QUEBEC – A Lewiston native has received high honors from Universite Laval. Dr. Lucien Morin was awarded a professor emeritus honor on June 13 at the university.

Born, raised and educated in the United States, Morin went to Universite Laval in 1963, where he received a bachelor’s degree in education, and a bachelor’s and a master’s in philosophy. He received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of education from the Universite de Caen (France) in 1981.

For more than 30 years, Morin defended the place and promoted the role of philosophy in education. His university career began in 1970 at the Universite du Quebec in Trois-Rivieres, where he taught the foundations in education and was named head of the education department in 1975.

In 1981, he left there for l’Universite Laval where he pursued his teaching and publishing activities until his retirement in 2002. His expertise in the areas of ethics and bioethics, the philosophy of education and the philosophy of art, as well as his considerable teaching skills, attracted many graduate students. Over the years he supervised more than 50 of them.

Morin was active in research. From 1976 to 1978, he did research full time for the Conseil Superieur de l’Education, for whom he published a well known book (eight printings), “L’Esquive. L’ecole et les valeurs.” He also published many other books, and some of his work was translated into English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Italian.

Morin was a member of the Canadian Commission on Education in Federal Prisons. He set up a bachelor’s program in one of Canada’s federal prisons (Laval), which he coordinated from 1980 to 1985. He was an active member of l’Universite Laval’s Groupe de recherche en bioethique.

Morin’s wide culture as philosopher and educator were put to the service of fundamental values, in the field of human rights, notably.

Morin gave more than 60 conferences and presentations on the national and international scenes. He was in charge of the scientific content of the first Congres mondial des sciences de l’education (1984), whose theme was values.

Through his involvement in the area of human rights, he developed a model for education in maximum security prisons, which received world acclaim. The commitment lead him to sit as a nongovernmental organization delegate to the United Nations and to draft the first version of Resolution 45/111: “All inmates shall be treated with the respect due to their inherent dignity and value as human persons.”

Morin is the son of late Frank and Julia Morin of Lewiston, Maine. His sister, Liane, and husband, Donald Pelletier, live in Lewiston, and his brother, Roland, and wife, Anne Morin, live in Litchfield, Maine. Morin also had another sister, Lorraine Jacques, who died.