Robert Spencer is an Atlantic man, part of a generation that fought the war well, believed the Atlantic span was narrow and founded on common values, and committed its professional lives to preserving the links to Europe when it was in ashes and, during those more difficult years, when it thrived. At earnest gatherings of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs (CIIA) during the winter, at Christmas parties at the men's clubs, at dinner tables in Rosedale, and at Couchiching in the summer, they made their case when the Cold War was young. Through the terrifying confrontations of the fifties and early sixties, the detente of the later sixties and seventies, and the collapse of communism in the late eighties, many Europeans and Canadians wavered, but Bob Spencer remained an Atlantici st.Last fall 8 6 -year- old Bob Spencer journeyed to the rising hills just outside Frankfurt for the annual meeting of the Canadian-German branch of Atlantik-Bruecke, an organization committed to the Atlanticist vision. Sitting at the table with Bob, I wondered what he thought when Barry Cooper of the University of Calgary lamented that, despite his best efforts, he could not convert a visiting German student from the pacifism that was so deeply and, in Cooper's opinion, unfortunately rooted among contemporary Germans.Bob Spencer surely recalled other Germans. He fought them in northwest Europe as a young man. After graduating from McGiIl in 1941, he joined the Canadian army and served overseas in the 15th Canadian Field Regiment. In 1945, he was mentioned in despatches, and in the following year Spencer - now a captain - wrote the history of his regiment as a part of Charles Stacey's historical team in London. He then quickly completed a master's degree at Toronto followed by three years at St. John's College at Oxford, from which he received his doctorate in 1950. In the same year, he returned to the University of Toronto as a lecturer and began his remarkable career as a teacher and an academic leader.Spencer was part of a postwar generation of teachers who came to a relatively small university in a still provincial city. There were rumblings of excellence, even a Nobel prize in medicine and a cluster of remarkable medievalists nurtured by the minority Catholic faith. Political scientists and economists dwelt in the same department, and there were not yet language barriers between historians and economists. Indeed, when Spencer returned to Toronto, the historian Donald Creighton and his close friend the economist Harold I ? ni s were bitterly lamenting Canada's entry into the Korean War. In their view, their former colleague Lester Pearson, now the secretary of state for external affairs, was blindly leading Canada into the dangerous embrace of the Americans. It was, in Creighton's later phrase, a forked road that would end in a catastrophic loss of identity and direction.Bob Spencer, who had fought with the British, lived in London, and studied at Oxford, did not share these views, although in those days a junior lecturer probably would not have publicly dissented from the eminent Creighton. Spencer was a German historian and a veteran who shared Pearson's belief that the Cold War required a continuing American commitment to Europe and that Canada should play its part, at America's side, in confronting Soviet communism.In those days, historians often taught courses well beyond the areas they had studied, and in Canada at least they also published scholarly works outside their fields of professional interest. The Canadian Historical Association meeting was an annual and boisterous affair where medievalists drank copious amounts of rye with historians of modern Britain, and the Canadian Historical Review did not restrict itself to only Canadian material. Spencer served on its editorial board in the mid-1950s and published many reviews on German history in its pages.In a world where disciplinary boundaries were thin and where Toronto's business and political leaders often mingled with academics, a bright young assistant professor could take on assignments that today would not survive the harsh scrutiny of promotion and tenure committees charged with the responsibility of keeping scholars from straying beyond their proper confines. …
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Mar 28, 2024
Hemanth Narayana Shetty + 1
Open Access