It is curious to note that on the occasion of the announcement of a competition to fill a post of professor of biology at Laval University, some elected officials suddenly seem to discover that Quebec universities are subject to strict federal rules on which they have no right of inspection, under pain of sanctions. And this, despite the well-known fact that higher education, and therefore the hiring of professors who ultimately come from the general budget of the university, is an area of exclusively provincial jurisdiction, according to the Canadian Constitution of 1867… The trick here is to use the word “research”, a field which is not exclusive to the provinces, to make people forget the fact that it is indeed a program for hiring professors.
Because beyond the question of hiring “quotas” and the curious fact of lumping together women, Aboriginal people, the disabled and ethnic minorities, this temporary excitement of elected officials and the media makes it possible to recall a fact most fundamental concerning the so-called “autonomy” of universities.
In fact, while rectors have been asserting loud and clear for several months that they value their sacrosanct “autonomy” as the apple of their eye and “vigorously” oppose, as the lawyers put it, any desire for part of the government of Quebec to interfere in what they consider to be “their business”, here they are caught in the act of total submission to the federal government, which dictates the conditions for hiring teachers! I had, moreover, issued a warning, in the pages of the Homework, twenty years ago, against this operation which bartered a share of university autonomy for a few dollars ($100,000 for a so-called junior chair and $200,000 for a so-called senior chair). Of course, we was in a hurry to deny everything in the usual wooden language of organizations.
However, before this chair of biology, there was, still in Laval, the one, however unnoticed, relating to French literature, also reserved for “women, Aboriginal people, people with disabilities and people belonging to visible minorities” . Knowing perfectly well that such a criterion could be considered by many sensible people as problematic on the part of an “autonomous” university, the University had immediately added that its hands were tied and that it could not “file other types of candidate profiles as long as its representation targets do not [seraient] not achieved, in accordance with the requirements of the CRC Program”. The University curiously forgot to specify that these “targets” were also imposed by the federal government, under penalty of sanctions.
Of course, money is odorless, and since universities consider the level of provincial funding insufficient, they cannot afford to refuse $100,000 a year for five years to help pay the salary of a young teacher. The managements then silently submit to increasingly restrictive conditions, hoping that no one will take a closer look…
Undisclosed requirements
We repeat that it is not a question here of discussing the legitimacy of limiting certain hirings to specific groups, because, “of equal quality” of applications, this has been done for women for more than twenty years, but rather of noting that these requirements imposed by the federal program are in no way denounced by the universities as being an illegitimate and unacceptable obstacle to their autonomy. But wasn’t this a flagrant case of denial of their management autonomy? It is true that university leaders also sometimes accept to forget their autonomy a little to sign contracts with private organizations which demand that everything be secret, from the name of the researchers to the results of the research, as shown the journalist of the Sun Mylène Moisan in a series of columns in March and April 2021.
In short, to be credible, the autonomy requirement cannot be variable in geometry. If the federal government can dictate the physical characteristics of people who can become professors in Quebec universities that do not come under its jurisdiction, it is hard to see how an intervention on the part of the Quebec government, which uses the taxes of the citizens of the province to operate the universities, would suddenly constitute a serious attack on their autonomy. After all, if the universities disagree with the constraints imposed on them by the federal government, they can always refuse to participate in this program, thus truly exercising their management autonomy.
As for the provincial government, instead of scolding the universities and thus turning a blind eye to federal interference, if it really wants to defend its jurisdiction over higher education, as Maurice Duplessis did in 1951 by blocking federal subsidies to universities, all he has to do is create his own program of research chairs! We can then bet that the rectors would not complain of “interference” in their affairs…