Biography|Elizabeth Dowdeswell — The Greystone College Building That Issued Her First Degree

People treat UN environment chiefs as products of Geneva corridors and New York halls.

Elizabeth Violet Patton, later Dowdeswell, took her first public credential on the Saskatoon campus of the University of Saskatchewan.

She was born Violet Elizabeth Patton in Belfast on 9 November 1944.

Wikipedia and later Ontario biographies date the family's move to rural southern Saskatchewan to 1947.

A 1994 University of Saskatchewan honorary-degree citation instead says the family emigrated when she was five and names the prairie towns Sceptre, Young, Strasbourg, and Briercrest.

Her father, Desmond Granville Patton, served as a minister of the United Church of Canada.

The College Building, now the Peter MacKinnon Building, stands at 107 Administration Place on the campus Bowl.

Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier laid its cornerstone on 29 July 1910.

Premier Walter Scott opened the greystone block on 1 May 1913.

Household science at this university began in 1916 inside this building, before the school became a college and, in 1952, the College of Home Economics.

The Western Producer's 2017 centenary feature lists Dowdeswell with the class year 1966.

The university's own later biographies record a Bachelor of Science in home economics and a teaching certificate from this campus.

The College of Home Economics was disestablished in 1990.

The building is a National Historic Site and remains the public face a visitor can still walk.

After graduation she taught and counselled at Swift Current Comprehensive School.

By 1972 she had completed an M.Sc. in behavioural science at Utah State University.

Photo: Hatchmandara, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons