Social Science Intellectuals and Public Issues in English Canada

442 ROBERT J. BRYM AND JOHN MYLES We apologize for asking you to take the time to respond to this letter and hope that you will agree with our view that the topic is important enough to merit the imposition. T.H. ADAMOWSKI Editor L.E. DOUCETTE Associate Editor SAM SOLECKI Book Review Editor ROBERT J. BRYM AND JOHN MYLES Social Science Intellectuals and Public Issues in English Canada It is not surprising that a quarter century after the explosive growth of Canada's post-secondary educational system we are witnessing concern over the failure of academic intellectuals to playa more important role in public life. The large generation of then-young scholars - now the middle-aged professoriate - was hired in the first instance to teach. Its responsibility was to lecture to the baby boomers who filled the nation's classrooms in the 1960s and early 1970s, not to be 'public intellectuals' with the task of addressing an educated public in print. For social scientists the job was compounded by the need to create teaching materials, to 'Canadianize' their disciplines by writing textbooks and readers so that their students might know as much about the Canadian social, political, and economic systems as they could about those of the United States and the United Kingdom. Now, however, one might reasonably expect Anglo-Canadian academics to begin playing a more prominent role in public life. The Canadian university system has entered a mature phase, the professoriate's pedagogical functions are being more or less adequately performed, and it seems possible that more intellectual energy might be devoted to the public discussion of pressing issues. In this essay we will argue that such a development is unlikely, at least in the immediate future. Few Anglo-Canadian academics have ever addressed the educated public, and certain aspects of our political structure in particular seem to prevent much of a change in their traditional role. Concern over the failure of Anglo-Canadian academics to contribute to the discussion of public issues is not new. At the turn of the century, Stephen Leacock described Canada's university-based scholars as 'shut out from the general society,' a result of having 'neither ideas nor enthusiasms, nothing but an elaborate catalogue of dead men's opinions' to express (Leacock 1973 [1910], 28-9). Leacock may have been the first to identify the social isolation of Anglo-Canadian scholars, but he was UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1989 SYMPOSIUM ON PROFESSIONALIZATION 443 hardly the last: itis a view that has been repeated often and enthusiastically (e.g., Underhill 1959; Porter 1965; Brooks and Gagnon 1987; Marsden 1988). Describing the members of sectionII of the Royal Society of Canada more than half a century later, John Porter (1965, 503) concluded: 'It would probably be difficult to find another modern political system with such a paucity of participation from its scholars. He observed: 'Very few of them write, as do so many academics in the United States, books which become widely read interpretations of social life.' Porter did not mean that Anglo-Canadian academics contributed nothing to public life. Rather, their political indifference provided them with their single public function: to act as a reserve of neutral investigators for Royal Commissions and other government agencies. The result was that Anglo-Canadian intellectuals had become the handmaidens of the state bureaucracy rather than its rivals. The other side of this situation, he observed, was that in contrast to Quebec, few of those who work and live outside the university would classify themselves as intellectuals or as playing an intellectual role in society. The exceptions to Porter's generalization probably prove the rule. In the 1930S and early 1940S the academics who formed the League for Social Reconstruction played a major part in shaping CCF policy. As Michiel Horn (1980, 216) notes, the LSR 'was the first organization of left-wing intellectuals in Canada; it enunciated the main principles of a Canadian socialism; it shaped and sustained the CCF; it kept alive The Canadian Forum; it helped to bring about the welfare state in Canada.' While this is a considerable record of achievement, the LSR, unlike its Fabian counterpart...