Evidence of meeting #111 for Science and Research in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was political.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
You mentioned that when you're looking at, I assume, students to take on for research, you just look at their merit, but they've had to rise to that place.
Does DEI in Canada research chairs help with that, when students see people like them at that level?
Professor, Department of Biology, University of Ottawa, and Chair, Committee on Discovery Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, As an Individual
I'm sure it does. I am one of those people who come from the majority group, so I have no shortage of role models and examples of people who look just like me who've also been very successful.
When there are examples of people who are diverse, in the sense of being very different from me, I'm sure that it can create inspiration for others to believe that they, too, can pursue a career in that direction. If that talent proves itself in the academy, that's wonderful. I think those people should therefore always be welcomed, but also welcomed as individuals given their personal backgrounds, rather than in some sort of cookie-cutter way.
There's just no litmus test here. We're looking for excellence, and we're trying to foster the creation of more of it.
Thank you.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Valerie Bradford
Thank you. That's a great note to end on, for our first panel.
Thank you to our three witnesses, even the one who we unfortunately couldn't hear from verbally. However, if you have any questions, you may check with the clerk and submit additional information.
We're going to suspend briefly now to allow the witnesses to leave, and then we'll resume with our second panel.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Valerie Bradford
Welcome back.
As a brief reminder for those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mic, and please mute yourself when you're not speaking. For interpretation for those on Zoom, you have the choice, at the bottom of your screen, of floor, English or French.
It's now my pleasure to welcome, appearing as individuals, Dr. Christopher Dummitt, professor of Canadian studies at Trent University; Dr. Daniel O'Donnell, professor of English at the University of Lethbridge; and Bruce Pardy, professor of law at Queen's University, by video conference.
Up to five minutes will be given for opening remarks, after which we'll proceed with rounds of questions.
Dr. Dummitt, I invite you to make an opening statement for up to five minutes.
Dr. Christopher Dummitt Professor, Canadian Studies, Trent University, As an Individual
Thanks so much.
I should say that I'm a historian of Canadian politics, and this is a great honour. I am very pleased to be here, but I'm not here to speak about the history of Canadian politics, sadly. I am here to speak about a survey I did with a data analyst from Concordia University about university professors, their political opinions and their attitudes towards academic freedom and towards diversity.
The news I want to bring to you—and this has been slightly pre-empted by the other witnesses—is that federal funding agencies, federal research agencies and the Canada research program are at the moment ignoring the single biggest and most egregious diversity problem in higher education, and that is viewpoint diversity. This may seem like a partisan statement, and I would understand if you thought it was so, but it's simply an accurate description of reality.
In our survey—Eric Kaufmann found slightly different things—76% of professors we surveyed voted for either the Liberal Party or the NDP. Only 7.6% voted for the Conservatives. We asked them—because maybe party identification is not the only thing you want to think about—how they would identify politically, on the left or right spectrum, and 88% identified as left-leaning. This is, of course, significantly different from the rest of the population and of a category of magnitude that is unlike any other kind of diversity concerns that higher education is currently concerned about.
It might be tempting to dismiss this as a concern only for conservatives. Again, I would understand if some would think that this would be the case, and certainly there are consequences for conservatives. They reported in our survey high rates of self-censorship, finding the workplace to be a hostile workplace and a whole host of problems. I should say that we also found that centrists, sometimes even left-leaning scholars, particularly feminist scholars who thought about biological sex as a really important category, also reported great concerns about political discrimination, so it's not just a right/left concern.
However, I want to suggest to you that it is not a partisan concern. It's a concern that matters towards the purpose of higher education as a truth-seeking and truth-validating research enterprise. I think the lack of viewpoint diversity significantly damages the purpose of higher education, which I greatly support.
How does it do this in practice? Well, first of all, it just reduces the effectiveness of peer review. John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows [very] little”. Peer review is supposed to give you the best criticisms by the most knowledgeable people who are going to be most critical of your work. You don't have to change your mind just because you face that criticism, but you will know your side and be much more robust by knowing that. The fact is that a university higher education sector that is so devoid of divergent opinions prevents this from happening.
There are other concerns. Self-censorship makes this even worse. The small numbers of conservatives among the academics who are there reported to us that almost half of them were too frightened to have their colleagues even know their politics. Their ability to actually effectively do peer review, especially in the social sciences and humanities, is greatly diminished.
This leads to what some social psychologists call “reputational cascades”. This is a process whereby information that is untrue—or at least partial or inaccurate—can be accepted in certain groups as accurate if those who have alternative viewpoints don't speak up and aren't able to speak up. This is a major concern.
It also brings us to another problem, which is that an institution that lacks viewpoint diversity, in the way that higher education does, also leads to the possibility of group polarization. Group polarization is a well-known phenomenon whereby in groups, small or large, where many people already think alike, the absence of divergent opinions makes everyone's individual opinion—which may be more moderate—after processes of discussion and assessment, even more radical at the end, because they're not facing opinions and corrective discussions. It's a serious concern. Ironically, the current EDI policies in the tri-council agencies and in the Canada research program might actually be making it worse. To the extent to which diversity statements are required, these act as a kind of political statements.
I did hear Professor Kerr talking about the importance of diversity and having different perspectives in the research, and I fundamentally agree with what he was saying, but diversity statements ask for certain kinds of understanding of diversity and certain politicized ways of understanding diversity. It's not about eliminating discrimination. It's about having a very politically partisan idea of what EDI means. If you don't have those particular kinds of terms in your assessment, then it's very possible that you'll be rated lower and weeded out. You either have to lie on your assessment or risk not getting funding.
What's more, the other problem is that often programs that are meant to attract equity-deserving groups or under-represented groups come paired not just with a desire to improve those groups but—and I'm not sure how much this reaches this level—with certain kinds of other qualifications, so things like a position or funding might be advertised for someone who has a commitment to, say, decolonization or anti-racist pedagogy. I've seen these in ads for a whole bunch of things, and these are political statements—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Valerie Bradford
I'm sorry. We're over our time, but you can elaborate in the question period.
We will now turn to Professor Pardy.
I invite you to make an opening statement of up to five minutes, please.
Bruce Pardy Professor of Law, Queen's University, As an Individual
Thank you.
Madam Chair and members of the committee, you may be familiar with The Big Bang Theory—not the explosion, but the TV sitcom. It's about four scientist nerds who work at a research university. In one episode, they argue with the university president, who says to them, “Let me ask you something. What do you think the business of this [university] is?” “Science?” one of the science nerds replies. “Money,” the president snorts.
In Canada, the business of universities isn't just money; it's government money. The business of Canadian universities, in large part, is to get their hands on as much government money as they can. They have become chronic welfare recipients that, like the CBC, are dependent on government largesse with no prospect of becoming self-sustaining. These are deep black holes into which gobs of money disappear.
If you are a young professor today, your university probably doesn't care so much about your work. It cares more about whether you get federal grants. From every grant, universities skim a cool chunk off the top—like 40%. To get the grant, you must pitch research that the granting councils like, and universities have whole departments of administrators dedicated to getting their academics to pitch the research in a way that will please the people holding the purse strings.
Federal research money corrupts the intellectual enterprise of universities. My academic colleagues and I are among the many Canadians feeding at the public trough. The public sector is 40% of this country's economy. That's not sustainable. It's one of the many reasons this country is becoming poor. He who pays the piper calls the tune. Government money always comes with strings—ideological strings, political strings. The way to have politically neutral research is not to have government granting agencies.
You are studying whether to reform federal research funding. Don't reform it; abolish it. Get rid of it. Universities fall under provincial jurisdiction. Please stop interfering. Please stop taking money from truck drivers and cashiers and giving it to elite institutions. Please stop corrupting the intellectual enterprise. Please stop requiring and funding discrimination against white people, Asian people and men. Please stop dictating how research is done and by whom. Please get federal money out of the business of Canadian universities.
Thank you very much.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Valerie Bradford
Thank you for that opening statement.
Now we will turn to Dr. O'Donnell.
The floor is yours for your opening statement of five minutes.
Dr. Daniel O'Donnell Professor of English, University of Lethbridge, As an Individual
Good afternoon, members of the committee.
My name is Daniel O'Donnell, and I teach Old and Middle English as well as digital humanities at Iniskim, or the University of Lethbridge.
I'm delighted to be appearing before the Standing Committee on Science and Research to share my views.
I will continue in English, since this is my first time at this committee.
Just over a decade ago, Italian researcher Domenico Fiormonte published an article in the journal Historical Social Research, focusing on what he called an “Anglo-American hegemony”, which he believed controlled access to the most prominent journals, conferences and standards in the then fast-growing discipline of the digital humanities.
The discipline of the digital humanities was and remains today a key driver in applying computation to cultural, social and political problems. It's the field that first modelled Michelangelo's David in 3D, contributed to some of the most important mechanisms for processing texts with computers, and helped develop the standard character encodings that allow us to use computers in languages other than English.
Today, researchers in the digital humanities are at the cutting edge of cultural applications in artificial intelligence, big data, and the critical examination of how infrastructure shapes the questions we ask about ourselves. If it's the job of scientists to solve problems and if it's the job of humanists to problematize solutions, then digital humanists end up doing both. They develop cutting-edge tools, and they also offer technologically literate critiques of those same solutions when they fall short or require improvement.
This brings me to the motion before your committee. Fiormonte's claim that there was an “Anglo-American hegemony” in the leadership of the global digital humanities was, in fact, incorrect. To the extent that there was a small group of scholars leading the field's most important organs and projects, those people were neither British nor American. They were Canadian. In fact, there were as many francophone Canadians on Fiormonte's list as there were British people. Just as importantly, these Canadians were not based at the usual suspects, our big U15s such as the University of Toronto, McGill, UBC, or the University of Alberta. Instead, they came from smaller U15s or francophone U15s like McMaster and Université de Montréal, and especially from smaller comprehensive research universities such as Victoria, Guelph and my own university, the University of Lethbridge.
I flag this because, as the Bouchard report suggests, Canadian researchers, especially from smaller comprehensive research universities, have lost a lot of ground since Fiormonte wrote his article. At that time, Canada was second only to the U.S. in its number of digital humanities centres. Today, we're nowhere close to third or fourth place.
Our researchers, too, have moved. The U15s now dominate Canadian digital humanities, largely because they have the resources to attract talent from the smaller ones. Of the eight Canadians on Fiormonte's list in 2012, six have been recruited by U15 institutions, and only two remain at smaller universities as Canada research chairs. I, too, was on the list and was recruited, having been offered a job at the University of Saskatchewan, although I had to turn it down for personal reasons.
I stayed at the University of Lethbridge because it once supported my SSHRC-funded research on scanning early medieval crosses in 3D and my work as the chair of the Text Encoding Initiative, a major international computing standard. However, even as we speak today, I am in discussions about moving a major SSHRC-funded textual project and the associated graduate student to a U15, because we no longer have the resources at the University of Lethbridge to create a position for the adjunct who brought us the project in the first place.
In preparing my remarks, I reviewed testimony from my colleagues Vincent Larivière of the Université de Montréal and Dena McMartin, my own vice-president of research, and both emphasized the importance of understanding excellence in the broadest sense as a question of capacity rather than competition.
In “'Excellence R Us': university research and the fetishisation of excellence”, an article I co-wrote with a number of colleagues from the U.K., Australia and Canada, we argued that national research capacity is far more important to research success than a narrow focus on identifying winners and losers. This is particularly true when it comes to developing the kind of knowledge reservoir the Bouchard report describes as having been critical in the global response to COVID, and I would argue it underpins our societal developing consensus and developing understanding of things like marriage equality 20 years ago, gender equity and systemic bias. Much of the reservoir is filled at global universities, like my daughter's alma mater of Harvard or mine of Toronto and Yale, but universities like Lethbridge, Guelph and Victoria also play a critical role.
Our system is one that has been great, historically, at fostering research across the country, rather than concentrating it in a few elite locations, which is perhaps a uniquely Canadian form of research excellence. As DH over the last 10 years demonstrates, we are now beginning to lose that advantage.
Professor of English, University of Lethbridge, As an Individual
There's no problem. My main point was made. Thank you.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Valerie Bradford
Hopefully you will get to elaborate through our questions.
Thank you all for your opening remarks.
We'll now open the floor to questions. Please be sure to indicate to whom your questions are directed.
We'll ask MP Viersen to start off for the first six minutes, please.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I want to thank the witnesses for being here and online.
I just wanted to start with Mr. Dummitt. You published the report “The Viewpoint Diversity Crisis at Canadian Universities” a little while ago, in 2022. I'm just wondering what your experience was in producing that report. It's an interesting report. I'm just wondering if you could elaborate a little bit, not even necessarily on the results of the report, but just on your experience of producing it.
Professor, Canadian Studies, Trent University, As an Individual
Sure. Ironically, in doing the research, simply asking professors what their political viewpoints were and what their attitudes towards diversity were was difficult in and of itself. In fact, we faced a kind of online campaign from other federally funded scholars to shut down the research. They contacted our universities and our ethics board. We had to pull back the funding. We had to go through a whole other process and we had to go through ethics to double-check it, because our universities were so frightened of the blowback from simply asking pretty simple questions about essentially who people voted for, what their politics were and what they thought about EDI in a general way.
It was an example of why research by political minority scholars is just really hard to do.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
I'm not quite sure of the term that you used, but you talked about a waterfall effect or an exponential growth.
Professor, Canadian Studies, Trent University, As an Individual
It was a cascade.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
Do you see any way of self-correcting that without perhaps using the exact tools that we're somewhat concerned about here?
Professor, Canadian Studies, Trent University, As an Individual
What I was trying to get at when I was talking about reputational cascades—and you had an esteemed witness before who was talking about the natural sciences—is that I think the research in the social sciences and humanities is just fundamentally different here.
Let's say you're trying to research something like the effectiveness of harm reduction. We know that people on the political spectrum psychologically just have different makeups. When you're going to assess what the costs of harm reduction are, and why it would work or why it wouldn't work, you want people in the room who are doing research on that topic to come from the full diversity of perspectives in order to really fundamentally assess that. When you don't have that, the danger is that you get certain stories told, certain bullet points, that are accepted within academic disciplines as true, as operating assumptions, and they just haven't been tested. It's due to this kind of cascade of untested information.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
You mentioned political loyalty tests and how they either self-select or self-censor.... There are folks who are self-censoring. Could you elaborate on that a bit more and perhaps point out how, if it's from your side, you might be blind to the fact that it's even a political test?
Professor, Canadian Studies, Trent University, As an Individual
Thanks. I didn't get a chance to really say that effectively.
Things like diversity statements, in expecting a certain kind of language, are a classic example of systemic discrimination. They pretend to be neutral; they ostensibly are neutral. They just want diversity. However, they have expectations that an applicant is going to describe it in a way that fits a certain political standard approach to that.
There is a diversity of ways of thinking about how you create a society so that discrimination is not there. When you have expectations to include these things.... As I was saying, when you expect candidates to have a commitment to say something like “decolonization”, no one working in the field of decolonization is a conservative, so ostensibly it's a neutral claim, but it's really a political litmus test. It's a systemic discrimination that's built into the way this thing works.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
That's interesting.
Mr. Pardy, would you be interested in commenting on any of this as well?
Professor of Law, Queen's University, As an Individual
I completely agree with Chris. The political strings are as he describes, inevitably so.
Now, you can change the nature of the strings, and that would be an improvement, I suppose, to encourage viewpoint diversity, for sure. We have the problem that he is identifying. There is no question about that, but if you keep it and just reform it, then you're going to just get different kinds of strings.
For my money, the problem is having the overseers with the power to direct the activities of both individual researchers and the universities themselves. These programs require conformity of a type, not just from the applicants but from the institutions. They have requirements for EDI action plans on behalf of the institutions. In order to qualify for Canada research chairs, for example, you have institutions complying with tri-council documents. That means that the whole institution is driven by the political ideological agenda that is embedded in the tri-council programs.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
Can you talk about any countries that you know of around the world that are doing...? Can you give us an example that we could have a look at and say, “Hey, these folks are doing it well”?
Professor of Law, Queen's University, As an Individual
What would it be an example of? If you're asking me what my preference is—