The Mouse that Must Roar: Some Thoughts on Canadian Studies Programmes Today

student will become literate in the arts; that every arts course will have a place for Canadian doers and their achievements. It will certainly help us to understand our personal character and our national character. If that is important to us now and we think it should be important to our The Mouse that Must Roar: Some Thoughts on Canadian Studies Programmes Today J.M. BUMSTED The concept of Canadian Studies (as distinct from the study of Canada) is now about a decade old. There seems little point in engaging in the fatuous search for that exact moment in time when someone first brought forward the idea, always represented in cartooning by the lit electric light bulb over the head, but the founding of the Journal of Canadian Studies in 1966 is perhaps as useful a benchmark as any other. A dozen years later, we are in the process of digesting that monumental compendium of fact and opinion about the present and future state of Canadian Studies, known popularly as the Symons Report, and one hesitates to attempt to compete with all that material, the distillation of the ideas of so many of the brightest and most talented people who have worked the territory. But at the same time, there may actually be some advantage for the individual toiler in the vineyards, unencumbered by mounds of contradictory evidence and pressures, to essay some thoughts on the past, present and future of Canadian Studies as an intellectual enterprise. What we need, saith the sage, are not facts but truth. I should make clear from the outset that the concept of Canadian Studies about which I am writing is both a narrower and a broader one 102 grandchildren, we must find the way. The Symons Report would have us search the way. The university community should not fail to lead us towards achieving such a reasonable objective. than that employed by the Symons Commission. I am not concerned with the study of Canada, but with the attempts of Canadian educational institutions, mainly at the tertiary level, to coordinate the many individual efforts of teachers and researchers on Canadian subjects and to translate these efforts into administrative and curricular terms. My remarks are focused, therefore , on Canadian Studies as an articulated programme within educational institutions, and particularly at the larger universities. There are undoubtedly exceptions to the generalisations which follow - one thinks particularly of Trent - among the smaller universities and post-secondary colleges, although we need much more widespread publicity about successful programmes . Most Canadian Studies programmes were born sometime in the mid-1960s, in the broadest sense a part of one of those recurrent upsurges of Canadian nationalism and questing for selfidentity . Peter Russell's Nationalism in Canada, published in 1966, can be taken as symptomatic of the early days of the movement of nationalism , illustrative of the concerns of those in its vanguard at this point in time. A.B. Hodgett's What Culture? What Heritage?, published in 1967, reflects the early concern to translate the movement of nationalism into educational terms. There was clearly a new interest among many academics, educationalists, artists, and intellectuals for strengthening Canadian culture, and a curious resistance on the part of educational power structures, particularly at the university level (which is the one with which I am most familiar), to translating this interest into curricular Revue d'etudes canadiennes terms. It would be too easy - and also inaccurate - to lay the blame for the frequent hostility to Canadian Studies solely at the feet of the tremendous numbers of foreign academics and university administrators ignorant of Canada who were flooding into the Canadian universities at this time. In the first place, the nationalistic reaction was in part a response to their coming, and thus their arrival had functional benefits. But more significantly, a good deal of the objections or apathy to the increased emphasis on the study of indigenous Canadian material came from native-born Canadians who had, for one reason or another, chosen to concentrate their academic attentions either on non-Canadian matters or on fields which they claimed had no national boundaries. In some senses the newcomers were less of an obstacle than the...