This article originally appeared in the National Post.
By Christopher Dummitt, September 4, 2024
This fall, as kids and parents contemplate the piles of cash they are about to fork over for this thing called a “university education,” they might be wondering if universities are getting back to normal. The past several years saw a moral panic of wokeness erupt in higher education circles in the wake of American Black Lives Matter race politics, Donald Trump and our very own alleged mass graves controversy in Kamloops.In the wider culture, woke now seems to be receding somewhat. Certainly, in the offline world, when you turn your head away from the latest urgent crisis on X (formerly Twitter) that we will all have forgotten about by tomorrow, temperatures seem to be cooling. The Conservatives have been dominating the polls in Canada for the last year and the Democrats in the United States under Kamala Harris are attempting to present themselves as a moderate burst of sanity.
It would be tempting to think that everything is going back to normal. Maybe we’ve learned our lesson from the moral insanity of assuming that our public institutions should be loudspeakers booming out the latest and zaniest new fringe left concept of justice.
Unfortunately, many universities seem to have missed the lesson. It’s not entirely surprising given that Canadian universities are populated by those who come from a very narrow range of political viewpoints. So even as the larger culture is moderating, in the petri dish that is the world of Canadian academia, the contentious ideas that the rest of us are dropping are instead being institutionalized as a new normal.
As students come back to campus this fall, they’ll be greeted at some universities by some who seem to think race segregation is all the rage. Canadian universities are inviting their Black students to come to campus and assume that they will likely have things in common with those who happen to have the same colour skin. The same goes for gender and sexual orientation. Staff and students are being organized into “affinity groups” in the interest of advocating “equity.”
Nothing has ever gone wrong when we organize societies along racial lines, right? And how about ensuring people have special rooms and spaces just for members of their own so-called race?
The universities themselves advertise their roles as promoting justice, as if everyone who shows up on their campus will agree on what this means. Instead of the pursuit of knowledge, civic-mindedness or excellence, many universities seem to think it’s the role of higher education to promote a particular idea of social justice. American higher education critic and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt warned a number of years ago that universities had to choose between two competing purposes: justice or truth. We can’t embrace both. But a number of Canadian universities are telling students otherwise.
The most egregious forms of woke politics in universities, though, come in the way they hire. And that’s where we can really see the skewed priorities at work, with systemic political and identity discrimination written into the very fabric of higher education. Universities were already political monoliths populated by left-leaning thinkers — but the new practices are making an already ludicrously unbalanced market even more lopsided.
Job ads for academic posts now routinely include thinly disguised political tests that will, under the guise of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), ensure that only people of a certain political persuasion are hired. Candidates are routinely asked to swear fealty to woke ideas of identity politics by including DEI statements in their applications. If you don’t have the right idea of what equity means — maybe you prefer equality of opportunity over progressive “equity” — then the universities are perfectly willing to exclude you.
Some universities go even further and make political commitments part of the job itself. For example, the University of British Columbia wants to hire a lecturer in “New Media and Learning Technologies in Education” with a focus on artificial intelligence. This all sounds reasonable and non-political, and yet, the university says it will give preference to candidates with “expertise with decolonizing, reconciliation, anti-racist and social justice approaches to teaching and learning.”
Carleton University wants to hire someone in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, which you might think is science-based and free from political considerations. But you’d be wrong, for Carleton insists that the candidate must have “an awareness of the importance of (DEI) considerations in early education.”
And on and on it goes. In job after job, universities are imposing political tests and rigged qualifications. Sometimes these come via diversity statements. In other cases, universities specifically hire in fields that are themselves politicized and only generate specialists with a certain worldview. Fields in the sciences that might otherwise be assumed to be politics-free are assigned “add-ons” — like expertise in equity, anti-racism or decolonization — which amount to a political test. It’s even more common in the humanities and social sciences, where whole subfields within disciplines, such as settler colonial studies, draw their boundaries to guarantee that scholars share a political worldview.
Remember, universities already are made up of a professoriate of which nearly 90 per cent self-identifies as being on the left. New DEI requirements are therefore a matter of intra-left politics, too — a tactic to displace an older version of the left and replace it with the woke priorities of the current age.
In all of this, where is meritocracy? Where is institutional neutrality?
Parents who are about to send their kids off to school might want to ask some questions of these institutions to which they are about to send heaps of money. The same goes even more so for potential donors. Why have universities abandoned the idea of a higher education system that is open to all viewpoints? Why are they giving themselves a political mission to force one version of justice on their students? And why have they abandoned meritocracy in the hiring process?
University boards and presidents might have even more questions to ask. Public institutions maintain legitimacy by showing that they perform key functions in society. They need social trust and public buy-in.
All they need to do is look to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for an example of what happens when a once-valued public institution loses support by seeming to abandon its old mission for one that embraces certain political views over others. Would universities want to be in the same position as the CBC is now, fearing that their entire existence might end if a particular political party takes power? A political party that is running 20 points up in the polls?
If they don’t want to be in this position, if they don’t want to have an existential crisis with the advent of a conservative government, universities might want to give some serious consideration to reversing the kinds of woke discrimination that they are embedding in their daily practices.
Christopher Dummitt is a historian of Canadian culture and politics at Trent University and senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
