Modernization and Reaction: Postwar Evolutions and the Critique of Higher Learning in English-Speaking Canada, 1945-1970

Higher education underwent the final stage of modernization after 1945. The Second World War had accelerated modernizing trends that were decades in the making. In the postwar era, universities in English-speaking Canada continued to develop as utilitarian institutions: they were funded by the public purse, responsive to both governments and the public at large, and perceived as the focal points for the continued material and technological advancement of society. The utilitarian university, in short, reflected the values and orientations of the modern world. As such, there was little room in it for the humanities and liberal arts, once the foci of higher learning. Nor did the university maintain its function as social critic or transmitter of cultural values. Signaled by massive enrolments, million-dollar budgets, and the unprecedented significance of professional and applied science faculties, by the late 1960s, the fully modern multiversity had arrived in Canada. A major purpose of this article is to chronicle the postwar evolution of the university in English-speaking Canada. Even more important is the analysis of the reaction to these modernizing trends. Harold Innis, Donald Creighton, George Grant, Vincent Massey, Hilda Neatby and Northrop Frye were among the most significant of the postwar critics of modern higher education. While most Canadians were vaguely supportive of or indifferent to modernization, these critics deplored modern tendencies as being destructive of what they perceived to be an age-old university tradition and as undermining the basic cultural values of Western civilization. Above all, their self-imposed mandate was to call attention to the abuses and help reverse the effects of modernization. An understanding of the critics' views is thus important because it enables a fuller appreciation of the issues that underpinned academic modernization. It also helps one grasp the critics' own Idealized conception of the academy, which reveals much not only about the substance of the modernity debate, but also the biases and cultural values of the critics as the latter relate to higher education and the greater question of modernization.

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