As globalization has picked up pace in the past decade, universities worldwide have aspired to become or remain internationally competitive. A central plank of their strategies is often to step up the recruitment of top-notch foreign scholars who bring contacts that help connect the university community to the outside world and publishing histories that can boost an institution’s ranking in surveys.
But do such headlong pushes to achieve global competitiveness by hiring those thought to be the “world’s best” have serious, unintended side effects that can undermine a nation’s intellectual capital?
Some scholars in Canada say their country’s recent history suggests such globalization efforts do indeed have downsides, especially in the social sciences and humanities, where they say doors have been closing on homegrown scholars and Canada-specific research. If corrective steps are not taken, some say, their country’s intellectual capacity will be sapped, not strengthened, in the coming decades.
“I think what’s happening is a dumbing down of Canada,” said Louis Groarke, associate professor of philosophy at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. “If you want to have a vibrant intellectual culture in Canada, you can’t only hire people who are intellectually excited only about what is happening outside of the country. This makes Canada into a backwater.”
The problem, Mr. Groarke and other concerned scholars say, is that in their pursuit of excellence, most Canadian institutions are consciously or unconsciously discriminating against graduates of Canadian doctoral programs. At the same time, they have joined other countries to embrace hiring criteria that create strong disincentives for young students and scholars to pursue research topics vital to their own country.
While Canadian scholars have griped among themselves about alleged discrimination on the basis of anecdotal information, over the past year and a half, some have compiled data suggesting the problem is very real. In November, Yves Gingras, a professor of the history and sociology of science at the University of Quebec, published data on 11,000 tenured professors at the 10 largest Canadian universities. Mr. Gingras, who holds a prestigious Canada Research Chair, as part of a program to attract some of the world’s best minds, found a significant decline over the past decade in the proportion who earned doctorates in Canada, from nearly 70 percent in the mid-1990s to 55 percent in 2005. Less than 40 percent of humanities professors earned their Ph.D.'s in Canada, down from a peak of 70 percent in the mid-1980s.
Mr. Gingras’s study confirmed the findings of a late-2009 study by Mr. Groarke and Wayne Fenske, a tenured philosophy instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, in Surrey, British Columbia, that showed that Canadian Ph.D.'s occupy only 30 percent of the tenured and tenure-track positions at the 15 major Canadian philosophy departments in English-speaking Canada. At the four programs considered “the most prominent in Canada"—at McGill University, Queen’s University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Toronto—eight out of 10 faculty members earned their degrees abroad.
“The disparities are way too large, so either these programs are effectively discriminating against people who study in Canada, or our philosophy programs are second-rate,” said Mr. Groarke. “I don’t accept for a moment that the Canadian Ph.D.'s are substandard, so I think it is a kind of colonial mentality where they think that if somehow you go to Oxford or down to California, you have to be better.”
A similar pattern can be seen in hiring at English departments in Canada, according to data compiled by Suzanne Stewart, assistant professor of literature and art at Mount Allison University, in Sackville, New Brunswick. She found that holders of Canadian Ph.D.'s are a minority at 19 of the 21 Canadian departments that have doctoral programs in English, and that those who are hired came almost entirely from six elite universities. Almost none had graduated from nine other universities, including the Universities of Manitoba, New Brunswick, and Saskatchewan.
“I think there would be an outcry from the public if they knew that parents and the public were sending students to institutions where they will be forced to look outside the country to find opportunities,” Ms. Stewart said. “In my mind there is a very blatant prejudice against graduates of Canadian universities based on a presumed inferiority that isn’t substantiated.”
The situation is all the more remarkable in that it signals a major reversal for Canada, a country that took steps to break a long and contentious legacy of foreign dominance of its professorate. Canada was literally a collection of British colonies until 1867, and its handful of English-speaking universities looked to Britain—and Quebec’s Francophone ones to France—for staff and guidance well into the 20th century. When Canada began building its modern, expanded higher-education system after World War II, Canadian Ph.D.'s were in short supply, so most faculty members were hired from Britain and, especially, the United States.
Amid the ferment of the late 1960s, Canadian intellectuals began agitating against this perceived academic takeover by scholars born in the United States as a threat to the nation’s identity and culture. The celebrated Canadian philosopher George Parkin Grant declared that Canada had “ceased to be a nation” and had become a “branch plant satellite” to the United States, onto which it would eventually be annexed. “At the end of the 60s, a Canadianization movement appeared that said, Look, we’re hiring only Americans here,” said Mr. Gingras, whose research indicates foreign-trained academics made up more than 80 percent of social-science faculty in 1967. “They don’t understand Canadian sociology or history.”
“In the 60s and 70s, you really had to fight for recognition that Canada was even a legitimate area for study,” said Paul Axelrod, a professor of history at York University, in Toronto, who was a graduate student at the time. “To me the key was always not what somebody’s citizenship was but what kind of work they were doing.”
Canadians Last?
Out of the tumult, the government of Canada adopted “Canadians first” policies for faculty hiring at public universities and colleges, which have a near monopoly on higher education here. Since 1982, departments have been required to advertise for Canadian citizens first and only recruit foreigners if no qualified Canadian could be found. The result of the protests and policy changes, Mr. Gingras’s data show, was an increase in the proportion of Canadian Ph.D.'s to around 70 percent by the mid-1980s, including in the social sciences and humanities. (Researchers acknowledge that some holders of foreign Ph.D.'s are Canadian citizens and vice versa, but citizenship-based data are far more difficult to procure.)
But the rules have always been easy for hiring committees to get around, if they really want to, as they have the power to define who is “qualified” for a given position. “The rules are virtually unenforceable,” notes James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, in Ottawa. “How is a government bureaucrat ever going to be in a position to overrule a university biology department on the necessary qualifications for a cell biologist?”
Indeed, Mr. Gingras’s research suggests the Canadianization movement is over, as the proportion of Canadian Ph.D. holders in the professorate has fallen back to the levels of the late 1960s. “Now the movement has been totally reversed,” he says. “We may be on the verge of creating in 10 years’ time the same problem we had” in social sciences at the end of the 70s: “What topics will we teach?”
The danger: the exclusion of scholars interested and versed in Canadian topics, most of whom are presumably Canadian or study at Canadian universities.
“As universities embrace as a kind of religion the notions of globalization and internationalization, they may reinforce the old notion that ‘international’ is excellent and Canadian is not,” said Mr. Axelrod, who studies Canadian higher-education history. “There needs to be a balance between engaging internationally—which is something I believe in—and recognizing that Canada isn’t simply a backwater. Canada has a lot to offer the current unstable world in terms of civil society, the banking system, and all that.”
Alan MacEachern, associate professor of history at the University of Western Ontario, said that “the issue that’s really peeling back the scab of the Canadianization movement right now is not so much about the nationality of the professors, but where the professors are trained. There’s this sense that you’re better off having a Duke Canadian-studies Ph.D. than you are a Canadian one.”
The critics don’t argue that there’s a conspiracy against homegrown scholars, but rather that, in embracing internationalization, university hiring committees have unconsciously built barriers to hiring them into tenured positions.
First, they suggest a built-in bias toward graduates of prestigious American and British institutions in hiring committees that are dominated by American- and British-trained scholars. “They brought with them the interests they had in their own studies, which tended to be nothing about Canada,” says Mr. Turk. “This has been perpetuated because when they go recruiting for new vacancies, their reference group tends to be colleagues in the U.S rather than, say, the University of Alberta.”
A Stacked Deck
At the same time, the quantitative criteria many universities around the world use to evaluate faculty research stack the deck against people who study topics that may be extremely important in their home country but would be considered obscure by the editors of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals. Journals like Science and Nature have much higher “impact ratings” than specialized ones like, say, the Journal of New Zealand Literature, while an article in the American Sociological Review counts more than one in its Canadian counterpart. “But if you are doing studies of Canadian social structure, you want to publish in the Canadian Journal of Sociology because the interested academic audience reads that,” Mr. Turk says. “You get rated as a poorer performer, even though the chance of getting something in the American Sociological Review isn’t great if it’s something that’s about Canada.”
“If we want to talk about global excellence, that’s perfectly fine if you say what they are excellent in,” argued Mr. Gingras. “If we’re hiring somebody in economics to be an expert on the Canadian banking and economic system, they shouldn’t be asking how many papers they have in the international journals, because if they write about the Bank of Canada, they probably won’t get published there.”
The result for small countries like Canada, Mr. Turk said, is a reorientation of academics away from local topics and toward American, transnational, or abstract ones. “Globalization is encouraging us to be the ‘best of the best,’ but ‘best’ is an abstract concept that brings along a lot of baggage,” he said. “Universities exist to serve the public interest, but it’s easier to count journals and measure impact factors than to measure the utility of your research for the public.”
Mr. Groarke said this reorientation toward external topics, journals, and peers has had a withering effect on the Canadian Philosophical Association, which has “very poor attendance.” “Many of the fresh people who get tenure don’t bother coming to Canadian conferences,” he said. “They’re not that interested.”
In a similar vein, Mr. Gingras said that reorientation was behind the failure of Canada to create a viable counterpart to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, even though French-speaking Quebec has had one since 1923. “The only time the actors say we should have such an association is when the AAAS comes to Canada,” he says. “But when the conference finishes and the Americans go home, nothing happens.”
A Positive Force
Still, many argue that despite the side effects, internationalization has been a positive force for Canadian higher education. “The biggest challenges in the world today that our universities are trying to address are global, whether it’s climate change or hunger or sustainability” said Helen Murphy of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, who also said she was unfamiliar with the critical arguments. “These big issues of today don’t stop at our national border.”
“It’s 2011, the world is small, and talent is mobile,” says David Naylor, president of the University of Toronto, Canada’s largest higher-education institution. “As a Canadian, I like it when our Ph.D.'s get great jobs. But as a university president, my overriding duty is to support our search committees when they make offers to the very best candidates, regardless of where they were educated.”
Mr. Naylor said he found the data unconvincing with regard to a bias against holders of Canadian doctorates, and noted that the data lacked revealing details, such as what the overall job-seeking success rates actually are for graduates of various Canadian doctoral programs. “There are lots of complaints from Ph.D.'s, understandably frustrated by a very tight market for academic jobs,” he added. “But there’s only limited dissection of the numbers in the form of trend plots and cross-sectional analyses.”
Gregory S. Kealey, provost of the University of New Brunswick, said he suspects that if there is a recruiting bias against Canadian Ph.D.'s, it is most likely concentrated in disciplines that are universal (like psychology or philosophy) rather than those with clear, Canada-specific subfields (like history or literature). He also suspects there could be less of a problem at smaller institutions that are not well known to foreigners and, thus, attract fewer candidates. “There’s a certain provincialism, even of American Ph.D.'s, that lead them to apply only to the elite schools because they know their names,” said Mr. Kealey, who did his own doctorate at the University of Rochester. “If you’re in the States and say you’re from the University of New Brunswick, people often think you’re talking about Rutgers,” in New Brunswick, N.J.
“No matter what the topic is, Canada’s universities—just like other leading universities around the world—are focused on having the best and brightest minds teaching and conducting groundbreaking research on their campuses,” said the Canadian college association’s Ms. Murphy. “An internationalized campus is something that students are demanding, and we’ve been moving strongly in that direction for some time.”
Jay Young, a doctoral student in history at York University, says that, in his experience, focusing on a Canadian topic—the history of Toronto’s subway system—has not been a liability. In the field of transportation history, non-U.S. research is now sought after to build better comparisons with the well-studied American cities. Nonetheless, he says, he’s well aware of the tension between the drive for international hires and the need for local expertise. “There really is this debate which is happening in Canadian institutions,” he says. “Certainly, if you hire from Columbia or Harvard, they are certainly excellent material, but there’s value in studying the national and local as well.”
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