Equal outcomes have replaced equality of opportunity
by Margaret Wente, Globe & Mail:
How do Canada’s universities stack up against the world’s best? The answer is: Meh. Maybe a handful rank among the global top 100. How many Nobel winners have we produced lately? Better not to ask.
But excellence is not the point of universities these days. Diversity is the point – not diversity of thought or intellect, but diversity of race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation. To achieve this goal, our universities have announced a major new initiative to collect and publish detailed demographic data on faculty, staff and students. The idea is to ensure that women, Indigenous people, academics with disabilities, and other underrepresented groups achieve equality of numbers.
This is a new goal. The old goal was academic excellence. And the old goal of equity programs was to make sure that everybody got an equal opportunity. Now the goal has switched to equal outcomes. Success has been redefined from hiring the best person for the job to making sure your demographics mirror the demographics of the general population.
“This university needs to have the best faculty possible to maintain its international position,” one senior university person told me. As a veteran of more hiring committees than she can count, she has made great efforts to recruit students and faculty from visible minorities, often with considerable success. But now, she says, “The pendulum is swinging way too far.”
The unexamined notion behind the diversity craze is that there is never any conflict between diversity and excellence. On the contrary, it’s widely assumed that the more diverse the team or institution, the better the performance. In fact, there is no real evidence for this. Another fallacy is the assumption that skills, desires, preferences and motivation are evenly spread across all groups in society. If this is the case, then unequal outcomes must be due to systemic discrimination. Systemic discrimination is the legacy of our long history of colonization, white privilege, and unconscious bias against ‘The Other.’ And it’s systemic discrimination – rather than preferences, skills, differences in family background, cultural differences, and so on – that overwhelmingly explain the shortage of female math professors, the scarcity of Indigenous medical students, the underrepresentation of “racialized” lawyers in the top ranks of big-city law firms and the poor marks of certain groups of students in the school system.
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