Taking stock of discriminatory hiring practices at Canadian universities

Mark Milke, National Post, February 12, 2025

Since the first European university was founded in Bologna, Italy, in 1088, the goal of higher education was supposed to be a search for truth. Alas, too many modern ivory towers in the West, including those in Canada in recent decades, have been tempted into trendy anti-reality policies, activism and illiberalism.

A useful example of the latter is the rise of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and bureaucracies at universities.

Some pick students and professors by race, ethnicity or gender, on the justification that it will somehow make up for doing the same 100 years ago. Others hold the mistaken belief that diverse economic outcomes between cohorts is due to racism, in whole or in part.

Both are mistaken, but they explain why DEI offices sprung up like toxic weeds over the last 10 years on campuses throughout the United States and Canada.

Why is DEI so flawed in its diagnosis of the differences in economic outcomes? Simply put, in liberal democracies such as Canada and the United States, incomes and wealth result from multiple factors: education levels, family dynamics, geography (people in rural locations, including on reserves, earn less than those in major cities), the time one has lived in a country and a variety of other influences.

That’s why, when direct comparisons are made, one often finds more similarities between groups than stark differences. For example, there is an average income gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians, but that’s due in part to large differences in average education levels and in geography — i.e., more Indigenous people live in rural areas compared with the rest of the population.

That gap mostly disappears when those factors are accounted for: Indigenous Canadians with a bachelor’s degree had a median income of $76,000 a year in 2020, according to census data, while non-Indigenous Canadians earned $77,500. But that gap flips when when looking at those who received above a bachelor’s-level education: Indigenous people had a median income of $85,000, compared with $83,000 for non-indigenous folks.

DEI policies ignore all of this in favour of a simplistic racism-explains-everything ideology. That’s why proponents try so hard to impose diversity from the top down, including forced DEI statements and discrimination in hiring. We found exactly that in a new Aristotle Foundation study, which analyzed 489 academic job postings at Canada’s 10 largest universities (by student population, by province).

Of these, 477, or 98 per cent, used some form of DEI requirement or strategy to fill academic vacancies.

We then sorted the data based on differing DEI strategies in job advertisements — from generic statements, to citing DEI contributions as an asset, to explicitly encouraging people to apply (or not) based on race, ethnicity and gender. That then allowed us to create a “university discrimination index.”

Some noteworthy findings include: all University of Toronto employment postings and 96 per cent of Dalhousie University’s mentioned or implied that a candidate’s “contribution to DEI” was an asset; McGill University and the University of Saskatchewan required all applicants to complete a DEI survey; and around two-thirds of the University of British Columbia’s, and 55 per cent of the University of Manitoba’s, postings required candidates to submit DEI statements or essays.

One could argue that asking for DEI statements, endorsements and the like is no guarantee that a university will discriminate in its hiring. That’s unlikely given how much money, time and advocacy is spent by DEI advocates arguing that top-down ethnic, racial and gender sorting is a positive (as opposed to “organic” bottom-up diversity, where all are welcome).

Besides the implicit hint about who is likely, or not likely, to be hired, we found that some universities are explicit: the University of New Brunswick, for example, excluded white males from applying to the department of physics for a research chair position in “quantum sensors for space”; at UBC, nearly one out of every five academic postings explicitly restricted the job to a particular race, ethnicity, group identity or other immutable trait.

Without even getting into the lack of diversity of thought at Canada’s universities, the core problem with DEI criteria is not the desire to have a diverse workforce — that makes sense precisely because skills and merit exist among all cohorts. The problem with discriminating based on race, ethnicity and gender is three-fold.

First, it treats individuals in a discriminatory fashion based on some group identity assigned by others and based upon unchangeable characteristics. Second, it assumes that identity largely explains success or failure. And third, it’s an attack on merit.

The result is an anti-individual, illiberal, anti-merit approach to hiring at many of Canada’s largest universities.

Mark Milke is president of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, which recently released “DEI and academic hiring in public universities: An index of university discrimination in Canada.” Imgae credit: Pixabay.