Correspondence

Correspondence The Editor, I have just come across your August, 1970, issue and read the essay "Canadian nationalism, Americanization, and scholarly vaiues" by Michael Butler and David Shugarman . I am not sure I should be wasting my time writing this, but as a "branch-plant" intellectual from the University of Toronto who received his graduate education at Berkeley and is now preparing to return to Canada to begin teaching, I took the authors' remarks more personally than perhaps I should have. I strongly disagree with the article's tone, arguments, conclusions and implications. Its tone in particular, is an odd mixture of piety, belligerence, hesitancy and hysteria. I am tempted to elaborate some connection with the nature of Canadian nationalism but your authors' obvious lack of a sense of humour forbids it. The essay's arguments can't stand up to any sort of intelligent scrutiny. It would be too dreary to deal with all of the arguments but something must be said about them. To begin with, most of the vices of American universities and academics found to be so reprehensible by the authors were characteristics of Canadian universities long before the past decade of American immigration. To believe, for example, that "teaching ability " was ever more important at a Canadian university than the "school at which doctorate was taken," "having the right connections ," and "ability to get research support" is to engage in fiction. Butler and Shugarman make much of the fact that American scholars threaten to engulf Canada's academic departments with "alien" values. However , they don't seem to be competent to define national academic values and they most certainly underestimate the cosmopolitan nature of modern scholarship. In my own area of specialization, German history, for example, the most exciting work is not being Journal of Canadian Studies done in Canada or in the United States (with the exception of the efforts of several refugee scholars from Hitler's Europe who now occupy senior posts in American departments ) but at European universities. The conceptual values and methods for my own work come from the 1ve section at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, from German and Austrian social history and from English agrarian history. When I begin to teach next year, I will not be teaching "American" values at all but the preoccupations and values of an international melange of scholars who are working in my area of specializaton . Your authors' problem lies in their perception of the world. They cite surveys, statistics, and authorities ad nauseam and spice these with a few of their own pomposities ("Such is the stuff of politics." etc). But aside from giving their essay a kind of innocent freshman air, all this evidence and feeling fail to convey a sense of tangible reality. Monolithic Americanism, as they profess to perceive it, doesn't exist any more than monolithic Communism. And to follow this by urging on us a cultural nationalism that smacks of nineteenth century Eastern Europe is presumptuous. To be sure, there are profound threats from below the border, threats involving money, resources, corporate philosophy and power, law and militarism . To engage in a "struggle for Canadian universities," to worry about the "chilling statistics" that 25% of Canada's high school students "found no source of pride in Canada 's past," to advocate crude proposals aimed at "quotas" and "discrimination" is a frivolous distortion of what the Canadian response to the Continental Menace ought to be. The scholars leaving the United States are not necessarily missionaries of "Americanism ." Most of them are disenchanted with their land and might conceivably be worthwhile allies in our struggle to avoid becoming "a mere geographic expression of American culture~" Whatever that means. 61 This essay does not stand alone, of course, but is part of a growing climate of Canadian opinion distinguished by paranoia and inflated phrases. One sentence in the Butler and Shugarman essay, for example, struck me as particularly vulgar and malevolent: "In Canada, when our elites and informed opinion leaders, who should compose the backbone for the Canadian interpretation of media, are educated on a steady and almost exclusive diet of alien ideas, opinions and practices, they assume the role...