Rethinking the Impact of the Harper Government on Canadian History: It's Our Fault Too
My second, albeit inter-related, explanation for our collective failure is an academic reward system that has encouraged us to privilege (at least in our scholarship) a small, élitist audience to the exclusion of the Canadian public as a whole. Let us be honest: one receives tenure for publishing an...
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| Published in: | Labour (Halifax) 2014-03, Vol.73 (73), p.222-224 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | My second, albeit inter-related, explanation for our collective failure is an academic reward system that has encouraged us to privilege (at least in our scholarship) a small, élitist audience to the exclusion of the Canadian public as a whole. Let us be honest: one receives tenure for publishing an academic monograph with a university press, not for producing a high school textbook. A single scholarly article in a reputable journal with a subscription list of under 1000 advances one's academic career more than one hundred op-eds in national or even international newspapers and magazines with readerships in the tens of thousands. And most university tenure and promotion committees would consider a multi-year commitment to collaborate with a provincial government to modernize its Canadian history curriculum to be service, not scholarship. By deliberately rewarding such exclusiveness in personnel decisions, and by ascribing so little relative weight to the promotion of student learning in university and high school classrooms, we have all but forced the responsibility for the promotion of historical thinking among a more general audience to be taken up by private organizations, by the media and now, it seems, by the federal government. And given our dismissive attitude towards popularizing the past, it is hardly surprising that Prime Minister [Harper]'s team in Ottawa has rarely looked to us for advice on how to promote historical initiatives that it believes to be important. Similarly, it should not be shocking that protests of the Harper government's approach to history have inspired strong support among those who dislike the regime inherently, but relatively little among others. Indeed, the ease with which the Conservatives have transformed the historical landscape in Canada should be a wake-up call to Canadian academics: it's time to reconsider the way that we as professional historians do business. |
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| ISSN: | 0700-3862 1911-4842 |