An Historian Beyond the University

      No Comments on An Historian Beyond the University

Adam Bunch

This post is part of our series of Essays on the Future of Knowledge Mobilization and Public History Online.

I didn’t expect to get into public history. I’ve been lucky enough to find an unconventional path into it, almost accidentally, from a strange multimedia project to online writing to books and teaching and now a wide enough variety of projects that I’m able to make my living doing it. But I’ve never had a clear plan. My work is incredibly rewarding and I find it endlessly fascinating, but my day-to-day is usually a chaotic scramble of deadlines and unanswered emails, so I don’t often get a chance to stop and take a step back to wrap my head around my work and my approach. Thankfully, last year Active History invited me to take part in a workshop about “The Future of Knowledge Mobilization and Public History Online.” It was a wonderful two days, bringing together historians from across the country and giving me the chance to take that step back and try to articulate my own experiences.  

Continue reading →

Relevance and Resistance: Steering a Critical Course on AI

      1 Comment on Relevance and Resistance: Steering a Critical Course on AI

Mack Penner and Edward Dunsworth

In his case for “steering a middle course” on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the history classroom, written partially as response to earlier pieces by each of us, Mark Humphries makes a number of points with which we agree. First among those points of agreement are the value of a historical education and the skills that such an education develops in students. We agree, also, that a certain media literacy and technological capacity are important skills not just for our students but for us as historians, too – and that developing those skills can be an important pedagogical goal in our classrooms. We disagree, however, with a number of Humphries’s other arguments in favour of the AI middle course, and finding those disagreements both significant and worthy of reply, we want to further the discussion here.

Among Humphries’s key arguments is one about relevance: to reject AI is to “retreat into a purist position that is likely to make us irrelevant” in the ongoing discussion about AI implementation, he claims. But to reject AI is not to ignore it, and neither is it to vacate the field of discussion. We have no interest whatsoever in pretending that AI doesn’t exist, as Humphries implies that we do. On the contrary, from a place of intense concern for how AI might warp our discipline (not to mention our world more generally), and diminish the intellectual development of us and our students alike, our position is critical rather than ignorant.

There is something unsettling about Humphries’ arguments for relevance. He seems to suggest that only by falling in line behind the ascendant power of AI can historians have any effect whatsoever in the classroom. Resistance is futile. “This is the world in which we and our students must live. So how can we simultaneously reject AI while also claiming to prepare students to live, work, and think critically in such a world?” Humphries asks. We don’t agree that teachers’ ability to reach their students is dependent on the use of the technology du jour. (Neither do we accept that this is the world in which we must live, but more on that later). Both of us attended university after the take-off of personal computers and the Internet and had professors who integrated those technologies minimally – or not at all – in their teaching. In our own experiences as students, the use or non-use of technology had absolutely no correlation with the quality of instruction. We strongly suspect that this observation rings true to many readers. Universities offer students a wide-range of pedagogical approaches that may or may not inform their future paths. Some professors are embracing AI, while others are rejecting it. But surely even AI optimists can recognize the value to students in this pedagogical diversity.

Continue reading →

Professors or Propagandists? McGill’s Socialist Professors and their Students in the 1930s

      No Comments on Professors or Propagandists? McGill’s Socialist Professors and their Students in the 1930s

This is the final post in a three-part series about socialism at McGill in the 1930s.

Raffaella Cerenzia

1930s McGill was a small, tight-knit place. Only 3,000 or so students roamed the university’s campus. They were taught by a short roster of professors; the Department of Economics and Political Science numbered just six in the early thirties. In this intimate setting, “One got to know one’s classmates and teachers fairly easily.”[1] The McGill You Knew, a collection of McGill memories, is replete with stories of casual and friendly student-professor interactions, many of which took place outside of the classroom or even off campus.[2] In such an environment, professors were likely to know their more vocal students’ political leanings. Economics professor Stephen Leacock, a known Conservative, once told one of his socialist students not to write an assigned essay “because, he said with a Leacockian grin, his ulcers acted up at the thought of having to read it.”[3]

In this context, it’s easy to imagine that individual professors had the ability to influence or shape their students’ political philosophies. It’s also quite hard to imagine that when socialism cropped up among students and staff, the two cohorts operated independently. Certainly, McGill’s top administrators found it entirely plausible, or even definite, that McGill’s handful of socialist professors were propagating their beliefs among the student population. Professors Eugene Forsey and Frank Scott were considered the ringleaders, poisoning lectures and students with their socialist propagandizing.[4] Throughout the 1930s, McGill’s administrators returned repeatedly to the question of whether radical professors were converting students to their ideology. While evidence suggests that these professors did influence at least a handful of their students, it also indicates that administrative fears were rather overblown. In fact, it seems that the professors’ greatest impact was made outside the classroom, among students who were already involved with socialism to some extent.

McGill professors Eugene Forsey and F.R. Scott. Library and Archives Canada; McGill University Archives.
Continue reading →

The Chancellor and His Principals: Administrative Reponses to Socialist Professors at McGill, c. 1930-1941

      No Comments on The Chancellor and His Principals: Administrative Reponses to Socialist Professors at McGill, c. 1930-1941

This is the second post in a three-part series about socialism at McGill in the 1930s.

Raffaella Cerenzia

As the 1930s unfolded, the soaring unemployment and general miseries of the Great Depression breathed new life into the Canadian left. Socialism began to take root in federal politics, a process exemplified by the founding of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in 1932. As an institution that catered to elites, McGill University was in many ways protected from the worst the Depression had to offer. Even so, the tensions playing out across Canada could be found on McGill’s campus. Balancing the books was a consuming struggle for the decade’s administrators, and they remained preoccupied with keeping socialist influences on campus in check. Throughout the 1930s, McGill’s handful of socialist students and professors were active and vocal. Early in the decade, socialist students printed a CCF-aligned publication. Socialist professors engaged repeatedly in public newspaper debates and lectures. Both groups’ activities drew significant public attention. For McGill’s governors and donors, who were largely drawn from the ranks of Montreal’s business elite, this was a source of great consternation and outcry.[1] Protecting McGill against this perceived threat to its reputation became a major preoccupation for the university’s leadership during the Great Depression.

McGill’s principalship was no steadying force amid the turmoil. From 1930 to 1941, the position passed hands four times. For the two years when there was no principal at all, the chancellor, Sir Edward Beatty, took the reins instead. All of the head administrators wanted to protect McGill’s reputation and preserve academic freedom, but each defined those concepts in very different terms. The principals’ reactions to socialist professors thus flip-flopped throughout the decade, passing from unhappy acceptance to active support, and then to active resistance. As the principalship rapidly rotated, Chancellor Beatty remained a stable, influential, and decidedly anti-socialist presence.

Edward Beatty in his office at the headquarters of the Canadian Pacific Railway (Montreal), where he served as president, 1919. Image: Queens University Archives.
Continue reading →

“Time to Wake Up!”: Principal Currie and the McGill Labour Club’s Alarm Clock

      No Comments on “Time to Wake Up!”: Principal Currie and the McGill Labour Club’s Alarm Clock

This is the first post in a three-part series about socialism at McGill in the 1930s.

Raffaella Cerenzia

Tick tock, tick tock. “Time to wake up!” In January 1933, deep in the midst of the Great Depression, a new student publication announced its arrival on McGill University’s campus. The paper was the production of McGill’s Labour Club, to which all of its editors belonged. Featuring eight to twelve pages of serious and satirical leftist social commentary, The Alarm Clock professed itself to be a “means of expression… for the best thought of students on Canadian economics and politics.” The editors explicitly aligned themselves with the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the democratic socialist political party that had been founded the year before.[1]

The first issue of The Alarm Clock, January 1933. McGill University Archives.

Contributions to the paper were diverse. One reporter hit the streets to collect quotes from unemployed men, compiled to emphasize the humiliation and misery of their situation. A multi-page exposé reported that a nearby municipal homeless shelter gave its guests inadequate meals and vermin-infested beds. The charges were based on the experience of three Alarm Clock reporters, who had “dressed for the occasion” and passed a night incognito in the shelter. McGill professors and faculty members contributed articles promoting the CCF and explaining the meaning of “technocracy,” while another column rebutted common objections to socialism.[1]

Some columns were less informative and more biting. One, pithily entitled “Sage Sayings,” simply quoted wealthy businessmen on the Great Depression: “We bankers are all hopeful of a silver lining,” said the president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce. The editors indulged in the occasional quip—Henry Ford’s upbeat statement that “If this period… must be spoken of as a period of depression, it is far and away the finest depression we have ever had” was preceded by a note that “when better depressions are made Mr. Ford will make them”—but the quotes were not generally accompanied by any response or analysis.[2] Nestled between articles on inescapable unemployment and crushing poverty, they needed none.

Continue reading →

Ericka Huggins, Black Panther Woman – What’s Old is News

      No Comments on Ericka Huggins, Black Panther Woman – What’s Old is News

By Sean Graham

This week I talk with Mary Frances Phillips, author of Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins. We talk about the process of writing a historical biography of a living person, tracking down new archival sources, and how Ericka Huggins ended up in prison. We also chat about COINTELPRO plots and how Ericka ended up in prison, her spiritual journey and self-car in prison, and how her story serves as an example for other activists.

Historical Headline of the Week

Amanda Font, “How the Black Panthers Shaped U.S. Schools,” KQED, November 14, 2024.

Continue reading →

The Warmth of The Sun – Brian Wilson – an appreciation

      No Comments on The Warmth of The Sun – Brian Wilson – an appreciation

James Cullingham

One day in 2004, I was aboard the infamous #196 “York University Rocket” bus, hurtling back to what was then the Downsview subway station (now Sheppard West) in Toronto, having finished my day as a professor in the journalism programme at Seneca College’s York University campus. I felt the hum of a flip phone in my pocket. I pulled the phone out and took the call.

“Hello Mr. Cullingham, I’m calling on behalf of Brian Wilson. I know you’ve been trying to reach him. He’ll call you in 15 minutes. Is that alright?” said a decidedly Californian female voice. I said, “Yes,” and hoped the bus would arrive at the station on time.

I hadn’t been at all sure I would get an interview with the reclusive Mr. Wilson, and the story, for The Globe and Mail, was almost finished when I got that call aboard #196. The woman said 15 minutes. As both a journalist and fan this was like getting an interview with Paul McCartney or Joni Mitchell. I wasn’t about to negotiate the terms.

Continue reading →

Philadelphia – What’s Old is News

      No Comments on Philadelphia – What’s Old is News

By Sean Graham

This week I talk with Paul Kahan, author of Philadelphia: A Narrative History. We talk about the city’s origins, its connection to the American Revolution, and how the city’s history is distinct from the national story. We also chat about community, Philadelphia’s political history, and the local culture.

Historical Headline of the Week

Nancy Steinbach, “Philadelphia: A City Famous for its History,” Voice of America, March 9, 2025.

Continue reading →

Steering a Middle Course on AI in the History Classroom

      No Comments on Steering a Middle Course on AI in the History Classroom

By Mark Humphries

In the last few months, there has been a growing debate about how historians should respond to AI. And that’s a good thing. I’ve argued that we need to engage with the technology or risk becoming irrelevant. Recent pieces in Active History by Mack Penner and Edward Dunsworth make the case  for why we should approach AI with caution and stand-up to resist its use in historical practice and teaching.

One thing on which we can all agree is that teaching critical thinking is essential—probably more so now than ever before—and that higher education generally, and history as a discipline specifically, play essential roles in that regard. I agree with Dunsworth too that it would be wrong to either throw our hands up in surrender to the machines or embrace AI as a panacea. Both will surely lead to the destruction of history and the university as we know them. I would argue, though, that the question of how to respond to AI—especially in the classroom—remains very much unresolved.

Dunsworth argues for resistance, reaffirming the intrinsic value of deliberative human thought and mindful writing by embracing the traditional, tactile, and analog. While I agree that critical thinking and engagement are essential, I don’t believe rejecting AI is a viable way to uphold those values without ultimately distorting them into something unrecognizable. Looking at issues from a variety of perspectives, so long as they are grounded in evidence is, after all, the essence of critical thinking. If we deny that generative AI can be useful at least in some circumstances—or worse, pretend it doesn’t exist and that our students don’t have to contend with it—we simply aren’t being true to the evidence.

Continue reading →

On Generative AI in the Classroom: Give Up, Give In, or Stand Up

      6 Comments on On Generative AI in the Classroom: Give Up, Give In, or Stand Up

Edward Dunsworth

Two approaches dominate discussion about how professors should handle generative “artificial intelligence” in the classroom: give up or give in.

Give up. Faced with a powerful new technology custom-cut for cheating, many professors are throwing up their hands in despair. This was the dominant mood of last month’s widely shared New York Magazine article. “Everyone is cheating their way through college: ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project,” its doomsday headline proclaimed. The article paints a depressing picture: students using AI to cheat, constantly and without compunction; professors out of ideas for how to deal with it. “Every time I talk to a colleague about this, the same thing comes up: retirement,” one professor told author James D. Walsh. “When can I retire? When can I get out of this? That’s what we’re all thinking now.”

Give in. A second response has been to surrender to the techno-hype of ChatGPT, to embrace generative AI as a teaching tool. “It’s an opportunity to open the door of creativity in the classroom,” gushed historian Jo Guldi in a 2024 interview, “and simultaneously raise the bar for the quality of the work we expect from our students.” Professors are encouraging students to use AI software not just for rote tasks like transcription and data compilation, but for more cerebral activities like brainstorming, analysis, and even writing. Mark Humphries, who has led the pro-AI charge among Canadian historians, boldly declared in a February article that, with increasing AI use among students, “poorly crafted theses, unsupported arguments, and narrative papers without an argument should become a thing of the past.”

I reject both approaches.[1] Not because I don’t appreciate the revolutionary challenge that generative AI poses to humanities and social sciences education, and to our society at large, but precisely because of it.[2] At this worrying juncture, as multitudes – on campus and off – cede ever more of their thinking and writing to computer programs, historians and other humanistic intellectuals should not be shying away from the challenge, but rising to it. We know (or should know) the value of deep thinking, of labouring through complex research and writing projects. We have (or should have) an inkling of what students are losing when they skip over these tasks. Rather than giving up or giving in, we should be standing up and speaking up. For our students, for our craft, and for quaint human practices like thinking and writing.

Continue reading →