Social Science Intellectuals and Public Issues in English Canada

Abstract

It is not surprising that a quarter century after the explosive growth of Canada's post-secondary educational system we are witnessing concern over the failure of academic intellectuals to play a more important role in public life. The large generation of then-young scholars—now the middle-aged professoriate—was hired in the first instance to teach. Its responsibility was to lecture to the baby boomers who filled the nation's classrooms in the 1960s and early 1970s, not to be 'public intellectuals' with the task of addressing an educated public in print. For social scientists the job was compounded by the need to create teaching materials, to 'Canadianize' their disciplines by writing textbooks and readers so that their students might know as much about the Canadian social, political, and economic systems as they could about those of the United States and the United Kingdom.