The news is a bit ugly for young university students in history in the Quebec region. If they wanted to perfect their course, master’s or doctorate, with the support of a cutting-edge teacher and the budgets offered by a Canada Chair, the opportunity slipped through their fingers at 4 p.m. November 8 last. At that time, no acceptable candidate had applied to head the chairs of Latin American history, Roman history, Canadian-Quebec history and the history of art at Laval University. Quebec and Canada.
As everyone knows by now, able-bodied white men could not aspire to occupy the leadership of these chairs, such as the one in biology that has been talked about since last week. All the faculties set up projects and try to find non-white carriers to reach the target and appear, in June, among the finalists. Many fall in battle at the first stage.
To understand why Université Laval finds itself in this mess, let’s perform a simple statistical check. To qualify for the federal windfall, universities must meet strict diversity thresholds. For women and the disabled, their proportion is evenly distributed in the country. But the target that the university must reach in terms of “racialized minorities” is 22.3%. This is the Canadian average. What proportion do these minorities occupy in Quebec? Statistics Canada is accurate: 6.5%. (And this is exactly the proportion present within the teaching body of Laval University.) And what is it in Toronto? 51.5%.
In short, Toronto universities can fill their Canada Chairs by displaying only half of the diversity present on their territory and have only to look to find, locally, professors responding to the composite portrait. Quebec (or Rimouski, Sherbrooke or Chicoutimi) must recruit far, very far, and indulge in great seductions.
To savor the situation, suppose that an apostle of equality has determined that historically, French Canadians have suffered from discrimination in higher education. I’m making it up, I know, but we’re talking here. To right this wrong, he would order all universities in the country to hire their fair share of French-Canadian teachers, ie 23%, the Canadian average, or risk losing their funding. We bet that Laval University would have no trouble recruiting, but that the thing would be painful in Toronto and Edmonton?
These are subtleties that escaped those who made the decision to put our universities in this funnel. Responding to complaints from academics dissatisfied with the under-representation of minorities in the Canada Research Chairs program, the Canadian Human Rights Commission accepted at the outset that it was fair and proper that the holders of these Chairs are, in a fairly short period of time, representative of the rainbow of differences found, on average, in Canadian society, concluding that the laggards would be deprived of funding, period. The Federal Court stamped these agreements and gave them the force of law.
We see everywhere a strong mobilization for the increase of the presence of members of minorities in employment, in decision-making positions and with high visibility. I applaud. It is indefensible that there are still too few visible minorities in the police forces, at Hydro and at the SAQ in the Montreal region, where the skin of 34% of our fellow citizens does not have the pigmentation that once dominated in Normandy. But in Rimouski, where are they less than 2%?
The question is: how far should we go, how and at what speed? Pedagogues teach us, for example, that male under-representation in elementary and preschool is a determinant of the underperformance of boys, who lack role models. Let’s use the method of the chairs and withdraw in 10 years the financing of the nurseries and the primary schools which do not count 50% of male educators and professors! It’s stiff, but it’s for a good cause. Aren’t you outraged by the failure and dropout rates for boys (only 68% graduate from high school on time)?
Let us look with the same determined method on the construction industry. The pay is excellent, employment plentiful, but there are not 3% of women there, and that is only progressing at a snail’s pace. Let us announce that, by 2029, the only entrepreneurs who can apply for public works will have to demonstrate that half of their workers are women workers!
If these proposals seem to you excessive, or at least hasty, the case of the Chairs is, in my opinion, even worse. Because when we reflect on the pyramid of skills, isn’t it curious that the place where we now demand strict representation is at the forefront, where it is a question of getting the best minds to cross the borders present in human knowledge? Researchers have found a way to eliminate bias in the distribution of research grants. They submit their files “blind”, that is to say without entering their name or that of their establishment. Shouldn’t the candidates for these chairs also be chosen this way? And so much the better if excellence is embodied by an Aboriginal person with a disability?
As there is, in university courses, an under-representation of students from certain backgrounds, isn’t this where we need to multiply the gateways to attract them? Knowing that Quebec is already doing better than the rest of America for all modest incomes, with the lowest tuition fees and the most generous loans and bursaries.
We are therefore struggling with sorcerer’s apprentices of equality. They harm science, education and the cause they believe they serve.
[email protected]; blog: jflisee.org