Academic Freedom in Canada: A History by Michiel Horn (review)

294 letters in canada 1999 censorship to reflect current realities. Overall, this is a fine collection. By and large, the papers are well researched , well written, and interesting. Despite my complaints about a dearth of historical material, the absence of essays justifying censorship, and questionable organization by the editors, Interpreting Censorship in Canada remains an engaging collection of the many and often insidious ways by which opinion is managed. (JEFF KESHEN) Michiel Horn. Academic Freedom in Canada: A History University of Toronto Press. xvi, 446. $39.95 This is a very fine book. Given the topic's propensity to mobilize controversy among professors, academic administrators, politicians, business people, and the general public, it is, notably, also a patient book, scrupulous in its assessment of the historical material and in its allowance to the parties of bygone controversies one more opportunity to air their sides of old grievances. One suspects Horn's many years of service on CAUT's Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee provided valuable experience in the patient listening that has served him so well in his survey of academic freedom in this country. Of the `two main meanings to academic freedom' B `the freedom of universities from external control, and the freedom of teachers and researchers to do their work' B it is the latter with which Horn is concerned . Inevitably, however, the struggle to provide academic freedom a secure home in Canadian universities had to contend with the view that too much such freedom poses a threat to the freedom of universities. Since the middle of the nineteenth century (where Horn's story begins), and continuing into the Cold War, when academic administrators have exerted pressures on `teachers and researchers,' they have often pleaded the need to preserve university autonomy. Attracting the angry attention of politicians (holding purse strings) and of businessmen (sitting on governing bodies), certain kinds of scholarly work disturbed the sleep of many a university president. Thus a main thread of Horn's narrative is the long struggle that led to the freedom of professors to speak out B in the press, in monographs, or in classrooms B about issues that touched on public policy. It is no accident then that the name of Frank Underhill punctuates Horn's narrative. The University of Toronto historian's critique of Canadian involvement in the First World War and his 1940 urging that Canada integrate its defence policies more closely with those of the United States earned the scorn of many politicians, editorialists, and ordinary citizens who took Underhill's views as slights both to Canada's sacrifices in 1914B18 and its historical bond with Great Britain. Underhill's saga is well known, of course, but what distinguishes Horn's account is the detail of humanities 295 the record he lays bare and the hundred-and-thirty-year context in which he situates it. Horn's treatment of the various threats to Underhill's academic freedom, including a failed attempt at dismissal in 1940, are at one with his treatment of dozens of major episodes in the history of Canadian academic freedom until the 1980s. In this connection, one must mention, too, the famous case of Harry Crowe at United College in 1958B60, where Horn's account of this thorny controversy (involving a `leaked' letter and politicoreligious conflict) is magisterial. However, by the 1980s, access to archives becomes more difficult to obtain, often forcing Horn to rely on newspaper accounts of troubling episodes (e.g., at the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto) and on his cogent speculations on the dangers the unseemly rush among university presidents for corporate support may pose for academic freedom. Occasionally, however, and because the very words `academic freedom' arouse their secular pieties, one wishes Horn were more willing to rattle the professors' cage. In his story of the slow but steady accrual of freedom to teach, publish, and engage in political life, there is a tendency to triumphalism, especially in the account of the breaching of barriers once posed to academic freedom by faded (or fading) religious institutions. Must this conflict be, one wonders, a zero-sum game? From Horn's account, it is difficult to infer anything...