[Technical difficulty—Editor] evident in both diversity statements on application forms and race and sex discrimination in hiring and funding calls.
I'll make three points about DEI. First, most Canadians do not support it. I found that 59% of Canadians favoured a colour-blind approach of “combating racism by treating people as individuals and trying not to see race”, as against just 29% in favour of the colour-conscious approach of “combating racism by being aware of race, in order to better notice inequality”. It's also worth saying that in the U.S., a majority of people, including a majority of Black and Hispanic respondents, support the Supreme Court decision banning racial preferences in university admissions.
The second point is that DEI is in tension with research excellence. Richard Sander, in 2004, famously showed that admitting Black students to law school with lower entrance scores correlated with them achieving lower grades in law school. That's not surprising if you're admitting at a lower score. More recently, I looked at data on academics from an article in Nature in 2024. It showed that female academics had significantly lower numbers of citations in their work than men, even when controlling for field of study and years in the profession. Likewise, Black and Hispanic scholars had substantially fewer citations than whites or Asians, although the gap was not as large as for gender. Whatever the cause of this is—arguably, there may be inequalities in society, and that's absolutely right, or inequalities earlier in the pipeline—artificially narrowing the talent pipeline by rigging the result at the end of the pipeline does not rectify the problem. All it does is prioritize equity or cultural socialism over excellence.
The third point is that DEI creates the conditions for delegitimizing research funding. Confidence in higher education in the United States has fallen from nearly 60% in 2015 to 36% in 2024, nearly half. The sharpest decline is amongst Republican voters, from 56% to 20%, dropping to nearly a third of its former value.
In Canada, the trust in higher education is greater, but it's also at risk. For instance, in my survey, I found that just 49% of Conservative-voting Canadians trust social science and humanities professors, as compared with 69% of those supporting left or Liberal parties. Now, that 49% is higher than the 34% amongst Republicans for the same question in the U.S., but it shows that when a sector starts to be seen as partisan, it will lose the confidence of those on the other side of the political divide. Consider that a quarter of conservatives now trust the media. That's approaching U.S. levels. Support for such established institutions as the CBC is in decline—