Bologna Erases Canada

Bologna, Italy, known as both “the Fat” and “the Red,” is a city to a make a book­ish vaca­tioner sali­vate. Less over­run by pack­age tours than Rome, Florence or Venice, Bologna com­bines superb food with the won­der­ful book­stores that seem to be the inevitable com­pan­ion of left-wing pol­i­tics. If the vis­i­tor is both Canadian and a writer, Bologna may feel par­tic­u­larly wel­com­ing. Numerous Cana­dian writ­ers have sold for­eign rights to their books at the annual Bologna Children’s Book Fair; the uni­ver­sity has an active Canadian Studies pro­gram. There is even an upmar­ket shop that spe­cial­izes in items from Canada. If a han­ker­ing for Grade A Canadian maple syrup strikes you in the mid­dle of an Italian vaca­tion, Bologna is the place to go.

Today, how­ever, this buoy­ant city is asso­ci­ated with a change in the struc­ture of the European uni­ver­sity sys­tem that will severely restrict the study of Canada in Europe. Anyone who has lec­tured on Canadian lit­er­a­ture in European uni­ver­si­ties knows that we have a core of com­mit­ted fol­low­ers there: women and men who have devoted sig­nif­i­cant por­tions of their careers to intro­duc­ing European stu­dents to the plea­sures of Gallant and Richler, Layton and Laurence, Blais and Brand; experts in plumb­ing the labyrinths of Loyalism, Red Toryism, la Révolution tran­quille, bilin­gual­ism and mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. Some of the stu­dents, infected by their instruc­tors’ enthu­si­asm, go on to spread the Canadian gospel. It’s dif­fi­cult to over­es­ti­mate the impor­tance of this activ­ity given that most European news­pa­pers, stunned by the gar­ish glare from the south­ern half of our con­ti­nent, rarely acknowl­edge the exis­tence of sen­tient beings north of the forty-ninth par­al­lel. On a glob­al­ized planet, national pres­tige is insep­a­ra­ble from the extent to which the chat­ter­ing classes of other coun­tries are acquainted with your nation’s cul­ture. The CanLit courses that are offered from Málaga to Helsinki, often against insti­tu­tional resis­tance, are a boon to Canadians every­where. Canadian busi­ness peo­ple, many of whom lobby for education-stunting tax cuts at home, are able to make deals in Europe, in part because some Europeans have read our lit­er­a­ture and there­fore take us seri­ously. These gains are now in jeop­ardy because of the Bologna Process.

Like most of the pol­i­tics of European inte­gra­tion, the Bologna Process is not sim­ple. But it is impor­tant, because adher­ence to the Process extends beyond the twenty-seven mem­bers of the European Union to forty-five of the forty-six nations of the Council of Europe — in other words, every coun­try between Iceland and Azerbaijan, with the excep­tion of Belarus. Consisting of the Bologna Accord, signed in 1999, sup­ple­mented by the 2001 Prague Communiqué, the 2003 Berlin Communiqué and the 2005 Bergen Ministerial Conference, the Bologna Process man­dates that by 2010 it must be “easy to move from one coun­try to the other … for the pur­pose of fur­ther study or employ­ment.” The goal is for Europeans to grad­u­ate with cre­den­tials that will be rec­og­niz­able, inter­change­able and instantly com­pre­hen­si­ble across the forty-five nations. Until now, each coun­try has cul­ti­vated its edu­ca­tional eccen­tric­i­ties. In Great Britain, for exam­ple, stu­dents spend three years as under­grad­u­ates, fol­lowed by three years as doc­toral stu­dents, and grad­u­ate in their early twen­ties with PhDs and highly spe­cial­ized train­ing but min­i­mal gen­eral knowl­edge. In Germany, where until recently there were no under­grad­u­ate pro­grams, most stu­dents do a master’s that rou­tinely takes six or seven years to com­plete and demands expert knowl­edge of three or four sub­jects; not one, but two, doc­toral dis­ser­ta­tions are required to obtain a per­ma­nent job in a uni­ver­sity. Where a British aca­d­e­mic may become a uni­ver­sity teacher at twenty-four, her German coun­ter­part is unlikely to have an aca­d­e­mic job before her early for­ties. The Bologna Process aims to elim­i­nate such incon­sis­ten­cies by estab­lish­ing a transna­tional norm of a three-year bachelor’s degree fol­lowed by a two-year master’s and a three-year doc­tor­ate. By 2010, uni­ver­sity cur­ric­ula across the “European Higher Education Area” must fit this model; in much of Europe, one of the fringe sub­jects being cut in order to imple­ment these changes is Canadian Studies.

The prob­lem for Canadian Studies is that few of the hun­dreds of pro­fes­sors, lec­tur­ers and grad­u­ate stu­dents who run courses or write the­ses on Canadian sub­jects are affil­i­ated with uni­ver­si­ties that have full degree pro­grams in Canadian sub­jects. In almost every case, Canada entered the uni­ver­sity through the English or French depart­ment. As far back as the early 1980s, com­mit­ted indi­vid­u­als such as Professor Judit Molnár at the University of Debrecen, Hungary, began offer­ing optional courses, build­ing pri­vate col­lec­tions of Canadian lit­er­a­ture, lend­ing books to stu­dents, mak­ing pil­grim­ages to Canada and encour­ag­ing Canadian writ­ers to visit their pro­grams when trav­el­ling in Europe. The Bologna Process will crush these hard-won gains. Compliance with Bologna is tak­ing place at dif­fer­ent speeds in dif­fer­ent coun­tries — cau­tiously in Germany, slowly in Poland, rapidly in Hungary — but every­where it means bad news for a diverse cur­ricu­lum. In much of Europe, the imple­men­ta­tion of the Bologna Process has coin­cided with a round of cut­backs to edu­ca­tion, height­en­ing the incen­tive to axe courses on mar­ginal subjects.

Professor Ursula Moser, direc­tor of the Canadian Studies Centre at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, says: “We are still in the process of trans­for­ma­tion and of chang­ing our cur­ric­ula. But you can see that there will be very lit­tle room left for Canadian Studies at the uni­ver­sity level unless you have a com­plete pro­gram. Curricula are so loaded with all kinds of ‘basics’ that there is prac­ti­cally no room.” Professor Ana Olos, who founded the only master’s degree in Canadian Studies in Romania, at the University of the North in Baia Mare, points out that the reduc­tion of the tra­di­tional four-year Romanian ba to three years to con­form with Bologna, “has either reduced the num­ber of dis­ci­plines or, if the dis­ci­plines have been pre­served, the num­ber of hours has been reduced.” Undergraduate courses on Canadian lit­er­a­ture at the University of the North have been com­pressed into a sin­gle elec­tive called “Anglophone Canadian Identity.” Professor Olos, who was recently forced into retire­ment by a clause of the Bologna Process, is grate­ful that Canadian Studies has sur­vived at all. For second-generation Canadianist aca­d­e­mics such as Mária Palla, a grad­u­ate of Judit Molnár’s pro­gram in Debrecen who now teaches at Kodolányi János University College in Székes­fehérvár, Hungary, there is the frus­tra­tion of not being able to teach the lit­er­a­ture they stud­ied: “We have man­aged to keep courses on Canadian cul­ture and civ­i­liza­tion but not much is offered in terms of literature.” 

The long-term impact of the Bologna Process on Canada’s sink­ing inter­na­tional pro­file will be highly neg­a­tive. Even fewer edu­cated Europeans than in the past will be acquainted with Canadian cul­ture or per­ceive Canada as a seri­ous part­ner in inter­na­tional affairs. Canada has observer sta­tus at the Council of Europe, so our gov­ern­ment could speak up to defend Canadian Studies courses in Europe. But who, in our gov­ern­ment, will speak for Canada?