Ōtautahi Christchurch and the wider Canterbury Province has benefitted from countless teachers, artists, musicians, journalists, doctors, scientists, and engineers that Canterbury College had a hand in teaching. John Macmillan Brown clearly knew this would be the true measure of the University’s success when he told students in 1878 that ‘we cannot, then, look for manifest proof of the success of our work in the immediate present; to the future, perhaps the far future, we must look; in your careers, in your afterlife it is we hope to find a more enduring monument of our labours’.
- MB157, Ref FD856.0005.0003.0006, procession of graduands, Macmillan Brown Library