The evolving prism: the role of nationalism in Canadian higher education

ABSTRACT This paper describes three eras of state building and higher education in Canada. Higher education in ‘Old Canada’ before WWII was mostly a small collection of colleges that bore imprints of American and British institutions and provided personnel needed to develop a vast and sparsely populated territory. The ‘Hey Day of Canadian Nationalism’ from 1950 to 1990 greatly expanded universities and colleges in a broader project of modern state building and social uplift, borrowing organizational models from mass-access American state colleges. The third era, ‘Transnational Nation-Building,’ spanning the past 20 years, uses Canadian degrees and diplomas to lure selective immigrants who seek Canadian citizenship and entrée to an emerging transnational class of English-speaking professionals. That strategy, along with a series of converging forces, is leveraging Canadian colleges and universities to implicitly adopt a new institutional path. We end by discussing insights that the Canadian case may provide for comparative understandings of higher education and state building.