Six Université Laval student associations are protesting against Ottawa’s demands that prevent any non-disabled white student from obtaining a position within a Canada Research Chair (CRC), making skin color a grounds for disqualification.
Responding to the will of the federal government, Université Laval has launched other calls for applications that are only open to people “who have self-identified as a member of at least one of the four underrepresented groups”. , including women, Aboriginal peoples, persons with disabilities and visible minorities. Ottawa is threatening to cut off the funds used to create professorships in the CRCs, because Université Laval does not respect the quotas set from coast to coast for all Canadian universities under objectives equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI).
Like all Quebec universities, Université Laval applies EDI policies for the hiring of its professors, favoring “equal competence” the selection of professors from under-represented groups. To fill positions in the CRCs, the federal authorities do not take into account the pool of students or the population served by the university. Achieving federal quotas is much more demanding for Université Laval than for universities in Toronto or Vancouver. “Nobody wants to have to apply such measures,” said the daily. The sun the vice-rector of Laval University and head of EDI, François Gélineau. “When we have a choice, we use the usual criteria, which is excellence. »
But the university intends to continue to receive federal money and to seek to comply with quotas that do not correspond to its reality. Far from seeing it as a matter of principle, the vice-rector argues that the quotas have only determined 12 hires since 2017, or 3% of the total. The strategy is to make the carpet hoping to convince the federal government to modify its CRC program.
These arbitrary quotas imposed by Ottawa, which pervert the actions of the university in favor of a just application of the objectives of EDI, raise questions of principle that cannot be concealed.
First of all, it ignores the autonomy claimed by Quebec universities. Wasn’t the Law on Academic Freedom in the University Environment passed last year, which affirms that the autonomy of universities is one of the essential conditions for the accomplishment of their mission? Now Université Laval has agreed to have its professors’ hiring criteria dictated to it.
It should also be remembered that the research chairs program is the means par excellence deployed by Ottawa to interfere in higher education, an exclusive jurisdiction of Quebec, and exert a lasting influence on its intelligentsia.
In the case of historian Frédéric Bastien, this “mediocre white man”, in the words of Laval University professor Sule Tomkinson, who was unable to present his candidacy for a CRC on the history of Quebec and of Canada, the Minister of Higher Education, Pascale Déry, had affirmed in December that such discrimination was “inadmissible”. Since then, the unacceptable continues.