Americanization

While sharing the alarm recently expressed by a number of our colleagues over the apparently rapid Americanization of Canadian universities, we are bound to point out that in one respect at least the exposition of the problem has been unacceptably crude. The statistics offered by Profes­sors Mathews, Steele, Dudek and MacLennan are cast in terms of "Canadians," "Americans,' and "others." Now it may be that in order to call public attention to the present danger, it is necessary to use such gross units of measurement, but when Professor MacLennan's quota plan is carried into effect, Canadian universities must in all honesty use a more precise instrument of measurement. The day is fast approaching when directors of personnel in Canadian universities will have to deter­mine the national identity of each of the many hundreds of academic personnel on campus. What will they do with the man who was born in Newfoundland prior to 1949, did his undergraduate work at Dal­housie, did his graduate work at Columbia, taught for three years in Pennsylvania and has now been teaching at McGill for two years? A simple determination that such a man is or is not a Canadian cannot do justice to the complexities of his being, and we submit that no uni­versity teacher conscious of his responsibility to maintain high standards of intellectual discrimination will be content to have the question resolved in so procrustean a manner. We propose therefore that follow­ing the precedent created some years ago by the Board of Broadcast Governors, a serious effort be made to determine the Canadian content of each member of the teaching staff in our universities. We envisage a reliable formula - ultimately a computer programme - that could handle all the relevant items of information. The devising of such a formula rests with colleagues in the mathematical sciences, whose help we now earnestly solicit. What we offer here is a brief survey of what seem to us to be obvious topics or categories for inclusion, together with our estimate of the relative importance of each. Within each cate­gory there are subtle questions that we cannot pretend to have answered fully, but it seems worthwhile, nevertheless, to describe some of them and to indicate possible solutions

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• Almost Americans

  Reginald C Stuart•Canadian Review of American Studies•1993

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