Something important changed in the structures influencing western society as a result of the two World Wars that is often overlooked: universities around the world altered dramatically. Student numbers increased, for one thing. In fact, a graph of student participation in higher education worldwide shows an almost 90-degree upturn at 1945, which included women in unprecedented quantities (though often in a lower proportion than in previous decades, for the influx of men was even more substantial). Scholars shifted their focus, turning their gaze in new ways to research and the production of new knowledge. Between these innovations, the nature and culture of universities transformed. With returned soldiers and more diverse students, “bolshie” political sentiments began to fester on campuses, culminating in student revolutionary movements 20 years later: these influenced the late twentieth century in important ways. Understanding how war could effect these transformations is an important element of the history of higher education in the twentieth century. This book tells just that story, while also giving excellent details about Canada's more specific university history.
An edited collection of chapters, the book is structured chronologically, considering the connections, first, between universities and the Great War, with a gesture to the South African war before it. The roles of universities in encouraging enlistment and in maintaining academic standards despite the disruptions of war characterise the book's first few chapters – and those towards the end of the collection. Throughout the text, nationalism on the one hand and women on the other are key themes. The shift from very small participation by women since the 1880s, who were mocked and hooted at by male students who were apparently anxious lest their esteemed institutions become “ladies colleges”, to the relatively respectable growth in the proportion of women at university during war, is documented. The book also acknowledges the fact that women's participation propped up the universities (and their fee income) while men were away fighting.
Women did more than just pay fees, it seems. Contemporary observers argued (derisively) that women were in fact responsible for the less respectable fun that also characterises universities. Ever eve-like, women provided a frisson of sexual adventure on male-dominated campuses, luring them away from serious academic pursuits to frivolous activities such as dancing and eating out. Whether intellectually or morally, the risks to society's status quo as a result of providing educational opportunities to intelligent young women was feared from the start. This was borne out by the author's (Sara Burke) observation that the core members of Canada's suffragette movement were undergraduates of universities.
The university's tendency to encourage reflective and rebellious thinking in times of social change is also on display in an excellent chapter by James Pitsula on shifts in Canadian masculinity as a result of the Great War, connecting this to larger, structural problems embedded in liberal internationalism.
We should not overstate the transformative effect of the war on universities, argues James Hull in a well researched and innovative piece on the growth of research. Canadian universities, Hull argues, were long partnered to industry and had well-developed research traditions before the Great War. It was not the practice and habit of research that wartime developments fostered in Canadian higher education, Hull argues (against historiographic orthodoxy), but the institutionalised connection to national and provincial funding schemes.
Science for the explicit purpose of defence, by contrast, was “virtually non-existent” at the beginning of the Second World War, argues Donald Avery (p. 178). There the National Research Council had far closer control of university-based research projects than any equivalent Federal body in Australia, so that even at the time university leaders feared for their autonomy as the concerns of war overtook all other institutional and intellectual priorities. The list of morally questionable research conducted in this time is alarming: atomic, chemical and biological weapons are all on the list, reminding us that dubious values were not only confined to Nazi Germany's notoriously horrific medical experiments. Even western universities were not always working precisely for the world's moral and physical well-being.
The sense that universities should support coherent national goals in a time of war impacted their capacity to interrogate diverse political and intellectual issues. Canadian professors, however, did not – and do not, according to Michiel Horn – utilise their freedom to such an extent that they attract much public or government criticism in or out of wartime.
The nuances of racial tensions during war, exhibited in responses to the appointment of refugee academics (especially those of Jewish background) is an important story, but one which in this book does not investigate the need to deprive the enemy of scientific researchers as much as possible in twentieth century wars.
The decision to end this very high-quality collection of work on universities and war with student radicalism in the 1960s is a clever and effective one. The war in Vietnam had the opposite effect on universities than previous wars: instead of galvanising intellectual and research expertise in support of the international conflict, students rallied to oppose it. In so doing, students fundamentally transformed the things that universities could do and approaches they could take to teaching and examination: even knowledge itself, I would argue. This chapter by Catherine Gidney focuses on the ways that wars – including, but not limited to, Vietnam – promoted the idea that students constituted a “generation”, which allowed a group of young people to develop a kind of generational consciousness that facilitated political action, through intellectual means.
Very well researched and beautifully written, this book has a stylistic coherence that displays excellent editorship. It will be useful to historians of higher education in general, of course, but for historians of Australian universities, it also offers a very useful comparator. As in Australia, Canadian participation in the wars of the British Empire ironically helped promote national uniqueness against the Imperial backdrop. This contributed to a slow decolonisation, which was useful for universities wanting to demonstrate their value to distinctive national development and the building of national infrastructure and culture.
While the book often turns, thematically, to nation, it does not really represent Canada's wide geography well. This University of Toronto Press publication focuses distinctly on that university and region rather than the breadth of Canada's higher education system. While this might theoretically limit the interpretation of the university experiences of war as wholly “Canadian”, it probably does not impact too significantly on the usefulness of the collection and what it offers to thinking about universities and war in the twentieth century.
