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

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

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

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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.

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

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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.

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The Warmth of The Sun – Brian Wilson – an appreciation

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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.

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Philadelphia – What’s Old is News

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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.

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Steering a Middle Course on AI in the History Classroom

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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.

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

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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.

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Gender Dysphoria Across Borders: The Archival Pasts and Potentials of Erica Rutherford

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by Jess Wilton

Threads of gender dysphoria unite the yellowing pages of adolescent diaries with the smudged print of typewritten letters in the Erica Rutherford fonds at the Prince Edward Island Public Archives. A trans artist who settled on Prince Edward Island (PEI), Rutherford passed away in 2008. She left behind numerous artworks that have been on display at the Venice Biennale as well as an autobiography and many records located at Archives PEI. Her archival record in this post will be primarily explored through her adolescent diary and a few letters. This illuminates experiences of gender dysphoria before and after her transition. It also sheds light on an important figure in PEI trans history.

Born on February 1st 1923, Rutherford was assigned male at birth in Scotland. In 1975, she legally changed her name to Erica and, in the following year, received gender affirming surgery. For much of her life, Rutherford was a transient artist living in England, South Africa, Switzerland, Spain, the United States, and Canada. In 1985, she permanently settled in eastern PEI having already lived many lives as she details in her autobiography Nine Lives: The Autobiography of Erica Rutherford. At different times she was a painter, actor, screenwriter, children’s book illustrator,clothing store owner, and officer in the British Occupation Army of the Rhine. In 2009, her records were added to the Public Archives and Records Office of Prince Edward Island after her death. They represent the archive’s only available records with explicit themes of gender identity and dysphoria.

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Against Lament: Developmentalism and Fourth-World Perspectives

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Jody Mason

An image of an article from the publication CUSO Bulletin. The featured image is of a 24-year old woman named Marie Smallface, of the Blackfoot Nation.
“CUSO Volunteer Wants More Indians to Go Overseas,” CUSO / SUCO Bulletin, Dec. 1968, p. 9, Vol. 103, file 2, “CUSO Bulletin, 1967–1971,” Canadian University Students Overseas fonds, Library and Archives Canada. Used with permission of CUSO International.

In her incisive discussion of Elon Musk’s recent gutting of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Jill Campbell-Miller correctly assesses the move as motivated by MAGA-movement isolationism. She further notes that Musk’s actions are complicated by the fact that, for many decades, the aid paradigm has also been subject to substantive critique from those who, unlike Musk, care about global poverty. Ultimately, Campbell-Miller concludes: “since the Second World War, it has never been the case that a US administration has so fully refused to state a commitment to the global order it helped create, or refused to participate in a dialogue about compassion and care for the world’s poorest.”

Weighing her own response to the attack on USAID, Campbell-Miller finds herself “in the strange position of missing” the “hypocrisy” of American foreign policy. I sympathize with this. But, for historians of development, is lament the most useful response? An activist mobilization is necessary on many fronts in the current moment. As part of this work, we historians of development would do well to return to the critical Indigenous thought on the development paradigm to inform our efforts.

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