Fifteen Years Later

Fifteen Years Later As I prepare to step down after nearly 15 years as first Associate Editor and then Editor of the Journal of Canadian Studies. I have been experiencing very mixed feelings. These I can best define as a tension between the pride that I share with my editorial colleagues concerning what has been achieved over these years and an uncertainty, indeed a fear, about what my successors have to face as they seek to bring the Journal as a meaningful agency of communication into the twenty-first century. It hardly seems remarkable now that a Canadian Studies journal should be in its 28th year, publishing more than 700 pages a year and sustaining a worldwide readership of over 1400 subscribers, and all while enjoying only an informal linkage with its related academic organization, the Association of Canadian Studies. However, if we cast our minds back to 1965 we may just remember that the idea of such an enterprise must have seemed sheer folly to most Canadians, be they academics or not; it was only through the vision and persistence of Trent University's founding president, T.H.B. Symons, and the Journal's first editor, Denis Smith, that this periodical slowly got itself up and running. The editor was chronically short of available material and, of course, even shorter of interested subscribers, and he managed to get by on the bits of money that could be squeezed from the University's budget. Less than three decades later the Journal of Canadian Studies finds itself facing competition within the country from the International Journal of Canadian Studies, the aggressive creation of the International Council of Canadian Studies and its generous funding arm, formerly Canada's Department of External Affairs. Abroad, journals devoted to Canadian Studies flourish in close to 20 countries (and languages) under the auspices of that same International Council. How, one cannot help but note, the proverbial worm has turned since that time when the United States advanced into Vietnam and the Beatles advanced upon New York! On the surface things have never looked better. The interest in the serious and comparative study of Canada continues to grow and the quality of interdisciplinary and revisionist work is constantly before us who have to make difficult editorial decisions. And insofar as tl1at interest is international, one hopes that more and more it is stuff of inherent fascination and less the hothouse creation of the Canadian government abroad. On the one hand, then, I am alive with good memories - the parade of supportive partners I have worked with on the Journal over the years, first under Ralph Heintzman and then John Wadland (I include here staff, associate editors, editorial board members, and the people at the Association of Canadian Studies), the quarterly joy of seeing a new issue appear (though one knows ad tedium all the stages in the process, there is still a moment of sheer magic when one takes hold of a finished product), the meeting of various editorial Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 28, No. 4 (Hiver 1993-94 Winter) 3 challenges, and the sense of having been a part of a most important mission the production and promotion of the study of Canada and things Canadian. On the other I am dogged by looming anxieties. There has been and continues to be an effective reduction of government funding in support not only of academic research in Canada in the humanities and social sciences but also of the primary means of dissemination of such research in the country; that is, Canadian-based journals. It may in fact be easier for individual scholars to get funding for work outside the country than within; it may even be easier to be published outside. As well, there are troubling signs of a new level of social intolerance for the work of humanists in particular, a willingness among far too many people - especially government leaders and civil servants - to buy into a materialistic and merely pragmatic view of learning and society, a view that increasingly pressures universities to reshape themselves into job-training centres that are accountable to everyone regardless of their level of experience. In such a dollar-crunching environment...