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Published by EH.NET (September 2000) 
 
Shirley Spafford, _No Ordinary Academics: Economics and Political  
Science at the University of Saskatchewan, 1910-1960_. Toronto:  
University of Toronto Press, 2000. ix + 272 pp. 5 (cloth), ISBN:  
0-8020-4437-9. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Robin F. Neill, Department of Economics,  
University of Prince Edward Island and Carleton University.  
<[log in to unmask]> 
 
 
In the words of W. C. Murray, President of the University of  
Saskatchewan from its founding in 1910 until his retirement in 1937,  
his economists were to be "no ordinary academics" because, following  
practice at the University of Wisconsin (as Murray saw it), they were  
to serve the economic and political interests of the farmers who,  
ultimately, paid the university's bills. There was little, if any,  
institutional and personnel difference between economics and  
political science at the university, in part because political  
science had yet to identify itself as a separate social science, and  
in part because the mission of economics at Saskatchewan was to shape  
national and provincial policy in the interests of Western Canada. 
 
_No Ordinary Academics_ is well written in the tradition of Canadian  
academic biography. Shirley Spafford is to be congratulated on a  
contribution to the field of Canadian Intellectual History. Still,  
some caveats for the would-be reader are in order. 
 
The book is not a work in the history of ideas. Its approach is  
personal and institutional. With the exception of a few pages  
describing a strong element in the historiographical stance of Vernon  
Fowke, the reader is left with just a suggestion of what the content  
of Economics and Political Science was on the Saskatoon campus.  
Classroom economics was what it was elsewhere, but what it was  
elsewhere is not revealed. It seems to have been unimportant to the  
people involved. Having the correct policy stance, one consistent  
with the views of the agrarian community to be served, was more  
important. Political science was constitutional history and a  
smattering of the classics in political philosophy. Competence in  
advanced neoclassical theory, or, later, in Keynesian theory, in  
mathematical economics, or econometrics was not a requirement, though  
it was increasingly present in the department. Of course, there were  
courses in introductory economics, money and banking, international  
trade, and public finance. 
 
It was important for the faculty to be adequately schooled in  
economics. Until Murray resigned in 1937, to be Scots was also  
important. To be Scots and Presbyterian was to be among the chosen. 
 
Murray, in the course of a long interview, showed only lukewarm  
interest in hiring him until it came out that [R. McG.] Dawson was  
Nova Scotian, and proud of it, at which point Murray, whose fondness  
for Nova Scotia had never diminished, was completely won over (p.  
115). 
 
The book has some tantalizing interest for the historian of economic  
thought in Canada. For example, we all know that H. A. Innis, at  
Toronto in the 1930s, was less than accepting of the socialist  
historian, Frank Underhill. What I expect few of us knew, and  
Spafford has revealed, is that Underhill, while a member of the  
Department of Economics and Political Science at Saskatchewan,  
"published a searing criticism of Innis's book on the fur trade." But  
here we experience the shortcoming of Spafford's book. She offers not  
a clue as to the views expressed by Innis or Underhill in this  
matter, and she does not provide detailed bibliographical references  
to the literature in question. Indeed, the book has thirty-nine pages  
of endnotes, citing mostly other biographies, personal papers, and  
letters, and it has an excellent nineteen-page index, but it has no  
bibliography or list of references. The present reviewer would have  
benefited from the in-text, general references to the works of Fowke  
and Timlin in the chapter dealing with their contributions, but  
considerable additional digging would have been necessary before the  
newly revealed items could have been added to attempted definitive  
lists of their publications. Spafford recounts in some detail the  
personal conflicts and power struggles in the department, but, some  
intriguing clues aside, she throws no light on their doctrinal  
dimensions. 
 
Weak with respect to ideas and bibliography, _No Ordinary Academics_  
is strong with respect to personal, social, and institutional  
history. Economics at Saskatchewan was heavily influenced by the  
preferences of the self-selecting elite that shaped Canadian  
universities, especially between 1910 and 1940. The account presents  
an impressive list of outstanding Canadian social scientists (which  
is not to say economists, as that term is now understood) whose early  
careers included a stay in the department at Saskatchewan. In the  
end, however, given the financial constraints on the university in  
the 1930s, it was home-grown scholars, influenced by conditions on  
the Prairies, that made a distinctively western contribution to  
economic analysis of the Canadian case. (For the intellectual  
substance of their contribution see R. F. Neill, "Economic  
Historiography in the 1950s: the Saskatchewan School," _Journal of  
Canadian Studies_, Vol. 34, 1999, pp. 243-260.) 
 
_No Ordinary Academics_ is an account of selected external factors  
shaping economics at the University of Saskatchewan between 1910 and  
1960. The principal members of what elsewhere has been called the  
Saskatchewan School -- Vernon Fowke, George Britnell, Mabel Timlin,  
and Ken Buckley -- were no ordinary academics. From Spafford's  
history we know that they were idealists, even romantics, who put  
economics at the service of their altogether honorable social goals.  
Their rewards were largely non-monetary; working as they did for  
their students, their associations, and their governments, provincial  
and national, frequently at their own expense, and despite  
appallingly low remuneration. 
 
 
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