Bernadet: À qui la diversité profite-t-elle le plus?

2023/07/13 Leave a comment

Another column noting the intersectionality of class:

Le 29 juin dernier, la Cour suprême des États-Unis a mis fin aux programmes d’action positive (affirmative action) dans les universités, s’attaquant aux procédures d’admission dans les campus qui prennent en compte la couleur de peau ou les origines ethniques des candidats. Cette décision a relancé la controverse autour des politiques d’embauche dans les établissements québécois, notamment en raison des plans équité, diversité, inclusion (EDI) mis en place par Ottawa depuis 2017 dans le cadre des chaires de recherche du Canada (CRC). Des mesures, il importe de le rappeler, qui trouvent leur origine dans une tradition de l’État fédéral, depuis la commission royale de la juge Rosalie Abella en 1984 et la Loi sur l’équité en matière d’emploi de 1986.

Dans le camp conservateur, des voix soutiennent ouvertement l’avis des juges américains, y voyant un heureux retour au statu quo comme si les inégalités allaient disparaître par miracle, et qu’il était possible de se dispenser de moyens de correction. D’autres s’inquiètent au contraire des possibles retombées de cette décision de ce côté-ci de la frontière. Dans un contexte de racisme et de colonialisme nourri par le « privilège masculin blanc », certains, comme la professeure de philosophie à l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières Naïma Hamrouni, dans Le Devoir du samedi 8 juillet, n’hésitent pas à dire que l’action positive est « l’un des instruments possibles d’une déségrégation sexuelle et raciale progressive de notre société ».

Un tel point de vue accrédite évidemment l’idée que le Québec subirait un modèle de ségrégation, une notion au maniement délicat, qui mériterait d’être rigoureusement définie et documentée tant son emploi est inséparable de l’histoire de certaines sociétés, à commencer par les États-Unis et l’Afrique du Sud. Mais on s’étonne surtout de l’efficacité que ce genre de propos prête aux fameux plans EDI. Car un examen un peu attentif de leurs critères en montre aussitôt les limites.

Il importe de souligner que le gouvernement fédéral a introduit les plans EDI par l’intermédiaire du programme CRC, c’est-à-dire en utilisant une fenêtre très étroite, la seule dont il bénéficiait à vrai dire, pour interférer dans les compétences en matière d’éducation des provinces. On peut bien sûr espérer que ces plans corrigent les inégalités du milieu universitaire, ce qui, à ce jour, reste à démontrer. En revanche, on peut douter qu’ils conduisent à des changements plus larges et profonds, d’autant plus qu’ils ne tiennent pas compte des particularités migratoires et démographiques, économiques ou sociales de chaque province.

Des failles

Cette politique de la diversité a été pensée par le haut et non à partir de la base. La justice dont il est question ici concerne avant tout le corps professoral et plus encore un segment limité de ce corps, les titulaires de chaires de recherche. De plus, les plans EDI sont pour l’essentiel centrés sur le genre et la race. Ils passent complètement sous silence les disparités socio-économiques. Leur but avoué est de favoriser le recrutement de personnes issues de groupes discriminés au cours de leur histoire, des mesures provisoires qui doivent être atteintes par les universités d’ici 2029.

Dans l’usage établi depuis le rapport de la juge Abella, il s’agit des femmes, des Autochtones, des personnes en situation de handicap et issues des minorités visibles, auxquels s’ajoute dans la pratique le cas des communautés LGBTQ. Or, aucune de ces catégories ne se situe sur le même plan. « Autochtones » et « femmes » peuvent difficilement être comparés. Bien qu’elle soit très utile, l’idée de « groupe » en particulier ne cesse pas de poser problème.

Par exemple, les femmes forment-elles vraiment un groupe ? Rappelons d’abord, contre les idées reçues, que certaines femmes peuvent être socialement plus avantagées par rapport à des hommes. Ensuite et surtout, les femmes entre elles ne sont pas égales. Elles n’ont pas les mêmes chances d’accéder à un emploi en raison du capital scolaire, culturel ou économique dont chacune dispose.

Un raisonnement similaire peut être appliqué aux minorités visibles. Il est fréquent de dire qu’elles sont sous-représentées au sein des universités, qui ont les outils pour chiffrer correctement ce phénomène. L’argument est même devenu un lieu commun au sein des élites. Il est repris par la classe politique ou dans l’entreprise, spécialement pour les cadres managériaux, les emplois visibles ou à haute responsabilité. On l’entend encore dans les médias et le monde de la culture.

Or, l’économiste Thomas Piketty l’a bien montré, la sous-représentation des minorités visibles dissimule proportionnellement leur surreprésentation au sein des classes populaires. Il n’est donc pas assuré que les politiques d’action positive soient capables de corriger un tel écart dans la mesure où elles ne touchent souvent qu’un pourcentage réduit de personnes au sein des populations visées. Non seulement les injustices raciales ne peuvent être séparées des injustices sociales, mais les unes et les autres exigent une politique égalitaire plus ambitieuse : une politique pour tous et non une justice d’élite.

À qui profitent donc les mesures EDI ? Est-ce aux groupes cibles, ou n’est-ce pas plutôt aux institutions qui promeuvent la diversité ? La question mérite d’être posée et débattue.

Source: À qui la diversité profite-t-elle le plus?

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Why equity, diversity and inclusion offices are failing us

2023/04/18 Leave a comment

I likely have a lack of innovation but hard to avoid the bureaucratic approach in large organizations as they grapple how to manage and implement policy and programs:

I have been writing and researching about Canada’s history of Blackface for over a decade. This work requires me to travel through history to a time when Black people were not seen as human and we had few rights. Because I do this work, I have a deep understanding of the development of human rights procedures and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) offices.

I am a knowledge expert. And I unequivocally believe that EDI offices are failing us. Not because of a lack of talented or well-intentioned people, but because of a lack of courage to imagine new ways of problem solving that centre people, not procedures, processes, and paper trails.

By insisting on bureaucratic solutions to execute strategic plans and prioritizing institutional value statements, with well-thought-out bullet-point “action items” these offices take what Benjamin Ginsberg, author of “The Fall of the Faculty” has called, “the neo-liberal all-administrative university” approach.

This model of education privileges economic-based relationships, it treats students as customers — who are always right — and faculty, who are cast in the role of service providers rather than knowledge experts, as failed subjects when students file complaints against them to human rights services embedded within EDI offices.

There is little room, in the current system, for decision-making at the point of intake. Instead, every complaint is treated as a potential threat to the institution’s reputation and as a result, faculty suffer collateral damage in this process.

The ever-expanding “regime of bureaucratization,” as Amna Khalid described in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, has taken as its mission the fulfilment of student EDI demands at all costs, while weakening and undermining more meaningful EDI efforts, such as ongoing community engagement and knowledge-expert-driven ideation and collaboration.

Human rights services at Ontario universities have publicly available statements about their policies and procedures, which are informed and guided by the Ontario Human Rights Code. Created in 1961, Ontario was the first province to create a human rights code and a Human Rights Commission to enforce it.

Daniel G. Hill, a Black American who moved to Canada in the 1950s and who wrote a landmark dissertation, “Negroes In Toronto; A Sociological Study Of A Minority Group,” was the first chairman of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Hill often tackled racism head-on, in public forums, with Black community and the public present to bear witness to what discrimination actually looked like. In doing that, he transformed the human rights process into a community event, rather than a backroom investigation to serve measurable outcomes.

We live in different times. But EDI offices are taking the joy out of education because they resist collaborative, restorative approaches to conflict and instead cling to approaches that are too bureaucratic, dehumanizing, and almost solely focused on the document trail.

Inside these institutions there is a culture of fear and silence among faculty, staff and even decision makers, who are rendered powerless by procedures and policies that are just not working.

At the same time faculty are invaluable to the institution as knowledge experts, once they become embroiled in a complaint process, which can go on for an unspecified number of years, they become voiceless, powerless, and invisible.

I agree with blogger Jodre Datu, who in 2022 declared, “if EDI isn’t igniting joy, we’re doing it wrong.” In that post, they called for an overhaul of EDI that would not create environments in which people are afraid to say the wrong thing but instead EDI work would involve an entire restructuring of our workplaces and a reorganization of power.

I know I don’t speak for all academics and there are EDI people who will disagree with me. But good people are leaving universities — something I have even contemplated — because of the “business as usual” approach to conflict taken by EDI offices. No one wins with this approach. It ultimately feeds into the hands of racists, homophobic and transphobic hate, and in the long run, is harming our institutions.

Cheryl Thompson is an associate professor in Performance at The Creative School. She is also director and creative lead, The Laboratory for Black Creativity. Twitter @DrCherylT

Source: Why equity, diversity and inclusion offices are failing us

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Usher: The EDI Hiring Bulge

2023/02/10 Leave a comment

Good analysis and myth destroying by Alex Usher:

A couple of days ago on the website Minding the Campus, a product of the National Association of Scholars (one of those Alan Bloom-loving revere-the-classics, free-exchange-of-ideas, but no-not-those-kinds-of-idea outfits) a research associate named John Sailer posted a list of academic jobs that were being advertised at The Ohio State University (you have to include the “the”. It’s a rule.) as an example of “political activism.”  Here’s the meat of the post:

[OSU’s] RAISE initiative (extends to fields that have little connection with DEI. The university is currently seeking three STEM professors—in chemistry, mathematics, and physics—who will “study issues relevant to educational equity.” One cluster hire on the social determinants of health includes roles in medicine, nursing, and engineering. Successful candidates for these jobs must show “a demonstrated commitment to diversity and inclusive excellence” and submit “a brief DEI narrative describing commitment to improving inclusive excellence” and demonstrating how their research focuses on “improving health equity.”

Many of Ohio State’s humanities jobs, meanwhile, now focus exclusively on race. The history department currently lists just two positions: “Contemporary African American History” and “African American History to 1820.” The Department of Comparative Studies lists three: “Indigenous Knowledge,” “Race, Science, and Technology,” and “Race and Health Equity.” The Department of French and Italian is hiring only one professor, an “Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies with a specialization in Black France.”

The university’s indigenous studies cluster hire—which is independent of the RAISE initiative—includes a role in “Indigenous Feminisms,” calling for a professor who will study “gendered and sexualized disparities alongside the dispossessions of settler colonialism” and “the potentials of women- and two-spirit or queer-led innovations in preserving embattled minority and colonized food/health/body/eco cultures.” Another role in the cluster is more novel, “Indigenous Siberian Studies,” a scholar in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures who will “explore questions about indigenous people’s knowledges and cultural practices” related to “race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, im/mobility, health, food, and environment, in imperial/post-imperial, communist/post-communist, or comparative contexts.”

The argument here is an anti-EDI one, but it is different from the ones you usually see.  It is not “EDI is unjust reverse discrimination” as much as it is “EDI is changing and perhaps perverting the nature of academic disciplines.”   The argument was pitched to specialists, claiming that their specialty is changing and perhaps leaving them behind. 

So, has OSU been “captured” by people who want to make it Subaltern U?  Well, in the first place, caution is warranted because we don’t have a good picture of how many jobs are up for grabs at OSU.  The article refers to about 10 positions. My guess is that OSU – which is the fourth-largest institution by enrolment in the United States and over 2,000 permanent faculty members – hires over 100 academic staff a year.  Question number one about this set of examples therefore is: “how representative is this list?”  And if it represents just 10% of new staff, then why should anyone consider it a big deal?

In the second place: ask yourself whether all these positions are misguided in the way Sailer charges.  A French department that doesn’t cover francophone Africa would be very limited, given that’s where over half of all French-speaking people live.  Physics departments that aren’t looking for people who can lead outreach and support programs for Black students are increasingly rare these days.  Specializations in Indigenous Siberian Studies might sound a bit obscure, but there’s any number of Indigenous studies programs focusing on North America, so it’s not obvious to me why offering similar treatment to indigenous cultures in Russia is illegitimate from an academic POV, unless you start from the perspective that certain cultures aren’t worth studying (there is, admittedly, a question about whether a position in Indigenous Siberian Studies located in Columbus, Ohio will bring in the necessary students and research dollars to pay its way, but that’s the department Chair’s call). 

In any event, colour me unpersuaded that the examples Sailer draws on to represent a wave of “misguided priorities” at the institution.  The job descriptions are much less radical that the author seems to think, and there’s no sense here of whether the author is cherry-picking (for what it’s worth, the OSU program through which these scholars are being hired was designed to bring in 50 scholars between 2020 and 2030, which at an institution the size of OSU is peanuts).  It read like cherry-picking and not of a particularly sophisticated variety.  But what was interesting to me is the number of twitter accounts from people I would normally qualify as pretty sensible tut-tutting about “the state of academia” exposed by this piece.

And I kind of get it.  If one isn’t quite alive to the extent of selective argumentation going on here (at most universities, 10 appointments is a pretty big fraction of annual hiring), and one interprets this kind of change as being “the shape of things to come”, then one might conclude that a wide variety of academic fields are being threatened with radical change in the sense that the focus of inquiry is changing completely (e.g. from France to Africa in the case of the French Studies, from Moscow to Siberia in the case of Russian studies).  And loyalty to discipline is a consistent theme amongst academics. It’s not difficult to see why something that seemed to be an attempt to alter disciplinary foci might seem threatening.

But the evidence that this is a permanent shift is thin.  Academia goes through cycles.  Right now, the cycle is one where many institutions, across a wide range of disciplines, are either trying to reach out to undergraduates from under-represented groups, or incorporate non-Western perspectives, or both.  This is a long and ongoing process, mainly because demand for scholars who can do such outreach or conduct effective research in these areas presently outstrips current supply.  It is not about making universities totally devoted to Subaltern studies (though this is pretty clearly what the author of this piece wanted readers to think); it is about a one-time Big Push to make sure under-represented students and previously neglected areas of studies have a larger place in the academy – sufficiently large, in fact, that maintaining strength in these areas no longer requires special hiring initiatives but is “par for the course”. That’s necessarily going to create a “bulge” in hiring to bring numbers up to that level: significant in the short-term, but less so in the long-term.

Anyways, if you’re tempted to get angry or despondent about a hiring story like this, just remember: it’s very likely that the extent of the phenomenon is inflated, and even to the extent it is not, the duration of the phenomenon is probably limited too. 

Source: The EDI Hiring Bulge

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