Canada: A Chair at Harvard

• Share

Most Canadians have considerable if malevolent knowledge of the United States. Most Americans have a benevolent ignorance of Canada.

This comment by Professor Edward J. Miles, director of Canadian studies at the University of Vermont, explains why a neighbor who is a good trading partner is not always the most understanding friend. When it comes to their powerful neighbor to the south, Canadians take umbrage at attitudes that would never bother more distant peoples. One measure of the gap is the fact that not one of the more than 2,000 U.S. colleges and universities has a professorial chair reserved for Canadian studies, and that only 37 offer courses on Canadian history rather than teaching it as part of British imperial history.

Now, Harvard has announced that next year it will establish a full chair of Canadian studies. The men who raised most of the $600,000 endowment are Canadian Beer Baron E. P. Taylor (Carling's) and two members of the Harvard board of overseers, Chase Manhattan Bank President David Rockefeller and Procter & Gamble Chairman Neil McElroy. Chosen to hold the chair for the first year: University of Toronto President Claude Bissell, 51, a Ph.D. in English from Cornell, who once observed that "American universities prefer the study of Tibet to the study of Canada." At Harvard, Bissell and his students will have access to the largest collection of books on Canada in the U.S.