Adapted from the remarks delivered by Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow Christopher Dummitt at the Standing Committee on Science and Research (SRSR) on 28 November 2024.
By Christopher Dummitt, January 6, 2025
The Canadian government’s research funding agencies and programs are overlooking the most significant equity problem in universities today: the almost complete absence of viewpoint diversity in our institutions of higher education.
The Canada Research Chairs program now mandates identity-based quotas for all Chairs across the country and the Tri-Agency research funding programs require a variety of diversity mandates– from assessment criteria to diversity statements. Yet none of these programs deals with viewpoint diversity, despite the fact that vast over- and under-representations of certain political viewpoints in higher education are drastically more significant than skews for almost any different other identity category in the sector.
This isn’t a partisan statement – it’s an accurate description. Recent surveys of professors’ political beliefs show that higher education is largely a monolith of left-leaning thinkers. A 2022 Macdonald-Laurier Institute survey showed that 76 per cent of professors voted for either the NDP or Liberal parties while only 7.6 per cent voted for the Conservatives. When asked about personal beliefs, 88 per cent of professors identified as being on the left. This is, to put it mildly, wildly out of sync with the wider Canadian population.
It might be tempting to dismiss this as a fringe issue only important to conservatives. Certainly, the impact on the small number of conservative academics is significant. Conservatives regularly self-censor in the classroom and on campus. Survey answers show that they also seem to opt out of certain research projects to avoid criticism and possible discrimination. The same goes for centrist and even left-leaning scholars who are offside on social issues like the importance of biological sex as an important category of identity.
This is, though, about much more than scholars who hold minority political viewpoints. The absence of viewpoint diversity in universities damages the core mission of higher education – to truthfully understand the natural and social world around us. Canadians should expect research to be accurate, useful, and robust. The information we garner from peer-review and institutions devoted to discovering the truth ought to be more reliable than partisan or ideologically motivated-opinion. Yet the lack of viewpoint diversity threatens this in clear and substantive ways.
For instance, it impairs the key structure of higher education truth-seeking: expert peer review. As John Stuart Mill noted in 1859, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” Peer review is supposed to correct this. It ought to be based on expert assessment from the widest range of critics – including those who might offer educated alternative points of view and the best and most detailed criticism. The absence of viewpoint diversity in higher education prevents this kind of rigorous critique.
Furthermore, the absence of viewpoint diversity makes it even less likely that those few scholars who disagree with the majority feel able to offer full-throated critiques. Such scholars reasonably fear consequences for mouthing alternative points of view and so regularly self-censor. Almost half of conservative scholars on campus fear even having their colleagues know their political opinions. This is not a climate in which healthy peer-review is possible.
This also can lead to the well-known phenomenon of reputational cascades, a process whereby a fear of reputational costs encourages those with truthful, but dissenting opinions to keep silent. Their silence encourages silence amongst others. As a result, faulty information and ideas can spread unchecked, eventually becoming ingrained in the working assumptions of disciplines and institutions.
The lack of viewpoint diversity also brings with it the possible danger of group polarization. It’s a well-known phenomenon that monolithic groups and institutions – where individuals tend to share the same perspective – also tend towards polarization. That is, even if the individual group members have more moderate views, the absence of dissenting voices can lead the group as a whole to be radicalized.
This can have a significant impact in scholarship – whether it is assessing ideas about harm reduction or the negative consequences of colonialism, or the costs and benefits of immigration reform. The absence of dissenting views within the academy can lead to radicalization amongst the majority. We think of this today often as a process linked to social media – where algorithms feed groups the same kinds of ideas, spiking radicalization. But the whole phenomenon is much broader. Universities – where almost 90 per cent of those who occupy its ranks share similar viewpoints – are exactly the kind of institutions that are prone to group polarization.
Ironically, the federal government’s current EDI policies might be making these problems worse. Current programs for funding and hiring that target specific identity categories tend to come attached to other programs that silently encode political discrimination. The initiatives are meant to increase the ratio of Indigenous and Black scholars. But, in practice, the funding and hiring criteria tend to link these identity goals with ideological criteria.
This is especially clear – but isn’t restricted to – requirements for “diversity statements.” These statements are a classic example of systemic discrimination. They pretend to be neutral, yet they embed certain political viewpoints as normal, weeding out those who disagree. They force those who disagree either to lie, and adopt the expected language, or to tell the truth but risk not receiving funding. This isn’t about allowing or not allowing discrimination. Instead, current practice privileges certain interpretations of how to deal with discrimination. It sets these political and contested assumptions as the default. Those who disagree are then punished and weeded out of higher education opportunities.
A similar process is at work when opportunities for “equity-deserving” groups are paired with politically coded qualifications. For example, positions in areas as diverse as cognitive neuroscience, educational technologies, or African history are frequently targeted towards individuals with certain backgrounds. Yet when advertised, these positions are paired with expectations that the scholar have an expertise in topics like “decolonization” or “antiracist pedagogy” or commitments to “equity, diversity, and education.”
These requirements act as political tests. They rule out from the outset those who don’t share the activist leanings of these fields. And they rule out those who share a commitment to anti-discrimination but who are critical of the way certain left-leaning scholars define those goals. In other words, they embed political discrimination into the very fabric of the program itself under the guise of being neutral. This meets the classic definition of systemic discrimination.
Federal funding agencies are not tracking or trying to address the most egregious diversity problem in higher education – the lack of viewpoint diversity. What’s more, the programs they are offering – around other identity categories – are worsening viewpoint diversity and embedding systemic discrimination in higher education. It’s just on a type of identity that they don’t yet – but should – be working to counteract.
The lack of viewpoint diversity undermines trust in one of the most important truth-verifying institutions in modern society – the university. It gives credence to those who want to vilify the sector writ large. What’s more, there is validity to these criticisms. The lack of viewpoint diversity does diminish the ability of university researchers to accurately describe and analyze both natural and especially social problems in Canada today, in the past, and in assessing solutions for the future. That’s what makes this university problem an issue with wider resonance – and one that must be addressed.
Christopher Dummitt is senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a professor of Canadian History at Trent University’s School for the Study of Canada. He previously taught at the University of London, Simon Fraser University, and the JFK Institute at the Freie Universitat Berlin. He writes on Canadian political history and the history of the ideas and values that have shaped daily life in Canada.
