Wednesday Talk: Sept. 11, 2024, 10am-12pm – hybrid

Speaker: Marlene Shore, Professor Emerita and Senior Scholar, Department of History/York University

Title: “Down from the Mountain: Reckoning with Unrest, Risk, and Charlatanism in the Canadian University, 1919-1939”

Abstract: In the aftermath of World War I, it was a commonly held belief in Canada, Britain, and the United States that the key to international stability was economic productivity which would produce a wider distribution of wealth and goods and minimize chances for future conflict. This entailed mobilizing a large part of a nation’s resources for industrial development, eliminating wastefulness and inefficiency, and encouraging productivity. These beliefs arose from the conviction that the length of the war and its higher-than-anticipated casualties had heavily drained human and material resources. In Canada, the war had initially fostered an almost militant nationalism that brought together military men, patriots, social gospellers, and reformers in common cause. When enthusiasm for the war dissipated, these groups pledged to achieve their societal goals once it ended. In an atmosphere that stressed the importance of productivity and social and economic reconstruction, much attention was given to child welfare, the prevention of mental disorder, charity organization, and relief. The cult of scientific management flourished and universities joined the vogue to produce “trained human doers”, implementing programs in applied science, and vocational and industrial training.

This drive for efficiency shaped the development of the social and behavioural sciences in Canada, with its strongest impulse at McGill University. An account of the beginnings of industrial psychology in Montreal published in 1935, laden with biblical allusion to Moses and the 10 Commandments, is evocative: “A dream existed in 1919 that psychology could be brought into close application to the business and educational life of Montreal. In the winter of 1919, Dr. W. D. Tait, head of the Department of Psychology at McGill University, returned from the War and believing that psychology had a real contribution to make to industry, decided to take it ‘down the hill’ from the University to the business world which lies at the foot of Montreal by offering a University Extension Course in business psychology.” As this paper will explain, even though the emergence and expansion of psychology owed much to the utilitarian traditions of Canadian and American universities, and to businesses and governments who readily recognized its practical applications, explanation for psychology’s phenomenal rise and popularity in the interwar period had deeper roots. It paralleled, mirrored, and was strongly embedded in the emergence of modernism – and its inherent contradictions. This development occurred over a period that started in the late nineteenth century and involved not only ideas central to the behavioural sciences but also facilitated psychology’s attractiveness outside the academy where it dovetailed with the popular postwar fascination with spiritism and the occult, with unforeseen consequences.

Bio: Marlene Shore, Professor Emerita and Senior Scholar, Department of History, York University, took retirement in July 2021, though she continues supervising doctoral students as a member of York’s Faculty of Graduate Studies. She received a BA in History from the University of Toronto in 1976, an MA in History from the University of British Columbia in 1977, and PhD in History from the University of Toronto in 1984. As a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, she taught in the Canadian Studies Program at University College (UofT). From 1986 to 1988, she was an Assistant Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University.  The next 34 years were spent at York, initially as a professor in the Division of Humanities at York, and from 1993 onwards, a professor in York’s Department of History where she also served stints as Director of the Graduate Program, and Chair of the Department. Her fields of research and teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels include Canadian history, United States history, and Intellectual and Cultural History. In the midst of supervising 22 doctoral students, she published many articles and books. The major ones are:  The Science of Social Redemption: McGill, the Chicago School, and the Origins of Social Research in Canada; The Contested Past: Reading Canada’s History; The Transformation of Psychology: Influences of 19th-Century Philosophy, Technology, and Natural Sciences (which was co-edited with Christopher Green and Thomas Teo). She currently has a few research projects in the works, including a manuscript on psychology and the culture of modernism in Canada, 1890-1940.

The link to register is https://forms.office.com/r/0VBUeNhcyv

The deadline to register is the Monday before the event at noon.  The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.