Risk takers, pioneers, fighters and legends. The Beatty Lecture has brought a total of 92 incredible speakers to the McGill stage. Now an annual event, until 2005 the Beatty in some years featured up to five lecturers. Here is a selection of standout lecturers from over the past seven decades and memories from those in the audience.
Margaret Atwood delivers the 2017 Beatty Lecture. Image: Owen Egan.
ICONS
Some names immediately leap off the list of the Beatty's 89 past lecturers. Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most beloved environmental advocates, delivered the Beatty Lecture in 1979, just two years after launching the Jane Goodall Institute which is now a global organization. Goodall delivered the 2019 Beatty Lecture, making her the first repeat lecturer in Beatty history.
Jane Goodall delivers the 2019 Beatty Lecture. Image: Owen Egan & Joni DuFour.
Pop culture icon Margaret Atwood, the author of over 50 books including The Handmaid's Tale and whose fanbase includes over two-million Twitter followers, delivered the 2017 Beatty Lecture. Sports legend Arthur Ashe stood at the Beatty podium in 1992. The only African-American man ever to win the singles title at Wimbledon and the US Open, Ashe delivered his lecture titled “Living With AIDS” just months after publicly disclosing his diagnosis. Alternative medicine icon Deepak Chopra, named by Time magazine as one of the top 100 heroes of the century, delivered the Beatty Lecture in 2006.
Arthur Ashe delivers the 1992 Beatty Lecture. Image: McGill University Archives.
NOBEL PRIZE LAUREATES
True trailblazers in their fields, these 13 recipients of the Nobel Prize each brought their hard-won insight and expertise to the Beatty podium: physiologist Luc Montaigner, chemist Paul J. Crutzen, human rights activist Shirin Ebadi, physicist Richard Feynman, biologist Gerald Edelman, microcredit pioneer Muhammad Yunus, physicist C. N. Yang, Green Belt movement founder Wangari Maathai, writer Saul Bellow, Médecins Sans Frontières founder Bernard Kouchner, chemist Rudolph A. Marcus, biologist Francis Crick and politician Mikhail Gorbachev.
Francis Crick delivered the Beatty Lecture in 1985. He received the Nobel in 1962 for co-discovering DNA.
Image: McGill University Archives.
ACTIVISTS
These Beatty lecturers have brought the spotlight to some of our world's most critical issues: ecologist Sandra Steingraber, Huntington's Disease crusader Nancy Wexler, human rights activist Shirin Ebadi, palliative care leader Cicely Saunders, Médecins Sans Frontières founder Bernard Kouchner, nuclear disarmament leader Peter Ritchie Calder, Green Belt movement founder Wangari Maathai and feminist Barbara Ehrenreich.
Cicely Saunders received an honorary doctorate degree from McGill before her Beatty Lecture in 1997.
Image: McGill University Archives.
MUSIC LEGENDS
In his 1975 Beatty Lecture, American violinist Yehudi Menuhin stated, “The violinist must divine the composer’s oral intention, a living entity consisting of textures, speeds and note pitches, that magically shows the composer’s private world and ethos and message and recreates it for all to share.” Menuhin is widely considered one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century. Four other world-renowned musicians who delivered Beatty lectures include Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel, French composer Pierre Boulez, Swiss conductor Paul Sacher and Polish composer and conductor Witold Lutoslawski.
Alfred Brendel titled his 2011 Beatty Lecture, "Does Classical Music Have to be Entirely Serious?".
Image: Owen Egan.
A BEATTY ROUNDTABLE
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's Beatty Lecture on March 23, 1993 is the only time in Beatty history when a lecturer shared the podium. His lecture on the topic of "A New World Order" took the form of a roundtable discussion with former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and McGill professors Reuven Brenner, Valentin Boss and Charles Taylor (who would deliver a Beatty Lecture in 2017). Gorbachev and Trudeau agreed to participate in the roundtable under the condition that it would not be a public event, but instead a private roundtable filmed on campus and broadcast only to audiences seated in two of McGill's largest auditoriums, Leacock rooms 132 and 126. Free tickets made available in advance quickly sold out and on lecture day over 800 people filled both rooms, including 70 members of the press.
Mikhail Gorbachev at a press conference at McGill's Redpath Hall before delivering the 1993 Beatty Lecture.
Image: McGill University Archives.
HISTORY ON REPEAT
Jane Goodall and Charles Taylor aren't the only lecturers connected to the Beatty's past. In 1979, a Rhodes Scholar at McGill named Marc Tessier-Lavigne reported on Richard Feynman's 1979 Beatty Lecture for the McGill Daily. Tessier-Lavigne received his Bachelor of Science degree from McGill the next year and went on to become a world renowned neuroscientist, entrepreneur and president of Stanford University—and the Beatty lecturer in 2009.
Image: Archive.org.
REMEMBERING THE BEATTY LECTURE
Share your story about attending a Beatty Lecture here.
"In 1979 when Jane Goodall first came to McGill, I worked at McGill for Facilities Management, then called Buildings and Grounds. I had been interested in Goodall and her work, I had read her books and to be able to actually be in the same room as her, well I had to go. The Lecture was a long time ago but what I remember was hearing her talk about the chimps that I had read about. Here was the woman who actually knew them, lived with them, studied them, and she was in the same room as I was, in front of me. It was 40 years ago but I still can’t believe I was in her presence. I have always been in awe of her, I still am and always will be for some unexplained reason." - Lynne Paterson Wolak on attending Jane Goodall's 1979 Beatty Lecture.
Author Han Suyin delivers the Beatty Lecture in 1968. Image: McGill University Archives.
"Speaking to a crowd of nearly 600, Gay led what managed to feel like an intimate discussion on feminism and current events with her characteristic humour, authenticity, and candor." - McGill Tribune writer Emma Carr in her article about Roxane Gay's 2018 Beatty Lecture.
Roxane Gay delivers the 2018 Beatty Lecture, to her left is Nantali Indongo, CBC Montreal radio host
and the Lecture's emcee. Image: Owen Egan.
"I organized the Beatty Lecture for more than 15 years starting in the early 1990s. The responsibility meant that I wasn’t always able to fully absorb the talk at the time, I was just thrilled and relieved to know it was finally happening. But I had the privilege of meeting some remarkable people, people who in a variety of ways literally changed the world. My Beatty career started with tennis star and activist Arthur Ashe—who delivered the lecture "Living with AIDS" just two months before he died at age 49—and included five other speakers: Mikhail Gorbachev, Bernard Kouchner, Wangari Maathai, Shirin Ebadi and Muhammad Yunus, whose worked all earned them the Nobel Peace Prize. Over many decades, the Beatty Lecture has ultimately touched on almost every sphere of human achievement. In addition to their talks, Beatty lecturers have given seminars, readings and master classes, visited classrooms and research facilities and participated in numerous activities on and off McGill’s campuses. I am truly proud of my association with this outstanding series." - Jennifer Towell on organizing past Beatty lectures.
Former McGill staffer Jennifer Towell with Muhammad Yunus in 2010.
Image: Jennifer Towell.
THE ARCHIVES
The Beatty Lecture's history can be told thanks to the McGill University Archives, where the majority of the material and information featured in this website is held and preserved. The earliest photographs of the Lecture are of the Australian economist Douglas Copland's lecture in 1961.
Douglas Copland, seated left, meets with journalists before his 1961 Beatty Lecture.
Image: McGill University Archives.
Section main image: Roxane Gay delivers the 2018 Beatty Lecture. Image: Owen Egan & Joni DuFour.