2013 Duff Spafford Award

Duff Spafford should be the first recipient of the “USRA Duff Spafford Award for Exceptional Service to the University Community” named in his honour. Duff Spafford’s contributions to the University of Saskatchewan are as numerous as they are varied. They began with his outstanding editorship of The Sheaf over half a century ago and concluded with his enthusiastic direction of a project unique among Canadian universities – the U of S Alumni Book Collection, which is housed in the Retirees Lounge of the Peter MacKinnon Building. The collection now includes over hundreds of books written by University of Saskatchewan alumni. Both of those undertakings highlight one of Duff’s lifelong passions: words. He was the “go-to guy” on campus when disputes among professors or students needed an expert opinion on a word’s meaning, etymology, correct spelling, or proper usage.

As a political scientist, Duff brought credit to the University from an international audience. His professional colleagues in Canada, the United States, and Britain respected his meticulous scholarship. The works for which he is best known include his award-winning book (co-edited with Norman Ward) Politics in Saskatchewan; his empirically demonstrated link between the level of highway construction and the timing of provincial elections, published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science (a Journal on which he later served with distinction as Assistant Editor); his invariably judicious, perceptive and - when deserved – critical book reviews in numerous scholarly quarterlies; and, perhaps most important, his widely acclaimed pair of articles on (a) the Canadian electoral system and (b) the “equilibrium division” of the vote. In those last two articles, published a year apart in the early 1970s in the American Political Science Review, Duff’s work drew on his training in economics by applying regression analysis to empirically tested political questions. This was relatively new for Canadian political scientists at the time. Duff helped to usher in a new era in political science in Canada and, at the same time, brought recognition both to his own careful scholarship and to the University of Saskatchewan.

Duff has been extraordinarily generous to this alma mater. His love of anything “Saskatchewan” – from local ceramics to sheet music to circus posters – has led him to assemble valuable collections of folklore of his beloved province. He has donated many of these artifacts to the University Archives. We, together with future generations, are the beneficiaries of these astonishing and unmatched gifts.

The USRA is also mindful of Duff’s contributions to this organization as a longtime member of the Executive, recently as its treasurer, and as its link for several years with CURAC, the College and University Retiree Associations of Canada.

As first recipient of the USRA Award for Exceptional Service to the University Community, Duff Spafford has set the bar exceptionally high for the Award that will now bear his name. For that we honour and thank him.