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
