Historical Identities: The Professoriate in Canada (review)

This anthology is a probing account of aspects of professorial life from the mid-nineteenth century to the recent past. Its primary purpose is to advance scholarly study on this subject, and more broadly on the historiography of Canadian higher education. It most certainly does this in a variety of ways. It includes original and stimulating research; simultaneously, it illustrates some of the limitations of the ‘new’ social history that is informed by scholarly trends in the humanities and social sciences.

The book begins with William Bruneau’s conversational and somewhat idiosyncratic overview of the international historiography on the professoriate. As a model, he recommends Fritz Ringer’s, Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890–1920 for its ‘balanced appreciation of demographic, economic and political factors’ and for its refusal ‘to see the rise and fall of disciplines exclusively as a matter of power relations among those disciplines or between practitioners and the society “outside” the university.’ Bruneau dislikes research that is confined to ‘discourse’ analysis; he prefers scholarship that draws from a fuller range of methods and whose interpretations strive to ‘make tight and clean arguments’ (38–39). Some of the essays that follow undoubtedly meet his expectations better than others.

Michiel Horn asks, quite simply, why professors in the twentieth century largely avoided electoral politics. He concludes that institutional rules and/or pressure from administrations played a role –universities did not want to bite the provincial funding hands that fed them. But, professors largely eschewed politics because – well – they were more interested in being professors. Steve Hewitt surveys, as far as the evidence will allow, the political activities and motives of academics who served as RCMP informants on campus during the Cold War. He suggests, somewhat speculatively, that RCMP members, who could qualify for the force with a grade 8 education, resented academics, especially the politically unorthodox, because of their privileged social status.

Barry Moody provides a fascinating account of the controversy surrounding Acadia University’s appointment in 1883 (and departure one year later) of Theodore Harding Rand, to the new professorship in Didactics (Education). This single case study sheds light on a variety of issues, including governance, academic standards, the place of ‘professional’ education in a liberal arts college, and denominational versus lay authority in the university.

A major theme in the collection is the experience of women faculty. Malcolm Macleod documents the discriminatory hiring practices – no married women need apply for faculty positions at Memorial University and elsewhere – a policy that lasted into the early 1960s. Elizabeth Smyth tells of the unique struggles that ‘women religious’ faced to obtain recognition for the university-level instruction which they provided Catholic females. Irene Poelzer, a professor in the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan also struggled: against all odds, she created a course on Women and Education in 1973, which became a beachhead of feminist scholarship. Historian Dianne Hallman notes that as a graduate supervisor, Poelzer was ‘valued for her insistence on validating personal experience, making students’ own existential concerns the starting point of inquiry’ (238), an approach, which in my view, has not served the cause of research in education, or other fields, especially well.

In order to trace the advances of women in the academy, historian Marianne Ainley interviewed one hundred female ‘scientists’ who received their university degrees between 1890 and 1980. Curiously, she includes ‘social’ scientists in this category, thus making it difficult analytically to distinguish between the fates of women in very different disciplines. Therese Hamel’s study of the dramatic transfer of teacher education in Quebec from normal schools to universities, and its jarring impact on many normal school professors, is one of the more substantive original pieces of research in this volume.

Other contributors – Donald Fisher, Lisa Panayotidis, Cameron Duder, Alison Prentice, and Paul Stortz – explore, respectively, the tensions between the liberal arts and the ‘vocational’ disciplines at Bishop’s University after the Second World War; the image of [End Page...