A Canadian University Doubles Down on Discrimination

Hiring only certain sexes or races is bad enough. Apparently only some groups are deserving of equity at this Canadian University.

Only in Canada, it seems. In the United States implicit discrimination in University hiring, based on sex or race, is not uncommon. But constitutional rights, combined with legislation, forbid explicit discrimination. Not so in Canada. To right past wrongs it is apparently constitutionally acceptable to restrict University appointments on the basis of sex, gender, or race.

One might imagine there are some fields where such a restriction could plausibly be argued to be reasonable—namely when the research or teaching area in question had some direct relationship to experiences based on these otherwise arbitrary identifiers. I remain skeptical about any such possibility, but I am willing to listen to an argument supporting it.

Not so in the natural sciences, however. By no stretch of the imagination can gender, sex, or race be a reasonable way of distinguishing between quality scientists. Nevertheless, positions restricted by gender or race are becoming more common. Last year, Dalhousie University advertised a Chemistry professorship that was restricted by gender.

Not to be outdone, last month The University of Guelph advertised a Canada Research Chair in Experimental Physics.

Canada Research Chairs were created by the Canadian government to fund positions to recruit the best and brightest researchers from around the world to return to Canada to teach and carry out research. The Physics Dept at Guelph is a research intensive department with some distinction. As such, they have great goals for this candidate:

“The successful candidate will be an outstanding and innovative world-class researcher in experimental physics whose accomplishments have made a major impact in their field.” 

You would think that to find such a remarkable candidate they would turn as broadly outward as they could. Not so. In bold letters in the advertisement is the following proviso:

“Candidates must be from one or more of the following equity-seeking groups to apply: women, persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, and racialized groups.”

With such remarkable restrictions, a host of questions arise. Here are a few: What kind of women are acceptable. Are Trans-Women allowed to apply? What kind of disability is an allowed disability? And what exactly is a racialized group?

Regarding the last question, I went online in search of an answer, and the best definition I could find was from homelesshub.ca, which defined racialized communities as “all people that are non-caucasian in race or non-white in colour”.

Following up on this, how does one determine colour? Can someone identify as black if 23andMe finds African heritage in their genome?

These questions are of course ridiculous, and that is the point. These identifiers are ridiculous. Any time you restrict employment based on identity, you are not only discriminating, you are also requiring arbitrary and often ridiculous and artificial distinctions to be made.

All of this obfuscates two key points First, the intent of any such search is to find the best candidates, then removing a large fraction of the candidate pool from consideration is not the way to achieve that goal. Second, once you start discriminating on the basis of race, gender, disabilities, or sex, then where do you stop?

These issues alone should give one pause. But simply discriminating against white males is not enough for the University of Guelph geniuses behind the advertisement. One of the requirements for the successful candidate is that they

“have a track record of providing opportunities for equity-deserving groups”

Are there equity-non-deserving groups? So many comments one could make! I am assuming the answer is white-males, but I will let you ruminate on this one…

The rabbit-hole of nonsense keeps growing, and I expect unless there is a public outcry against this kind of overt discrimination in academia we will continue to see advertisements like this appear, in Canada at last, including ones that might contain statements that are even dumber, if such a thing is possible…