Equity and Diversity are Essential for Universities
A break from my conventional political commentary
People are pushing back against “the equity agenda” in universities. Tony Keller recently wrote in the Globe and Mail of “DEI world,” informing us that “DEI stands for diversity, equity and inclusion, a system of mantras and methods that over the past decade has come to pervade almost everything at the North American university.” And The Hub went on a recent tear of features about universities overrun with wokeness and “EDI creep.”
The most vivid is this Hub essay by an anonymous “senior university administrator.” In their furtive message smuggled out of the administration building, they speak of EDI run wild and an institution that has shed its intellectual mission in favour of land acknowledgments, preferred pronouns, and a return of “segregation” of students and communities by race and identity.
Nonsense.
EDI advocates sometimes say, “check your privilege.” I’ve got a lot of boxes to check: white, straight, man, middle-aged, Canadian-born, northern European background, married with kids. And my scholarship is as traditional as it gets: about Parliament and mainstream Canadian politics.
But I don’t share the concern that universities are going to hell in an eco-friendly fair-trade handbasket. And I’m dismayed when people try to construct a stark polarization and blame equity and diversity initiatives to explain the state of universities today.
The writer of the anonymous Hub essay says they were a student in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which matches my own undergraduate years. I don’t know where they went, but it sounds pretty nice; a place where “faculty and students together grappled with the complex issues of the time, in the context of the tradition of the human quest for knowledge and truth.”
The thing is, that’s exactly what today’s universities are doing, and have always done. But, both then and now, there are challenges. One is determining what exactly are the “issues of the time.” The second is the parameters of “knowledge and truth.” These all evolve and change, and not always in the way that we want.
It can provoke reactions of resistance, and sometimes a rosy nostalgia, because the debate and discussion are not staying within familiar terrain. Universities exist to disturb things through the advancement of knowledge, and that often means going in new and unanticipated directions that challenge what we thought were the agreed and established boundaries.
We can fall into similar assumptions about universities themselves as organizations. As a white guy it has taken me time to recognize that the so-called ‘objective’ way I view and interpret the world is not always shared by others. A small-town conservatively-raised kid, I often felt like an outsider and outclassed in the academy.
But over time, I came to realize I could still see things that others couldn’t. I could sense and smell power; I could interpret subtle and unspoken norms; I knew how to get what I wanted. And while there were other hapless white men who clearly didn’t possess these academic street smarts, and I myself made lots of clumsy mistakes, over time I began to understand that it was primarily people of other races and genders who couldn’t just see and sense the things that seemed obvious and objective to me; because I was a white guy in an institution historically designed and run by people like me. I could see stuff that they couldn’t.
And so when I do little token things like give my pronouns - something that offends our anonymous administrator - it’s one small way of acknowledging that not everyone is like me, or thinks and sees things the way I do.
Let me acknowledge that I have seen many assaults on “knowledge and truth” that do concern me: spurious claims, echo chambers, narrow thinking, caricatures of opponents, selective facts; twisting of logic, etc.
But I don’t find them limited to the left or the right, or any single part of the ideological spectrum. What I do see is people on all sides falling into the ideologue’s trap of assuming everyone with whom you disagree agrees with each other, and is operating as a unified monolith against you.
A while ago I posted a reflection on my late colleague Peter Emberley’s 1996 Zero Tolerance book, where he took on both right-wing corporate and left-wing “identity” critics of universities, both of whom were convinced the university was falling to the other side. Peter’s categories need some updating but his point, that universities are getting it from all sides, endures. This polarized attitude is never helpful, especially when critics frame their perspective as simply the reasonable common-sense approach; it’s their opponents that have an agenda and are ruining the place.
About a third of the adult population has university degrees, meaning they feel some familiarity with and have opinions about the institution, and we extract tax dollars from the rest, so they have an interest as well. But the more time you spend in the administrative bowels of universities, the more you appreciate how spectacularly complicated they are, and the balancing acts that their leaders have to play.
I’ve spent over 23 years as a professor, including eight years in administrative roles, and I fully agree that there are plenty of things wrong with modern universities – as there are with governments, corporations, and all other large and complex organizations that encompass a huge range of people and activities. Inevitably with so much going on, some dumb and questionable things are going to happen. But a lot of good things happen too, things that can only be achieved on that scale.
If people are really concerned about the state of postsecondary education, they would ask Canadian governments to come up with coherent policy frameworks that encourage institutions to do more that desperately flail in every direction to stay afloat. This is a far greater threat to intellectual quality and integrity than EDI allegedly gone wild.
The Ontario government is particularly guilty here. It’s one thing to decline to spend more tax dollars on postsecondary education, as it has done until today’s chintzy announcement, ignoring its own internal recommendations.
But by freezing tuition since 2019, it’s prevented universities from going out and making their own way, other than by packing in as many units - er, students - as possible. Quality is out the window; only quantity counts.
Anyone who thinks universities don’t understand market forces and the real world should attend the Ontario Universities Fair in downtown Toronto every fall, where all twenty provincial universities slug it out for the hearts and tuition dollars of Grade 12 students, because goosing enrolments and doing volume business is the only way to stay afloat.
One of the main reasons why Queen’s University finances are hitting the headlines is that Queen’s has tried to hold enrolment steady and retain its distinct campus culture. If it had stuffed in a few thousand more students and opened Belleville and Brockville satellite campuses, it would be in much better shape. And the scandalous mess of colleges packed with far more international students than their communities can handle is a direct result of restricting domestic but not international tuition; cash-strapped institutions follow the money.
Universities have problems, but equity agendas are not one of them. I am sorry that some like our anonymous administrator feel unwelcome. But it’s not clear how much effort they have made to change, in an institution whose mission is to always be changing. This doesn’t mean equity and diversity initiatives can’t be challenged or questioned, or that overreach and errors don't occur. But I try to start by recognizing my own privilege and perspective, and that others see things differently than me.
As an old white guy - graduate of the University of Toronto, Cambridge, and LSE, I agree that Diversity Equity Inclusion is not the biggest problem universities face. I also agree that many of we old white males did enjoy and still enjoy a great many unexamined advantages and that it is good to become aware of all of that and deal with it. I did a brief training session in DEI on Zoom at Massey College, during COVID. It was run, in a gentle and adroitly diplomatic way, by two extremely intelligent "racialized" - odious Newspeak word - young women, and was for me a mildly enlightening experience - I have lived quite a bit in foreign parts and so have an inkling of how complex it is to learn the local and national and institutional codes of behavior, a problem that many "minorities" face, so I was already aware of various forms of "privilege" and "microaggressions" and the difference in the implicit and explicit codes in different societies, and how tricky it can be to learn to navigate them. The one disturbing thing was a ferocious, thin-lipped white lady who proclaimed she wanted to radically punish by shaming and expulsion from the institution, a hapless innocent young lady, Jenny, who, in a thought experiment proposed by our tutors, asked her neighbor at a hypothetical Massey dinner, "What is your accent? It is very beautiful." Our two tutors were bemused, and an Indian gentlemen - I believe he was - said, "Well, maybe Jenny was just curious." He struck exactly the right note. Curiosity about another person is the beginning of knowledge, perhaps of friendship, maybe, even, of love. We do have quite a few people running around, in the Woke Universe, which does infest many institutions including universities, who are immensely ignorant of many aspects of the world and of human psychology and who are zealously eager to cancel, obliterate, vilify, and ostracize, fire, or worse, anyone who deviates from the new ideologies, any one who criticizes any aspect of the new dogmas, and anyone who utters a discordant word or a syllable that triggers "discomfort" of any kind in someone somewhere somehow. These zealots would have joyously burned witches or salivated presiding over 1930s Stalinist show trials given half the chance. As for me, I will use a person's preferred pronouns in the right context - though the insistence on "they" and its equivalents I find incredibly narcissistic and precious - we all have plural identities along the lines proclaimed by Walt Whitman when he wrote "I contain multitudes." Imposing your own inner psychic circus on other people is self-indulgent to an extraordinary degree. Incidentally, much of trans-ideology, and queer ideology and gender ideology is, in my humble opinion, viciously misogynous. Note that I have trans friends and have known trans people, as friends and neighbors, for perhaps four decades. I have pronounced my share of land acknowledgements though I do think they are historically rather misleading - vast selective whitewashing simplifications - and are also a way of purchasing a "good conscience" and the right to be self-righteously superior while paying no price whatsoever. That said, the proponents of DEI often do not know where to stop and in some cases the tutors in DEI - not those two subtle and charming young women at Massey - seem more intent on working out their own traumas - either collective or individual - on settling scores, and on imposing a simplistic and rather totalitarian ideology, than they are in actually helping people to understand themselves and others. Imposing a guilt trip on a whole class of people defined by skin color - racism in a rather pure form and imposing it on individuals of whom you may know little or nothing is not the best way to win friends and influence people, nor is it the best way to counter racism, in fact, in quite a few of its guises DEI and DEI training have, I suspect, quite the opposite effect, creating racism or stirring it up where it was inexistent, trivial, or dormant. So, I think there is a problem. DEI is useful, but it should be looked at very critically and there should be space of criticism of DEI and for suggestions as to how it could be better designed if the aim is really to reduce racism and make equity and accessibility easier. Canada is a rapidly evolving society; what it needs, above all, is tolerance, pen minds, and dialogue. Yes, moderation and tolerance would be a nice idea, and pragmatism, and actually listening to each other, which seems, now, to have become, largely, a lost art. Anathemas from either side are not useful. Okay, enough said! Cheers Gilbert Reid.