All my historian readers seemed to enjoy last Thursday’s piece about writing campus histories, so I thought I would do a quick follow-up on things that drive me spare about the state of the art in writing about academia. 

To my mind, there is a single serious problem, and it is this: institutional histories are everywhere, but they are almost all rooted in local and national histories whereas academia is global.  As a result, most institutional histories are limited when it comes to answering, “why does this university look the way it does?” or “what, if anything, makes this institution special?”  There is almost no comparative aspect to them.

Institutional histories are where the money is.  It’s not big bucks or anything, but still: you can be pretty sure that institutions will publish a history of themselves around about the time that they hit a round number anniversary.  This isn’t always the case: Dalhousie seems to have gone past its 200^th birthday without a book, and I don’t believe McGill is planning on releasing new a book for one of it’s 200^th anniversaries, which it seems to be celebrating this year (the problem with McGill is that it has a lot of potential “founding dates”: 1801, 1821, 1829 and 1843 are all plausible). Universities like to use the histories as publicity and so don’t mind spending some money on them.  As a result, we have way more institutional histories than we have national histories of academia, because no one pays for those.  Yet the lack of that kind of integrative material makes it hard for writers of institutional histories to set their own work in a larger context.

Generally, the people who get chosen to write institutional histories are “national” historians (Canadian history professors in Canada, Australian history professors in Australia, etc).  Their inclination is therefore to talk about their institution in a national or a provincial context.  The parts of the narrative which therefore get privileged are those where the institution interacts with provincial or national institutions. A lot of these historians are also social historians, which means you get a lot of similar “look at how students behaved/look at how women were battled for quality stuff” narratives at every institution.  What you don’t get are people who analyze higher education as an enterprise, or academia as it exists in a national or international context. 

And so, what you get are histories of institutions as administrative entities (almost like histories of provinces, with different Presidents taking in the roles of provincial premiers) and histories of institutions as sites of social change (in which the institution is usually just reflecting wider social trends rather than being the locus of any innovation itself), but what you get only intermittently is how institutions reflect wider trends in higher education.

I think part of the problem is the convention that every era in an institution receive more or less equal treatment.  Conceivably this makes sense for young universities: it is patently wrong for older ones.   Take McGill or Queen’s as examples.  There are more people enrolled at those two institutions today than were enrolled in the entire 19^th Century.  Yet in each institution’s official history, the 19^th century gets about 300-350 pages of treatment and Oh God is it boring.  And more to the point, these pages help you understand almost nothing about the institution today.  At basically every Canadian institution, nearly all the key decisions that made the institution what it is today took place between 1945 and 1975.   Not to say interesting stuff didn’t happen outside these periods, but these were the key years.  Modern day universities are recognizable in the ones that existed in 1975: the 1945 ones are basically unrecognizable.

But to really understand this period in academia, you need to look at much broader trends in the creation and dissemination of knowledge.  For instance, research was not an important aspect of university life at most Canadian universities in 1945 (U of T and McGill excepted).  It was Vannevar Bush’s Science: the Endless Frontier and the creation of the National Science Foundation in the US that really created the a model for universities becoming engines of discovery.  It didn’t have to be that way: in much of Europe, governments chose to go in the direction of entrusting that task to specialized research institutes (eg Germany’s Max Planck, France’s CNRS, etc).  And this has had enormous effects on institutions not just financially but also in terms of hiring processes, the de-prioritization of undergraduate studies, and other trends.

But it’s not just research: it’s how universities teach and what they choose to teach.  The process of massification mattered, not just at each institution but across global academia more broadly.  So too did the wave of democratization that swept academia in the 60s and 70s – nearly all the governance arrangements which currently exist at Canadian universities come from this period.  The tendency to hand every tiny humanities discipline its own department (something most institutions have being trying to undo for the last forty years) also stems from this period.  The physical shape of most universities also reflect choices made by institutions in these years.  

For these reasons, it seems to me that most university histories would be better if they cut half or even two-thirds of the pages from the early years and bulked up the work on the 50s, 60s and 70s instead.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of the best books about specific periods at Canadian institutions – Hugh Johnston’s Radical Campus: Making Simon Fraser University and Kenneth McLaughlin’s Waterloo: The Unconventional Founding Of An Unconventional University are set in this period.  This is the period that mattered and continues to matter today.  We should know more about it, and endeavour to set it in broader, global academic trends, rather than as fundamentally local institutions.