There was a fascinating little story last week about a contretemps at the American Association of Universities (AAU), where the executive committee made a controversial decision to expel McGill University and the University of Toronto, largely on the grounds of needing to spend more time focussed on “American issues”. I am sure this would have had an enormous effect on public opinion in Canada (wot, o my god, so nationalist, Trump/nativism gone mad, etc), if anyone in Canada had the foggiest notion that McGill and U of T were in the AAU in the first place.

I can’t claim any special knowledge as to what happened in this case, but I do think the episode is an interesting example of a piece of history which is ingrained so deeply in the way a country does business that no one understands what a big deal it was in the first place. So buckle up, grasshoppers, there’s a history lesson coming.

Until the late nineteenth century, the level of interaction between Canadian and American universities was pretty low. We were part of the British Empire, and like universities in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, our institutions clung strongly to the Imperial connection (for a quite excellent work on this, see Tamson Pietsch’s Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British academic world). It was not just that we looked east rather than south for inspiration, our basic idea of higher education was ever-so-slightly out of sync with that of the Americans, too. Our colleges tended to look towards Scottish civic universities as a model, while Americans were rooted in a more collegiate (and hence residential) model inherited from Oxford and Cambridge.

That started to change towards the end of the century, when Americans got serious about higher education and started doing wild and crazy things like issuing “doctorates” and making “land grant universities” which cared about things like “the public”. Some of these notions were pretty appealing, as was the increasingly dynamic American economy which began pulling in skilled labour from Canada. Canadian students started heading south to get these newfangled degrees, a prospect so alarming that Canadian universities formed a lobby group prior to the 1913 Commonwealth Universities Conference to pressure Oxford and Cambridge (who disdained doctorates mostly on the grounds that academics actually having to generate knowledge on their own was a down-market German-inspired fad that would eventually pass) to start offering these degrees, too, so as to keep our “top men” in the Empire. This lobby group would eventually become Universities Canada.

As the prestige of American universities grew, Canadian universities began to develop ties to the south. When Abraham Flexner made his great study of medical schools in the 1920s, he made no distinction between Canadian and American schools, and his recommendation that all medical schools have a research mission and be attached to hospitals laid waste to weaker Canadian schools as well as American ones (Bishop’s University lost its med school in the aftermath). American foundations were among the largest contributors to Canadian universities in the 1920s and 1930s, with the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations combining to donate over $8 million dollars, which at the time was a simply mindblowing amount of money.

By the mid-1920s, Canadian institutions had enough contact with Americans that our higher education systems had largely become one big common academic space, where degrees were commonly recognized and academics went back and forth with ease. You know all the intense rigamarole Europe went through with the Bologna process to create a ‘European Higher Education Area”? Well, we in North America pretty much had most of the benefits seventy-five years earlier, albeit it in an informal and ad hoc manner. While the full integration of Canadian universities into a North American system didn’t really happen until the 1960s when, in a panic about how to educate the tide of baby boomers, our universities started hiring a ton of Americans to do the job because there simply weren’t enough Canadians with doctorates to make it work, this process of integration can be traced to the 1920s.

And so, it was not a big deal on either side of the border when McGill and Toronto joined the AAU, a coalition of important research universities, in 1926. I mean heck, the New York Rangers joined the National Hockey League the same year (the Bruins had joined two years earlier, as had a pair of no-longer-extant teams in New York and Pittsburgh): no one at the time seemed to think the border meant much when it came to fraternization for the purpose of knowledge or sport. And this was in a period in which Americans were at least as isolationist as they are today. Simply put, isolationism and continentalism weren’t really seen as being in conflict.

Why the AAU executive decided to reverse that position and throw away 90+ years of history by terminating McGill’s and Toronto’s memberships is a very good question. I have a pet theory – for which, let me stress, I have absolutely no evidence – that they worried that their presence might lead to other institutions asking for similar treatment (I seem to recall some noises coming from UBC when Santa Ono took over that an AAU membership application was in the offing, but have no idea if this actually happened). In any case, a joint letter from Suzanne Fortier and Meric Gertler to the AAU membership led to the executive’s initiative being overturned PDQ, which I think is a welcome sign that, outside the DC bubble at least, American academic leaders can float gracefully above the current administration’s tsunami of gibberish.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well. But it’s worth reminding ourselves of the benefits that we reap from decisions a century ago to integrate ourselves so deeply with what soon became the world’s greatest higher education system. And perhaps it’s also worth remembering we shouldn’t take those relationships for granted.