Remembering Academic Freedom in the United States

Reported on Bluesky:

So Northwestern University, an institution with a $14.3 billion endowment, pulled support for the 2026 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities (the “Big Berks”), forcing the organization to cancel the meeting. Such cowardice on Northwestern’s part.  

Apparently the Board of Governors of Northwestern University has announced the university can no longer host a conference of women historians, given the political situation in the United States of America. 

Apparently no other potential host site can or will step up to take its place. As a result, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians has cancelled the 2026 session of its triennial "Big Berks' conference, a huge event that has brought together women historians of all topics and backgrounds since the 1930s. 

It was usually held in the eastern US but gathered in Toronto about ten years ago, where if I recall correctly it was directed by Franca Iacovetta of the University of Toronto.

Heaman on Quebec tuition

I imagine a lot of my friends in academia or in Quebec, or both, are caught up in the Legault government's plan to discourage students from outside Quebec from attending the province's anglophone universities. 

If you are taking an interest, take a lot at Elspeth Heaman's very historical exploration of that matter at the website Borealia. There is a reason why the piece is headed by this 1840 election poster for Louis-Hyppolite LaFontaine.

Fernand Ouellet used to say that the really profound confrontation in Quebec is not between anglophones and francophones, but between Montreal and the rest of the province. And that in the long run, Montreal usually prevails. Legault's CAQ is definitely thinking the way it imagines the rest of the province does.  It is good to see so much of Montreal is on the other side on this issue -- though not yet prevailing.

Also at Borealia recently, two long collections of reminiscences and appreciations of the recently deceased University of New Brunswick scholar Elizabeth Mancke, who seems to have been what a professor and teacher should be.  

History of higher education, and federalism

Ontario colleges -- students from India provide more $$$ than Ontario

HESA higher education blog, back from summer break, documents how Ontario's college now base their budgets on operating as immigration facilitators instead of being, you know, a public education system educating the public.,

It turns out that Indian students not only contribute twice the amount of money to the college system, on aggregate, that Canadian students do, they also contribute slightly more than does the Government of Ontario.

Education, healthcare, seniorcare, housing, urban government -- is there any area of jurisdiction where the provincial governments are taking seriously the matters that are their basic constitutional responsibilities?  

Come, friends of piracy

This is a bit rich.  A network of university "research libraries" is holding "Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week" in Canada, the United States and Britain. As Hugh Stephens, the blogger (and scholar) of all things copyright, observes:

We will hear a lot about the benefits of exceptions and limitations to copyright, how permissionless use under specific circumstances promotes learning, creativity, free speech, public discourse. etc.

 All well and good. We quote at this blog, too, as you may notice. But, as Stephens goes on to observe:

What fair use and fair dealing do not justify is the wholesale appropriation of copyrighted content through industrial-scale unauthorized copying that destroys any market for the author’s works. Unfortunately, that is what is currently happening in both Canada and the US–through broad-based uncompensated educational copying in Canada and through infringing digital copying by libraries (and “pretend libraries”, like the Internet Archive) in the US, and to some extent in Canada as well.

The whole piece is well worth reading, not least to anyone concerned with academic ethics.

Image:  from Hugh Stephens's blog cited above. 

Acadiensis online (only)

 Acadiensis, the historical journal for the history of Atlantic Canada, announces that henceforth it will publish in digital form only:

This decision was guided by several intersecting factors and values. One of the most important is that a digital publication will save costs and help to ensure that Acadiensis has a bright future. Another factor was a collective effort to shift to greener forms of publishing by eliminating paper printing.

There are also new opportunities that come with an exclusively digital publication. We will be able to provide media-rich articles and seamlessly connect Acadiensis content to other platforms when appropriate. We also hope that the new electronic version will help us to engage readers and foster connections in new ways.

Sounds about right to me. 

History of history doctoral programs

Active History's recent nine-part series on the history PhD in Canada, which began with data suggesting that about one graduate in ten of such programs can hope to secure a tenure-stream academic job, ends with the conclusion that that's not really such a problem:

While many might rush to conclude that we should simply stop training History PhDs in order to better match the number of graduates and the number of academic jobs, doing so does not address the diverse reasons students pursue a PhD or the many structural problems that exist within programs. To improve student experiences and enhance the value of the PhD, departments need to acknowledge the flaws in current programs and recognize the effects of these flaws. We can re-think the design and purpose of our programs. The Task Force heard throughout our consultation process that there is value in completing a History degree, and History PhD training is important for those who work outside of tenure-track faculty positions.

Ya think? 

Of course there is "value in completing a History degree." And no doubt many of those who complete a PhD emerge as well-informed, hardworking, diligent people equipped with critical and other skills. But can it be reasonable to argue that the enormous demands and massive investments (public and private) that go into a doctoral degree are justified if what they provide becomes roughly equivalent, for most of their graduates, to what the community colleges call GE - general education? 

I presume there are history PhDs in many non-academic pursuits who do appreciate the doctoral studies they did, but I greatly doubt that making the PhD an entry qualification for every kind of history-adjacent career is "important," at least when subjected to any kind of cost-benefit analysis.

Ultimately, preparing future academics is what the PhD is for and what it should be good at -- and probably the only career for which it is better suited than some other kind of apprenticeship. Can it really be wise to "rethink the design and purpose" of academic doctorates for some other purpose than preparing future faculty?

Evidently the academy is unready "to better match the number of graduates and the number of academic jobs." I can't help thinking an educational planner who reads this series might think there are some good reasons for doing so.

Update, November 22: I meant to recall my late friend Silver Donald Cameron, who was an English prof before he left to become a freelance journalist, novelist, environmental activist, and examiner of the Maritime soul. I remember him once saying, "It took me ten years to get a PhD. And ten years to get rid of it." To which I said, "Then I'm twenty years ahead of the curve."  And we laughed and laughed.

History of Law, Life and Blaine Baker

I was noting the other day one specific essay in the collection Law, Life, and the Teaching of Legal History, recently published by McGill Queen's Press. Today a more general note about the book.

It's a festschrift,* a collection published in honour of an admired professor, in this case Blaine Baker (1952-2018), legal historian and longtime professor of law at McGill. Commemorative volumes like these generally include one or two biographical essays setting out the sterling personal qualities, depth of research, and enduring example of the person being honoured.

The editors of this collection, however, reflected on how legal history, like history in general, has turned away from worshipful biography. One of Blaine Baker's final projects, they note, was a study of Supreme Court of Canada justice Gerald Le Dain, one which Baker himself insisted had to be frank about Le Dain's struggles with depression and how they had affected his work and his relations with colleagues at the Supreme Court. Following that lead, the compilers of this volume present not one bland tribute but six or seven anguished attempts to understand and explain Blaine Baker.  

They present someone who was a generous and engaging colleague, a polymathic connoisseur of legal and historical knowledge, a much appreciated teacher and mentor ... but also one who also never wrote a complete book of his own, taught at McGill for decades  without ever establishing a home in Quebec, had no family and almost no social ties even with his closest colleagues, and was pushed into emeritus status at McGill at the age of 57, "an enigma to everyone who thought they knew him."

I knew Blaine Baker too -- and all this was new and sad and rather astonishing to me too. "He was my friend and mentor but I hardly knew him," is the refrain of this troubling book. If its model is followed, academic commemorative volumes may never be the same.

______

*One of the contributors, maybe paying tribute to Baker's traditionalism and punctiliousness, points out that it's not really a festscrift. Festschrifts honour living subjects, apparently. If they have died, it's a gedenkschrift. Right.

Blogs as history

 

"I worry there will be a move to de-emphasize the single-author manuscript: the book. Instead, anything that uses the historian’s craft or skills could count as scholarship. The most radical version might even include tweets, or at least blogs or essays online." James H. Sweet 1/

— Acadiensis (@Acadiensis) November 2, 2022

Jeez, if there is gonna be academic credit for blog posts (this tweet is quoting the embattled president of the American Historical Association), DM me and I'll tell you where to send my PhD and my tenure-stream appointment. No, actually, emeritus status might suit me.

History of dissertations and doctorates

Completed dissertation per year (one of many tables)

Active History has launched a series reflecting on the Canadian Historical Association's recent report on history dissertations in Canada. The first of the series, by Will Langford of Dalhousie University, compiles a discription of doctoral work in Canadian history departments from copious statistics

Over the last six academic years, the just-so dissertation was a 20th-century social history of Canada completed at the University of Toronto prior to the pandemic. It was probably written by a man in their 30s. And the title might have been along the lines of “A History of the Making of a Modern Canadian Public during World War.” Of course, this archetypal PhD graduate does not exist.

Langford is one of the authors of the complete report, which is available (French or English) at the CHA website.  Active History promises more installments from other members of the team that produced the study, and welcomes comments and contributions from readers. 

Update, November 2:  In another data-heavy analysis at Active History, Will Langford suggests that about one new history PhD in ten gets a tenure stream academic position, though as he says, "Many – if not almost all – fledging historians pursue a PhD degree with the intention of becoming a university professor."

Would anyone consider that Canadian universities should consider reducing the number of Ph.D candidates they admit by about, say, fifty per cent?  Don't think so.

.

God is in the dissertation

Sgt. York, memorialized

CBC News continues to report on the growing scandal of the history Ph.D the University of New Brunswick granted to American Christian-nationalist extremist and ex-soldier Douglas Mastriano, currently running for governor of Pennsylvania. [Note: We first covered this topic a month ago.]

UNB historian Jeffrey Brown, who opposed granting the degree in 2013, describes Mastriano's study of American First World War hero Alvin York as ascribing York's achievements to divine intervention. 

In one example, on Page 260, Mastriano writes: "The idea that York survived the carnage because of Divine Intervention also speaks of a miracle."
Brown said that approach just isn't scholarly.
"It wasn't so much, 'Sergeant York reported that,' or, 'York believed that,' as it was, 'God talked to York,'" Brown said in an interview.
"That's where Mastriano wanted to go with it: that this guy was literally directed by God to begin fighting people. That would be righteous. That's what God wanted."

 Alexander Panetta's CBC article reports Brown's concerns about why UNB approved the dissertation:  

The school, he says, has a good relationship with the military, and let Mastriano through to avoid disrupting that.

James Gregory, an American scholar of York, is reported as having found misleading citations throughout Mastriano's work.

It's rampant with fake footnotes, he says, meaning the paper often makes a claim, cites a footnote to back it up, then, when you actually go check the source mentioned in the footnote, it says something else.

UNB grad students are noticing: 

  Doing my PhD in history at UNB, the last thing I expected was for my department to become embroiled in US politics. But the last month has been a rollercoaster of emotion because the department, and by extension the university, is more concerned with saving face (1

— Richard Yeomans (@richrray) October 5, 2022

U New Brunswick history PhD becomes American electoral sensation

 American newsource ABC.com has published an AP story about strange doings involving the doctoral dissertation of the far-right, Christian Nationalist/Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania.  Doug Mastriano, a retired US Army officer, received a doctorate in history from the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, New Brunswick, for a dissertation that has been criticized by other scholars for alleged weaknesses in its research into American military hero Alvin York. 

A January 6th marcher, Mastriano secured the Republican nomination for governor of Pennsylvania with support from Donald Trump. His online biography credit him as the author of two books on American participation in the First World War, one based on the doctoral dissertation

The military history dissertation, oddly, has been embargoed from public circulation almost since it was written, but a member of the UNB faculty -- who says he was removed from Mastriano's doctoral committee after he identified weaknesses in it  -- has now released the text to American media, according to the AP story. 

The AP story reports that the University of New Brunswick declares Mastriano's credentials have not been impacted by a review undertaken after criticism of the dissertation arose. Most online news and commentary so far seems to be from American sources.  

Public History of the Canadian Historical Association

Ira Basen writes in the Globe and Mail today about controversy in the Canadian Historical Association and the academic historical community about genocide, reconciliation, and history.

"Since the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report in 2015, the CHA has worked to confront the generations of Canadian historians who have written the nation’s history as a triumphant narrative from colony to nation, while largely ignoring the impact that same history had on Indigenous peoples.

But that effort has split the community of professional historians in Canada, pitting the CHA against some of the country’s most distinguished practitioners."

Meanwhile, Twitter today is lively with political, diplomatic and military historian members of the CHA denying Basen's report of their non-existence:

Since the 1990s, the organization has been dominated by social historians; people studying issues of race, class and gender, whose politics generally lean toward the progressive side of the political spectrum. Political, diplomatic and military historians, who once dominated the CHA, have all but disappeared from its ranks.

 

History of academic freedom

In the rapidly changing situation regarding vaccine passports and vaccine mandates and requirements for entry to restaurants, theatres, galleries, stadiums, and the rest, I've been struck by the non-participation of post-secondary institutions -- and their faculties in particular.

Apart from Seneca College and one or two other outliers, most post-secondary institutions in Canada have been either silent or extremely non-enthusiastic about making (or even addressing) what seems like the obvious choice: to make attendance on campuses, classrooms, and student residences this fall conditional on proof of vaccinated status. (Yes, with some exceptions where warranted, but still....)

I guess these decisions are largely made by governing boards, with the advice of their administrators and legal counsel,  And one can imagine them being cautious, business-oriented, and very eager not to get on the wrong side of the provincial premiers who foot the bills.  But it's the silence of university Senates and faculty organizations that is really striking.

I notice this, I think, because in recent years I've been repeatedly struck by how professors have in recent decades increasingly adopted a sort of company-man subservience to their institutions and administrators, outsourcing all kinds of policy matters, including ones that ought to be of vital concern to scholars and teachers,  to "the boss." Some doctors who double as medical faculty have certainly been outspoken on Covid policy issues throughout this pandemic, but shouldn't we expect faculty to speak out about safely reopening their workplaces -- and to have some institutional capacity to do so?  

If university and college faculties across the country took a leading stand on this matter, they could really shift the institutional response -- and public opinion.  And some leadership on this matter seems urgently needed from somewhere.  

Update, August 10:  Okay, so yesterday the University of B.C. Faculty Association officially asked the president of the university to institute a vaccine mandate and other measures on campus.  

We therefore call upon UBC to adopt an indoor mask mandate in all its spaces and a vaccine mandate for all its employees and students (subject to the normal legal exemptions) in advance of the September reopening.

Not because of anything they read here, I am sure, but a sign that perhaps academic communities do still survive to some degree. More to come?

History of research during pandemics

 The editors of the Canadian Historical Review have posted an intriguing, disquieting, post at the UTP Journals blog. 

They keep an eye on the gender of historians submitting articles for publication at the CHR.  And the proportion of men over women among would-be contributors has risen during the Covid lockdowns of the past year. Men have long outnumbered women among those submitting to the journal. Only the "invited contributions" category has shifted the needle toward equality somewhat.  And since the vast majority of submissions are unsolicited -- what they still quaintly call "over the transom."  

But a) who'da thunk the pandemic would change these numbers? and b) isn't it obvious when you do think about it? 

There's lots of testimony that the pandemic has affected women's work experience more than men's and that women have left off work to attend to family matters more than men have. So sure, it will apply to people sitting at their desks banging out research monographs for the scholarly journals.

Kudos to the CHR editors for thinking to check on it. 

History of the future of academic history programs

Notes and portents about the future of history teaching and of universities themselves seem to be everywhere these days.

At Active History, Jeremy Milloy writes about precarious employment for historians in Canadian universities under the ominous title "I Think It's Time For Us To Give Up."

In the face of reports that enrolments in history programs have been declining faster than in any other of the major disciplines, an op-ed at History News Network argues that what is required is a "New Deal" to provide employment for historians if the universities cannot or will not.

Meanwhile looking beyond history programs in isolation, John Naughton, in The Guardian, writes about an article published way back in 1995 predicting that

while new technologies were likely to strengthen research, “they will also weaken the traditional major institutions of learning, the universities. Instead of prospering with the new tools, many of the traditional functions of universities will be superseded, their financial base eroded, their technology replaced and their role in intellectual inquiry reduced. This is not a cheerful scenario for higher education.”

Naughton, who began teaching online through Britain's Open University decades before Covid and Zoom, observes that universities have remained largely oblivious to this issue, and budget on the assumption that they can continue to charge students and taxpayers large amounts for credentials that can be cheaply and efficiently earned elsewhere.

And to the sound of people all over the country saying, "What, universities can go bankrupt?" Laurentian University in Sudbury declared itself insolvent and sought protection from its creditors.

Survey on academic publishing

University of Toronto Press, concerned about the future of academic publishing, is taking a survey "to better understand the needs of our customers and our authors in this dynamic environment."  Share those concerns? The survey is here. There are prizes offered.

History of Precarity: now it's for everyone

Recently we were noting the rise of "precarity" among academic teachers of history (and other subjects). Now History News Network observes its rapid spread "up" into the ranks of the tenured.

In a generation, tenure and tenure-track professors will be reduced to about 10%, and more faculty will have multiyear appointments, predicts Adrianna Kezar, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California.

 If pandemic practice among American colleges is any guide, "multiyear appointments" may be optimistic.

[P]residents of struggling colleges around the country are reacting to the pandemic by unilaterally cutting programs, firing professors and gutting tenure, all once-unthinkable changes....  That is a decline of nearly 10%. Along the way, they are changing the centuries-old higher education power structure.

The changes upset the “shared governance” model for running universities that has roots in Medieval Europe. It holds that a board of trustees has final say on how a school is run but largely delegates academic issues to administrators and faculty who share power.

Is History Precarious?

I haven't been following it much, but there is a Precarious History movement out there. More precisely, it is the Precarious Historical Instructors movement, concerned mostly with job status issues for session and contract teachers in university history departments. From their manifesto, published last February at Active History (which has followed the issue closely in its Academic Culture thread):

With respect and without acrimony, we submit that history departments have benefitted to an unseemly degree from universities’ use of contract academic labour as a cost-cutting mechanism. The function of contract work is to externalize risk from institutions and onto individuals. History departments have adopted this practice, however reluctantly, to their benefit. But there are multiple policies that, if departments adopted, would upload some of the personal risk to a department level where it could be absorbed with less catastrophic consequences than it currently does with individual historians.

We tend not to follow employment issues in the academic bureaucracy here. But it's worth noting that in the United States there is a whole magazine -- more of a blog, I think, but the lines blur -- called Contingent. It seems to be less for struggling sessionals seeking to organize against their employers than for historians who have abandoned the whole academic world, while continuing to assert their historical identities.

Contingent has just published its 2020 Booklist, a long list of very substantial and scholarly-seeming books by historians outside the academy. But quite a few Contingent articles cover teaching and other academic issues, so some of its people must have kept a foot inside.

Update, 3 December:  On reflection, I see that the Canadians are taking a collective, workers'-rights approach, while the Americans are seeking an individualist market-based solution. Hmmm.  

Grad school: cattle pens or open-range

Russ Chamberlayne responds to John Herd Thompson's comparison of American and Canadian graduate school methods as either feeding pens or open range:

I got an MA in American studies ("American Civilization," don't you know) at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. in the '70s, and it was very much what Prof. Thompson called a Canadian-style experience. The Am Civ department was quite small, and [...]

I had no mind for the academic courses I had to take, and a grinding writer's block all through the generation of a thesis. Fending for myself was (and is) very much my style, and for better or for worse, the department let me do that. Managed to avoid winter kill, though, and the only wolf I encountered, a nasty thesis advisor I had initially, gave way to a benignly neglectful prof who waited out my completion of the program.

History of smart people doing dumb things with good intentions

The Canadian Historical Association, meeting in Saskatchewan, has voted to remove the name of John A. Macdonald from its premiere prize, the one for the year's best work in Canadian history.  In the name of the good cause of reconciliation, though removal of names and statues was not one of the long list of projects the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has put forward as useful steps toward that goal.

Naming this prize for Macdonald has always seemed a bit odd, since he was not a scholar or a historian and did not donate the prize himself.  So there may have been a more appropriate name to be found all along, and indeed the CHA will now simply call it the CHA Prize. But removing the old name punitively....  Well meant, but not wise, I'd say.

[Hat tip to Allen Levine for the link.]