The View from Southwestern Ontario…: Results of our Opinion Survey

To Our Readers 3 United States. We welcome a wide diversity of opinions on a wide variety of topics; but we intend to make sure that the first part of the journal's name does not disappear. The Review will continue to seek original essays on American topics, recognizing that good contributions to the field are hard to come by; it will also continue to review the literature in a variety of fields. We will encourage inter-disciplinary work, as well as essays in disciplines other than the traditional ones of literature and history. We invite essays on American art history, film, politics, geography, music and other areas important to a study of the United States. With these goals in mind, we have decided to devote the first issue of the Revieivpublished at Western to the American landscape, a theme expressing itself through lanscape painting, landscape gardening, architecture, geography, literature , history and politics. It is a theme that peculiarly slices across disciplinary boundaries, as it cuts across the international boundary, sometimes recognizing it, sometimes disregarding it entirely. An understanding of American landscape, in its aesthetic, historical, geographical and political contexts, we trust may contribute something to our understanding of American civilization. Finally, we acknowledge with thanks the significant role which the outgoing editors have played in furthering American studies in Canada; and we thank too those people at Western who have allowed the Review to continue. Its transfer to this University, and its continued existence, have been made possible not only by the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, but by the moral and financial support of Denis Smith, Dean of the Faculty of Social Science, and Tom Collins, Formerly Dean of the Faculty of Arts and now Vice-President, Academic; of Tom Lennon, Dean of the Faculty of Arts; of James Teevan, Associate Dean, Faculty of Social Science; of Robert Hohner, Chairman of the Department of History and of David Flaherty, Director of the Center for American Studies. The View from Southwestern Ontario ... Results of our Opinion Survey RogerHall Results from our very informal survey of Americanists in Canada suggest that the average reader of these lines is a mid-forties, Canadian male who has spent the last decade and a half at the same institution in the pursuit of American literature. This average reader doubtless will recognize and appreciate Mark Twain's observation that there are "lies, damned lies and statistics." We admit to being properly wary of his words as well, especially considering how simplistic our survey methodology has been. Our efforts are not built upon any "scientific" sampling of Canadian-based Americanists. Rather, in November 4 To Our Readers of last year, we sent out 200 questionnaires addressing the ''state'' of American Studies in Canada. Most, but not all, of our recipients were or had been members ofCAAS, which we took to be a definition of professionalism. All recipients were reached through some known affiliation to university or college teaching. These individuals were in tum urged to push our questionnaire on to other interested parties. The response, we have been told by those who labour more regularly in these channels has been, if not terribly scientific, at least "statistically significant": fifty-nine readable returns making a near 30 percent sample. In any case, on this basis we have compiled the following observations. The Questionnaire The questionnaire broke into half-a-dozen broad categories: personal data; students and teaching; research and publishing; libraries and other repositories; related professional information, and finally, any additional comments a recipient might wish to add. Personal Data Americanists, like scholars in most branches of academe, overwhelmingly tend to be male. Of the fifty-nine respondents to our survey only nine were female.' Women in the field tend to be slightly younger than men as well, the average age being 43.5 as opposed to a male average of forty-seven years. It is perhaps noteworthy that only six of our respondents were under forty years of age (incidentally the category does not include the respondent who entered his age as ''unknown''). Half of our respondents were born in Canada and more than 70 percent of them are...