Ivison: DEI screening comes before merit questions in Canadian university hiring

Disappointing that Ivison would cite this tendentious study without background, context, nuance and deeper analysis. And, of course, no real assessment of whether the quality of academics hired has decreased or increased given various inclusion and equity policies. Suspect a mix, as in most hiring:

…But Milke suggested the point is made just as effectively by pre-screening. 

“What they do at the front end is to try and sort through people who they may consider overrepresented, to use an awful word, in a certain profession or faculty.”

He said that merit-based appointments would naturally become more diverse, reflecting the more ethnically diverse country that Canada has become. 

“The problem with diversity, equity, and inclusion, and this attempt to make everything exactly equal at the end and discriminate at the front end to do that, is you’re not looking at merit and qualifications the way that universities claim they are. Instead, you’re basically banning people from the position who don’t fit some irrelevant, non-changeable category.”

Milke said DEI policies entrench the notion that Canada is a systemically racist state. 

“Now, 100 years ago, there was systemic racism. If you were Chinese, for example, you could not get into a white hospital. They had to set up their own hospital. The same with Jewish people in Toronto, which is why Mount Sinai Hospital was set up. But that was 100 years ago. Systemic racism has been outlawed in Canada since the 1950s. You still find individual cases of prejudice, but systemic racism as a policy, as a law, began to be abolished in places like Ontario in the early 1950s.”

Ivison noted that the Trump administration is moving quickly to dismantle DEI in its areas of jurisdiction but that in Canada, the Liberal government has been an enthusiastic cheerleader of the policies, linking DEI hiring to federal funding. 

Milke said he would like to see the federal government reverse direction and admit students and professors based on merit and achievement. 

“The fundamental nature of DEI is flawed and what governments and universities should be doing is saying, ‘look, how can we restructure this? We do want people of all colours, creeds, backgrounds to succeed and help them to do that, but not by focusing on irrelevant characteristics’.

“The more they go down the DEI path, universities are going to capture a segment of the population that believes racism explains all, or mostly all. So, I think a federal government should strongly consider going back to not only Martin Luther King’s vision of equality of the individual (but to) Pierre Trudeau’s vision, in which he believed in the equality of the individual.”

Milke said he believes diversity is a very positive quality and that successful cultures and civilizations need an array of ideas to flourish. 

“These days, we may be admitting too many immigrants at once to have everyone get or provide housing, (but) that’s a separate issue. In the main, cultures that beg, borrow, and steal from each other generally succeed. Diversity is not a bad thing. It can be a very good thing. But not when it’s top down and people look at you and assume because you’re a certain skin colour, you’ve got privilege. I mean, it’s a fallacy.”

Source: Ivison: DEI screening comes before merit questions in Canadian university hiring