Since the first European university was founded in Bologna, Italy, in 1088, the goal of higher education was supposed to be a search for truth. Alas, too many modern ivory towers in the West, including those in Canada in recent decades, have been tempted into trendy anti-reality policies, activism, and illiberalism.
A useful example of the latter is the rise of so-called “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) policies and bureaucracies at universities.
Some pick students and professors by race, ethnicity, or gender today on the justification that it will somehow make up for doing the same 100 years ago. Others have the mistaken belief that diverse economic outcomes between cohorts today is due mostly or wholly from racism.
Both are mistaken but they explain why DEI offices sprung up like toxic weeds over the last 10 years across campuses in the United States and Canada.
A primer: Why is DEI so flawed in its diagnosis of differences between diverse statistical cohorts?
Simply put, in a liberal democracy such as Canada or the United States, incomes and wealth result from multiple factors: education levels, family dynamics, geography (people in rural locations including reserves earn less than those in major cities), the time one has lived in a country if an immigrant, and a variety of other influences.
That’s why when like-to-like comparisons are made, one finds more similarities between groups than stark differences.
For example, there is an average income gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians, but that’s due in part to large differences in average education levels and in geography—i.e., more indigenous people live in rural areas, on reserves compared with the rest of the population. That gap mostly disappears when those factors are accounted for: indigenous Canadians with a bachelor’s degree had a median income of $76,000 annually in 2020 according to the census while non-indigenous Canadians earned $77,500. But that gap flips when above-bachelor’s level education is considered: indigenous people had a median income of $85,000 compared with $83,000 for non-indigenous according to the same census data.
Another example of how higher-educated people earn more: The top four female cohorts in Canada income-wise, based on ancestry, are Korean, Chinese, South Asian, and Filipino. That’s as it should be, given their education levels and hours worked.
DEI policies ignore all of the foregoing in favour of a simplistic racism-explains-all ideology. That’s why proponents try so hard to manage justifying diversity from the top-down, including DEI statements and discrimination in hiring. We found exactly that in a new Aristotle Foundation index where we analyzed 489 academic job advertisements at Canada’s 10 largest universities (by student population, by province).
Of these, 477, or 98 per cent, used some form of DEI requirement or strategy to fill academic vacancies.
We then sorted the data based on differing DEI strategies in job advertisements, from generic statements to citing DEI contributions as an asset to explicitly encouraging people to apply (or not) based on race, ethnicity, and gender. That then allowed us to create a University Discrimination Index.
Some noteworthy findings include: how all University of Toronto employment postings and 96 percent of Dalhousie University’s mentioned or implied a candidate’s “contribution to DEI” was an asset; McGill University and the University of Saskatchewan required all applicants to complete a DEI survey; nearly two-thirds of the University of British Columbia’s and 55 percent of the University of Manitoba’s employment postings required candidates to submit a DEI statement or essay.
One could argue that asking for DEI statements, endorsements, and the like is no guarantee that a university will discriminate in hiring. That’s unlikely given how much money, time, and advocacy is spent by DEI advocates arguing that top-down ethnic, racial, and gender sorting is a positive good (as opposed to “organic” bottom-up diversity where all are welcome; which is, in fact, beneficial for a company or university or country).
Besides the implicit hint about who is likely, or not likely, to be hired, we found some universities are explicit: The University of New Brunswick, for example, excluded white males from applying to the department of physics for a research chair position in “quantum sensors for space”; at UBC, nearly one out of every five academic employment postings explicitly restricted the job to a particular race, ethnicity, group identity, or other immutable trait.
Without even getting into the lack of viewpoint diversity at Canada’s universities, the core problem with diversity, equity, and inclusion criteria is not the desire to have a diverse workforce — that makes sense precisely because skills and merit exist among all cohorts.
The problem with counting by race, ethnicity, and gender, is three-fold. First, it treats individuals in a discriminatory fashion based on some group identity assigned by others and based upon unchangeable characteristics. Second, it assumes that identity largely explains success or failure. And third, it’s an attack on merit.
The result is an anti-individual, illiberal, anti-merit approach to hiring at many of Canada’s largest universities.
Mark Milke, PhD, is the president of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, which recently released “DEI and academic hiring in public universities: An index of university discrimination in Canada
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