Canadian nationalism, Americanization and scholarly values

Canadian nationalism, Americanization and scholarly values :t:f. MICHAEL BUTLER DAVID SHUGARMAN The various reports and investigations of Robin Mathews and James Steele1 have led to a growing concern over the "Americanization " of Canadian universities. Their revelations are in many ways illuminating and disturbing. Their research, along with other more recent findings, makes it clear that a number of departments, principally in the social sciences and notably in the newer universities , are being substantially staffed and in some cases dominated by Americans. The subsequent controversy engendered by their findings has been carried on with varying degrees of scholarly rigour, including not a little malicious innuendo. Many of the arguments - certainly most of the academically respectable ones - have centred on the accuracy of the figures produced by Mathews and Steele; even then frequent resort to Reichman's Use and Abuse of Statistics has been necessary to ascertain the validity of conflicting interpretations. Statistics, probability curves, and mathematical tests of significance are important. But sometimes statistical arguments tend to obscure more fundamental issues. With regard to the problem of understanding the phenomenon of Americanization at the university level, the work of Mathews and Steele, which emphasizes statistics, should be treated as a "Prolegomenon to the Phenomenon ." In providing an explanation of the situation, arguments over numbers tell only part of the story. Accordingly, in this paper attention is focused on some of the underlying implications and substantive factors that have received minimal or inadequate treatment in the controversy to this point. Thus we shall inquire into a type of thinking, both _academic and general, that has tacitly sanctioned increased Americanization. We shall also examine certain consequences for *We would like to acknowledge the attention and sympathetic comments on the paper received from a number of members of the Department of Political Economy, University of Toronto. Special thanks are due to Paul Fox for constructive criticism and suggestions, and to Ron Blair for helping make this effort more readable than the original draft. 12 both the quality of academic thought in Canada and the continued vitality of Canadian culture and consciousness. For these consequences in turn accentuate and reinforce the Americanization process. To begin with, our discussion aims at a phenomenological treatment of the Canadian predicament using as a main conceptual tool the concept of "colonial mentality." With the latter established as a causal factor, we shall next approach the subject of scholarly values, focussing attention on the content of Americanization as it applies to the educational process at the university level. We shall then move toward a closer examination of some of the implications of large scale American teaching at Canadian universities. Here we shall be dealing with the related phenomena of national assimilation and political socialization . In dealing with these subjects, we hope to show: ( i) from an intellectual perspective, that the values inherent in Americanization should not by themselves be unquestionably emulated as standards of excellence; (ii) that the steady Americanization of the universities , by contributing to the massive influx of American values, ideas and patterns of behaviour , militates against a truly Canadian ~ducational process; (iii) that this deficiency impedes the development of Canadian national consciousness because of a self-reinforcing Americanizing process that slowly reduces the options available for the survival of a distinctive Canadian culture. CANADIAN DUALISM AND THE COLONIAL MENTALITY Dualism as a characteristic of the Canadian historical experience runs wider and deeper than that of French and English Canada only. There is another dualism of equal consequence embodied in the fact that Canada 's striving for national consciousness has been accompanied by an attitude perhaps best summed up as that of "colonial mentality ." The indices of the colonial mentality are not difficult to ascertain: intellectual, cultural and ec~nomic ideas and practices, rather than being germane to or characteristic of a particular country, are instead emulations of another or "mother" country. The colonial mentality, then, is a mentality which is infused with and makes manifest a certain spirit of colonialism, "a spirit that gratefully accepts a place of subordination, that looks Revue d'etudes canadiennes elsewhere for its standards of excellence and is content to imitate with a modest and timid conservatism the products of a...