English-Canadian Social Science, Humanities, and Law Academic Secondments during the Second World War and Their Contributions to Canadian External Affairs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I examine how a select group of English-Canadian social science, humanities, and law academics made significant contributions to Canadian foreign policy and diplomacy during the Second World War. Leaving the confines of their universities to work in wartime Ottawa through a formal secondment process, an influential and yet heretofore unrecognized group of seconded academics became key administrators and diplomats working on behalf of the Canadian state in the sphere of external affairs. Aiding a federal civil service short on administrative talent, seconded academics staffed crucially important posts in the Department of External Affairs, Department of Finance, Wartime Prices and Trade Board, and Wartime Information Board. Although permanent officials handled most issues regarded as first rank, the academics analyzed in this article did the heavy lifting in the committees and preparatory deskwork, making strong contributions to those issues of second rank, including the formulation and refinement of Canadian foreign policy. Academics also became both official and unofficial diplomats representing the nation in diverse international fora. During the Second World War, the federal civil service did not have enough personnel to handle all the representational duties, and academics stepped in to fill an important void. Through their work in the international sphere, academics actively sought to forge a new Canadian identity and facilitate a process whereby Canada became less overtly British and more sovereign and independent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.057 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".