Canadian Studies and the media

Late last week, a Canadian Press reporter looking for a story happened upon the Burlington Free Press article on the closure of our program office and the withdrawal of program funding to Canadian Studies. The resulting Canadian Press story hit the newswires on Friday morning and a media frenzy began. Even before I got to my office on Friday morning I was getting calls at home from radio stations in Canada who wanted to speak with me about this decision. Both AM 940 in Montreal and 1040 Hamilton interviewed me about this on live radio and one of our colleagues heard the story on the morning news on CBC Ottawa. Over the weekend, the story made it into Saturday’s Globe and Mail (which would be the equivalent here of making it into the Sunday NY Times), Saturday’s New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal, and it was on the editorial page of Sunday’s Edmonton Journal. Earlier today, the controversy was featured on Vermont Public Radio’s Vermont Edition. It also made it into today’s edition of The Vermont Cynic. It’s even been blogged about.

What’s fascinating about this, to me anyhow, is that very little of this attention was directly sought out by me or any of my colleagues. Aside from one inquiry by one of my senior colleagues to the Free Press to see if they’d be interested in the story, all of this coverage has been the doing of the media itself, who see this, especially in Canada, as a story worth covering. There are people on campus, I’m sure, who are surprised by this attention. The Administration undoubtedly expected fallout, but none of the people I spoke to there seemed to give much credence to my worries that this would soon be all over the news. Even I couldn’t have foreseen this story making it across Canada in that country’s most important and widely read newspaper.

Overall, I think the coverage has been balanced and fair to all concerned. The Administration’s position has been consistent. What it fails to speak to, though, is the effect that the potential loss of our annual grant will have on the work that we do and on the students in our classes, who have benefitted enormously from the extracurricular activities we run on campus and from the research and program money we use to help supplement the $800 or so we each get from our departments for conference travel every year. The small grant ($9500 CDN this year, which converted to just over $10,000 US) goes an incredibly long way and has been one of the things that differentiates our circumstance from all of the other area studies programs.

Up until three years ago, the amount we brought in with external grants was well over $70,000 a year and that amount subsidized the staff our Center employed (an admin assistant AND a separate outreach coordinator). I happen to believe that we can get back to that point and I’ve been working hard to position ourselves to do this. We can get there in the next few years, I believe, but achieving this without an office or a dedicated support person will be much more difficult.

What’s clear from the media attention and from the student outcry about this decision (the Student Government Association passed an emergency resolution this past Tuesday demanding the cuts be rescinded) is that there are many, many peple who are alarmed by this decision. There are few universities in the US better positioned geographically, historically, and politically to make Canadian Studies an area of study. Our program has been internationally known for decades and helped pioneer this field in the US, a country which now boasts over 50 Canadian Studies programs.

I think Bill Metcalfe said it well in the Canadian Press article: “The real question is not, ‘Why are they cutting it?’ it’s ‘Why don’t we have more of it?”‘