Canadianization revisited: a comment on Cormier's "The Canadianization Movement in Context".(Jeffrey Cormier )(Critical essay)

In "The Canadianization Movement in Context," Jeffrey Cormier (2005) analyzes and compares the structure and work of two different forces in the movement: a broadly public "movement community" that we started to form in 1968, and a more narrowly based, academic, disciplinary organization--the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association (CSAA). Although Cormier does not explicitly identify his "context," one presumes that it must be his history of the struggle as presented in The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival, and Success (Cormier, 2003).

Readers may recall that Cormier argues in this book that the movement went through three phases. The first consisted of its launching at Carleton University in December of 1968, our "framing" of the terms of the debate, and the vigorous public discussion that followed over the next two or three years. The second phase he describes as beginning when the CSAA became active on the question, internally in 1972 and publicly in about 1973. Cormier's report of the CSAA's activity until about 1976 suggests to readers that the most important activity relating to Canadianization took place in that organization. Cormier's third phase began (with some overlap) in the late 1970s and culminated in 1981 with the adoption, by the federal Department of Manpower and Immigration, of new immigration rules for the employment of foreign scholars; this phase consisted primarily of a growing awareness within the CSAA of the need for Canadianization and the CSAA's elaboration of specific policies with respect to disciplinary teaching and research, employment practices, and immigration. For Cormier, this phase was the work of professional anthropologists and sociologists working within the formal constraints of their academic organization, and it represented the movement's essential "success."

In Part 1 below, we suggest that this analysis of the two extremely different elements comprising the movement and their three-phase developmental context is inadequate. Citing evidence from a small survey of course descriptions, we argue that Cormier has completely overlooked and thus excluded an important element in the movement which should be taken into consideration. In Part 2, we make some observations as outside observers about the work of the CSAA in relation to the Canadianization movement. Our remarks are for the most part skeptical, and our suggestion is that the role ascribed to the CSAA by Cormier is exaggerated. In Part 3, we discuss Cormier's analysis of the public movement and the role he has assigned to us, arguing that that there are serious deficiencies in his account. Our Conclusion suggests that, although Cormier's work may be praiseworthy as an initial attempt to understand a complex matter, his treatment of the movement is misleading as social and political history and problematic as a study of a social structure. We then spell out several questions in the hope that they will lead to further study.

Part 1: A False Dichotomy: The Case of a Missing Dimension

The main problem with Cormier's argument is that his account is based on a simple dichotomy that completely overlooks a third element that was at work during the seventies. This constituent added an effective component to the kind of reform being advocated both by the public "movement community" and the CSAA and thus formed an extremely important part of the movement's structure. It consisted of many hundreds, if not thousands, of individual university teachers who worked diligently and effectively in their respective departments to bring Canadian material into their courses. Their work brought about a major enduring curricular reform that was one of the movement's most important achievements, and may have been, to use Cormier's term again, its main "success."

Before describing the details of this work (which are suggested by Table A), we would ask our readers to recall that very few new appointments were made in Canadian humanities and social science departments for about ten years after 1971. This stabilization in staffing occurred because in the years immediately prior to 1971 an extraordinarily large number of appointments (mostly foreign) had been made in order to provide instructors for the post-World-War-II "baby boomers" who began attending university in the mid-1960s. With very few appointments actually being made, the issue of the citizenship of newly employed faculty, while continuing in public and university discussions, became, at least in the short term, a less urgent issue. What remained an outstanding practical question during the seventies was whether or not a Canadianization of the curriculum could or would ever occur in the presence of the many recently appointed scholars from abroad.

From the outset, our basic strategy had been twofold (although at the time we did not think of it in these terms). One plan was to present or "frame" the issue in a positive way and to advocate as clearly and strongly as we could what we believed to be effective remedies for overcoming the de-Canadianization that had occurred. Our second strategy, which Cormier fails to appreciate, was to make available to our academic colleagues all of the arguments for and against our position so that faculty members (and others) could do their own "framing" of the issues and make up their own minds about how the problem we were facing should or should not be remedied. Our advocacy strategy was consistent with much public discussion of the issue in various media, government reports, commissions of inquiry and Hansard; and this discussion served as a constant reminder to our academic community that the universities just might have a problem on their hands worthy of their attention.

Our second strategy--the academic one--was expressed partly through teach-ins and panel discussions where all points of view were well represented and given equal time. Its main expression, however, was through the book we edited in 1969, The Struggle for Canadian Universities--a "dossier" (as the title page states) of various materials, often contradictory, related to the issue. Long before the book was published, we had been sending out many of the items that later formed part of it in response to inquiring colleagues who wrote or telephoned--those were the days before e-mail, when the regular mailing of mimeographed material was an economical way to communicate--asking for all relevant documentation, both pro and con, relating to our staff association meeting at Carleton. As communicating information in this way became increasingly expensive and time-consuming, the need for the publication of our dossier became obvious. The book therefore included as much information as we could find about various points of view. Our editorial goal was to enable our academic colleagues, who are by training and trade highly skeptical of slogans and movements of any kind, to consider the problem with respect to their own situations and disciplines and draw their own conclusions. Our editing was thus not "unfettered" (Cormier, 2005:357) but rather constrained by the reasonable editorial principle that all points of view be fairly represented.

Some of the practical results of our twofold strategy are summarized in Table A--a survey of undergraduate full-year course equivalents with Canadian content (as specified in their calendar descriptions) in five departments at six universities at five-year intervals from 1970-71 to 1980-81. Our choice of institutions for inspection is not, it should be noted, a scientific sample. Our selection was determined by the availability of calendars from the 1970s, by their proximity to us, and by an effort on our part to include institutions of varied size, age, and regional distribution. Likewise, our selection of disciplines--two humanities and three-to-four social sciences--was also arbitrary, for we could have chosen to examine courses offered by more than ten other departments. …