Finding Canada at Yale

Richard Albert
December 4, 2015

Richard Albert (Yale College ’00 and Yale Law School ’03), a Canadian-born constitutional law professor at Boston College, writes about his role as the 2015-16 Canadian Bicentennial Visiting Professor at the MacMillan Center.

In September 1997, Ramsay Cook came to Yale as the inaugural Canadian Bicentennial Visiting Professor, a position endowed by the Government of Canada in 1976 on the 200th anniversary of the United States to promote the study of Canada at Yale.

Ramsay arrived at Yale as one of Canada’s most distinguished historians, one of its most thoughtful expositors of Canadian identity and nationalism, an acclaimed teacher whose love for Canada inspired others to contemplate its internal tensions, its open questions and its roads to reconciliation.

I was a sophomore at the time, the new chair of the Yale College Association of Canadian Students, one of the dozens of student organizations on campus. I had known of Ramsay’s work, and I had long admired him from afar for the richness of his insights into our home country, but I had never met him.

When we met for the first of what would become many times that fall, Ramsay greeted me with enthusiasm and kindness, and almost immediately became a source of support, ideas and encouragement not only for me in my capacity as chair, but also personally as I was finding my way as an undergraduate student. I dove into his historical accounts of Canada just as I began to plan campus programs about Canada, many of them informed by ideas generated from reading his work.

This year, in my return to Yale as the Canadian Bicentennial Visiting Professor, I hope to be just as supportive to Canadian students as Ramsay was to me. I hope also that the Yale community takes a moment to learn a bit about Yale in one of the many programs I have planned with the support of the MacMillan Center and the Canadian Studies Committee.

Since the start of the term, I have met so many of the Canadian students in the college, graduate and professional schools. We debated foreign policy with former foreign minister John Baird, my guest at our first event of the year. We dined together, most memorably at the annual Canadian Thanksgiving dinner at Pierson College. We talked politics at our “election watch” viewing party, and we talked politics some more on our postelection panel featuring David Cameron and Ben Cashore. We mingled with diplomats at our “mini-summit” featuring Gary Doer and David Jacobson, ambassadors to Canada and the U.S., respectively.

I hope to meet many more Canadian students over the course of the year at the other events I have planned. We will host Justice Russell Brown, the newest member of the Supreme Court of Canada. We will also hear from former Quebec premier Jean Charest, who will give the keynote lecture in our conference on “Does Quebec Need a Written Constitution?” We will also welcome my former boss, the Chief Justice of Canada, Beverley McLachlin, the keynote speaker at our spring conference to mark the 150th anniversary of the Constitution of Canada. There will be other programs here and there, including the possibility of welcoming a former prime minister to campus for a public forum.

These programs are not only a wonderful way to bring together the contingent of more than 300 Canadians at Yale, but also to share a bit about Canada with the larger Yale community.