Thank you very much.
I'm very honoured to be here. I was happy to be here at the committee late last November, and I'm happy to be back.
I think I'm here to speak to a survey and report I did with a data scientist, Zachary Patterson of Concordia University, last year, where we surveyed the political opinions of professors across the country and their attitudes toward academic freedom and diversity issues. We did a report based on that survey.
Our main finding was that the federal research and funding agencies are ignoring the most important and most significant diversity problem in higher education. That problem relates to viewpoint diversity. It might seem that this could be a partisan statement, but I want to emphasize that this is just an accurate description based on the data. Our survey found that when one looks at professors' voting patterns, based on the 2021 election, fully 76% of professors voted for the NDP or the Liberal Party. Only 7.6% voted for the Conservative Party. When we asked professors about their self-reported political beliefs, fully 88% identified as being on the left. This, of course, is significantly different from the wider population. I want to suggest to the committee that if this result or this skew on this kind of issue were similar for really any other metric of diversity, it would be considered a national crisis.
It might be tempting to dismiss this as an issue for only conservative scholars. While I certainly think it's true that we found lots of evidence of self-censorship on the part of scholars and concerns for their careers, I want to emphasize that we also had evidence from centrist and even progressive scholars who differed from colleagues on certain kinds of issues who also reported this as a major problem. I also want to suggest to you that the problem of the lack of viewpoint diversity in our universities damages the core mission of universities themselves. It brings the mission of Canadian universities into disrepute.
How does this work in practice? It reduces the effectiveness of peer review. Peer review depends on having the best experts analyze claims to truth and knowledge. If we are excluding a series of viewpoints from the peer review, this is a significant problem. Whether it's live policy debates on housing, addiction or crime, or whether it's just questions about Canadian history and literature, this is a major issue. I would ask committee members to think about what they would think of research that came from a population of scholars who all thought like those in, say, the Cato Institute, or a MAGA think tank like the America First Policy Institute. Would you trust that research? I would say of course you wouldn't, and nor should you.
For those in the political minority in universities, our report found pretty significant problems. There was a high rate of self-censorship—in other words, not speaking on issues, not researching on issues and avoiding issues. Almost half of conservative scholars reported that they were frightened of even having their colleagues know that they were conservative. This is obviously a major issue.
We're also talking about the problem of group polarization. In communities where people tend to all think alike, what tends to happen in those kinds of groups, whether we're talking about juries or in the university world, is that people tend to skew toward.... Even if they come in with more moderate viewpoints, the lack of those who challenge those ideas tends to have the overall opinion of the group skew towards one area in particular and become more radicalized than any individual would have been when they came in.
Finally, I think the issue is that current federal EDI policies in research and in the Canada research chairs not only don't deal with this issue but also probably make it worse. The demand for diversity statements is a classic example of a kind of systemic discrimination. It's a policy that intends to be neutral but actually embeds within it, in practice, forms of political discrimination. That's mostly because, in practice, it tends to prioritize certain versions of EDI and not others. This isn't about not allowing discrimination. It's about essentially, in practice, discriminating against colour-blind approaches to EDI.
What's more, often programs, research or otherwise, that are, say, trying to target certain kinds of identity groups get paired with much more politicized readings, which then skew the research funding program towards certain political viewpoints, eliminating others from the outset.
This is obviously a significant problem. We only have to look south of the border right now to think about the lack of—