American recruitment in the Canadian academy: The case against 

As U. S. President Donald Trump’s funding cuts and ideological crackdowns hammer American universities, many commentators see a moment of opportunity in which Canada becomes a destination for disaffected and defunded American academics. 

But hang on just a minute before we roll out the red-and-white carpet.  

The Americanization of Canadian higher education is already a problem; anecdotal evidence suggests that academics with PhDs from American institutions are often preferred by hiring committees over their Canadian counterparts.   Meeting the current crisis in the U.S. with calls to intensify this process risks entirely squeezing out Canadians from their own labour market. After all, unlike family doctors or nurses, we have no shortage of Canadian PhDs vying for Canadian academic jobs. As we all know, we have a shortage of academic positions, especially given the current widespread underfunding of our university system. 

In McGill University’s Department of Anthropology – my doctoral alma mater – only one of the 16 full-time faculty members obtained his PhD in Canada. Its 15 other members all hail from doctoral programs in the United States, including from the University of Chicago, Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University.  

The situation at McGill is consistent with an analysis of Canada’s anthropology programs undertaken in 2015 by prominent Canadian anthropologists James Waldram and Janice Graham. Examining recent hiring patterns by focusing only on assistant professorships, they concluded that “two-thirds of Assistant Professors obtained their degrees from U.S. universities, and almost 80 per cent hold PhDs from a non-Canadian program.”   

No systematic review exists to understand the current extent of the Americanization of Canadian higher education. Systematic analyses are often challenging to conduct, because it can be hard to see the provenance of professors:  Degrees are not always listed on academics’ websites, and CVs are not publicly available.  

However, my examination of several academic units at elite Canadian universities revealed results strikingly similar to Waldram and Graham’s conclusions. For example, the University of Toronto’s sociology department is the largest in the country, boasting more than 70 full time tenure-stream positions.  I was able to identify 57 faculty members who received their PhDs from the United States, five of whom had done their undergraduate degrees in Canada. On the other hand, there were only 10 faculty members who had obtained their PhDs in Canada, amounting to less than 15 per cent of the department.  

The percentage I found at McGill’s sociology department was almost identical, with 16 faculty members holding PhDs from the U.S. (three of whom did their undergrads in Canada) and only three holding Canadian PhDs.  

I found similar results in many other academic units, although I only examined departments in the social sciences and humanities. Additionally, I found that hiring bias does not appear to be universal but more prominent in certain institutions and certain units, reflecting a deference to local culture. Numerous Atlantic Canadian universities, for example, appear to be entirely unaffected by it. Ontario universities appear to be more so. I also did not examine francophone Quebec universities which have their own cultural and linguistic dynamics.  

Nevertheless, in examining different academic units and universities, two additionally troubling patterns emerged. First, academics holding Canadian PhDs were often the oldest members of the department, which suggests that hiring patterns have shifted and that Americanization is a more recently dominant trend.  Second, many Canadian PhDs appear to be hired because they work on topics specific to Canada that may have been integral to their job description. In other words, sociologists with Canadian PhDs focus on Canadian society, historians with Canadian PhDs on Canadian history, and political scientists with Canadian PhDs on Canadian politics, leaving world history, political theory, and international relations even more dominated by non-Canadian hires. The only areas that insulated Canadian PhDs from hiring bias were those where it would be hard to find any American candidate with an American PhD.  

Meanwhile, my non-systematic analysis found that while Canadian PhDs were far less represented in tenure-stream jobs, they were far more represented in teaching-stream positions, which generally come with less pay, less prestige and less job security.  In such a way, one could argue that Canadian PhDs are second-class citizens in their own institutions.  In an ironic gap between theory and practice, it appears that the more attuned a discipline is to questions of colonialism, imperialism, neoliberalism, inequality, and hegemony – disciplines like sociology, political science, history, or anthropology – the more likely it is to be dominated by Americans. 

What’s jarring about how American PhDs end up being prioritized over Canadians for academic jobs is that many Canadian academic job announcements come with a statement that “Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority.” In practice, this is easily circumvented because priority is trumped by the designation of the most qualified candidate. That is, as it should be, deferred to search committees and academic units. But as departments become more Americanized so do academic search committees, and it is not surprising that hiring bias accelerates and makes one question whether American professors in Canada with American PhDs really give any preference to Canadian PhDs for academic jobs. Certainly, the numbers I found suggest otherwise.  

Read the opposing view: American recruitment in the Canadian academy: The case in favour

It’s true that a minority of scholars with American PhDs are Canadian citizens and thus fit within prioritization of citizenship over academic pedigree. However, this still begs the question: Why even bother having PhD programs if we consider Canadian PhDs to be second-rate compared to American ones?   Over the years, I have had numerous conversations with ambitious undergraduates and MA students about applying to doctoral programs, and they invariably ask if they are going to be competitive on the Canadian academic labour market if they stay in Canada for their PhDs. Many do not want to leave but see no choice. They are acutely aware of existing hiring bias. It is sad that so many believe landing an academic position in Canada requires them to leave the country to the United States for a PhD, often taking Canadian scholarship money with them. 

This is not a nativist argument. I write this as a Canadian citizen invested in this country. I also write this as an American citizen who arrived in this country for graduate school, obtained permanent residency status, and prioritized staying in Canada when I was on the job market. I’m also proud of our higher educational system and never considered my doctoral degree inferior to those of my American peers. 

 A good argument exists for hiring scholars trained in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and, yes, the United States to represent a diversity of academic and global perspectives and a variety of intellectual traditions. But the current trend of Americanization of Canadian universities fosters less diversity and more intellectual homogenization. Having pockets of professors trained at the same schools invariably leads to less educational variety and misses out historically on how many major new ideas, scientific innovations, and breakthroughs have come from educational peripheries.  

What also gets limited are Canadian perspectives in classrooms while reproducing American culture-war debates that do not always have the same resonance in Canada. Americanization also jeopardizes the future of Canadian academic professional associations and the distinctiveness of, to cite my discipline as an example, Canadian anthropology. While many Americans assimilate to their new home, some keep a foot more firmly planted in the United States. After all, for some, Canada is a second choice after they have been unable to land work at home. Their personal, familial, and academic networks are entirely there.  

Even many of the most highly educated Americans know surprisingly little about Canada, often abstractly seeing it as a socialist paradise or merely a place to threaten to move to when Republicans are elected President.  Upon arrival, despite our not having the same deep inequalities as the United States, they confront our high housing costs and the major issues in our medical and educational systems. Lacking the resources of deep-pocketed American institutions with their huge endowments, expense funds, and subsidized housing, they also may find Canadian universities underfunded by comparison and perhaps less attractive than they had imagined in the abstract. One can cite numerous cases of American academics who come here at the start of their careers and then leave for more prestigious positions back home as quickly as they can. 

Trump’s trade war has unleashed a new nationalist sensibility in Canada and a desire to protect our identity and sovereignty. Maybe we should be applying this to our higher education system.  In the current moment, rather than encouraging more American academics, perhaps we should be better protecting made-in-Canada academic talent. Do Canadian universities have a responsibility to be Canadian?  We protect our media and cultural landscape from Americanization, so why not embrace similar protections in our higher educational system? These are not easy questions, but they need to be posed as the national character and independence of our academic system are in jeopardy.