Recently Paul Phillips wrote: Ken Hanley posted a negative review of David Bercuson's work yesterday on the net. I would like to qualify somewhat this view. Bercuson did some quite excellent work early in his career. He worked with Kenneth McNaught,a well respected social democratic historian, in his PhD thesis on the Winnipeg General Strike. His book on the One Big Union _Fools and Wisemen_, though not without problems, is still a very good book. I contributed to his collection on Canadian federalism, more years ago than I want to mention, though I still think the volume is worth reading. (Hey, naked promotionism!). However, I think his more recent work is rightwing, nativist (in the worst sence) and anti-intellectual. I consider it rather sad to see the degeneration of a rather accomplished scholar to a kind of narrow "reformer". But then, I have been told that the whole history department at Calgary (devastated by cutbacks) has been reduced to a department of regimental military historians celebrating death and gore in the past, and ignoring society, past and present. COMMENT: While Bercuson's earlier work on labour might be OK from the point of view of scholarship, it never seemed particularly radical. Even his THE GREAT BRAIN ROBBERY has some excellent criticisms of academia. But that book is surely also an opinionated and unscholarly shit-disturbing tome aimed at irking academics and pleasing the public. His statements about UI speak for themselves. They are simply absurd. Even on the General Strike I find Norman Penner's book WINNIPEG 1919( 1973 Lewis and Samuel publishers) much more interesting than Bercuson. Bercuson can, when he is perturbed about something-and that is most of the time--write some great polemical prose. Anyway, I agree for the most part with Paul. I don't understand your points about Bercuson being anti-intellectual however. He is an elitist intellectual, and the Great Brain Robbery is an attack upon anti-intellectualism all the way through. He is opposed to democratisation of the academy, to its unionisation, and to its broadening of curricula to include things like Canadian Studies programmes, women's studies, aboriginal studies etc. He wants a thorough traditional high standard liberal arts programme. By the way, he thinks that the publish or perish movement in the States was great and that it is too bad that it did not take root here. In fact he suggests that academics turfed out of the US because they failed the test migrated to Canada and caused us to reject the publish or perish model. He also wants to raise admission standards and stop grade inflation, again all part of a move to make the university elitist again. What is Bercuson's nativism? Do you mean his criticism of the flow of US academics into Canadian universities or what? This is surely an issue that is of little relevance now. Cheers, Ken Hanly