Thank you.
I'm here to try to provide answers to questions arising from your study on the impact of funding criteria on research excellence. I will parse two key components of that: funding criteria and research excellence.
I've worked for 40 years at the intersection—that's a buzzword—of the sociology of science, the evaluation of research and the transformation of universities. I have therefore systematically analyzed how research works. It's not how I would like it to work, but it's how it works in the real world. So, what is scientific research?
Then, if we look at the connection between funding criteria and excellence, we have to ask ourselves what the current problem is. What is the mission of the three granting agencies? As they themselves say on their websites, their mission is to fund graduate and postgraduate scholarships. They also talk about funding “world-class” “innovative” work leading to “scientific breakthroughs”. These words can be found on the websites of all three granting agencies. Another aspect is training researchers. That is their mission.
The problem we have now has been well known in the field of organizational theory since the 1960s. It is called goal displacement. We've observed that the mission of the granting agencies until the 1980s and 1990s was to subsidize researchers. Then they were told, as we just heard, that they now have another mission related to a term that's never been defined: DEI, or “diversity, equity and inclusion”. The term suggests social equality and social justice issues. That's legitimate, but it's another mission.
To better illustrate the unintended consequences of merging missions, I'll give you a very simple example. Governments are made up of a number of departments, such as a department of the environment and a department of industry. If we ask the department of industry to also function as the department of the environment, it won't be able to do anything, because it will have to somehow reconcile two contradictory missions. That's why the department of the environment does one job, and the department of industry does another. Then the government, in its wisdom, can decide to act on studies by the department of the environment, for example. However, if both missions are assigned to the same organization, it will fail. That is well known.
So people rack their brains figuring out how to incorporate DEI. What we just heard and what we've been hearing for three weeks are what I call affirmations. People say DEI is good, but they don't understand the methodology. Any academic researcher knows very well that, if the methodology is biased—if a sample does not include women, say—the results will obviously be erroneous. That wasn't invented in the 1990s. Researchers have been evaluating methodology since the first federal grants were given out and the National Research Council of Canada was created in 1916.
In short, any external funding criteria can only diminish what we call excellence. Now, what is excellence? How do we achieve excellence? It is easy to demonstrate that excellence is a tautology. I provided the committee with a document about that. Excellence is what we deem to be excellent. At the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, NSERC, 70% of the researchers have a grant and are excellent. At the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, CIHR, only 15% of the researchers have a grant and are excellent. Universities don't hire mediocre professors, so all university presidents think that their professors are excellent because they are university professors.
We have to stop conflating these things and ask ourselves what the granting agencies' mission should be. Their mission should be to subsidize university researchers who are hired by universities. If they're hired, they're probably excellent. Let's stop basing decisions on abstract things and do empirical studies. For that, we need NSERC and CIHR data on rates of success and failure, but that data is not made available to us for privacy reasons. In contrast, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, SSHRC, has given this data to a leading researcher, Julien Larregue, who will present his findings to you an hour from now.
To sum up, if there must be funding criteria, those criteria have to be based on financial need. If we want to encourage girls or indigenous people to become professors, we have to give them schools and get them to college and university. It'll take 20 years for them to become professors. There's no reason to believe that today's faculty will represent the population.