Professors Testify on DEI Research Funding Criteria Before MPs

The Canadian Press/Ryan Remiorz

University professors voiced opposing views on federal funding based on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) criteria that have become increasingly prevalent in academia as they appeared in a House of Commons committee on Sept. 24.

Canadian academic Gad Saad, along with professor Eric Kaufmann, said that “woke” policies are harming academic integrity and depriving funding to worthy researchers, while professor Imogen Coe and assistant professor Nadia Hasan said Canada needs to include diversity criteria in allotting research funding in order to solve the pressing issues of our time and erase “systemic inequities” that they say make it harder for minorities to have their voices heard.

Do Diversity Considerations Help Research?

In his comments and answers to MPs, Saad, who was a professor of marketing at the Concordia University, said he left Canada for the United States to work as a visiting scholar at the University of Mississippi because Canadian academia has become “ultra woke” and ruled him out of opportunities due to his gender. He also said he’s seen a growth of “laughable” criteria for research grants based on identity markers that don’t have to do with merit.

“The use of diversity, inclusion, and equity when allocating research funds is an affront to individual dignity and to research excellence,” Saad said.

“The periodic table of elements is not dependent on whether a chemist is a Latinx queer or a cis-normative Hasidic Jew. ‘Oh, you are a non-binary bisexual chemist? Well, this completely changes the atomic numbers of carbon, palladium, and uranium.’ Ideological activism is anathema to research excellence. Meritocracy is all that matters.”

Hasan, by contrast, said that in her role as an assistant professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and director of the Islamophobia Research Hub at York University, she’s seen the positive impact of bringing identity questions into play in funding research.

She said that DEI policies have “saved lives” and are crucial for allocating money for research that helps populations who might otherwise be overlooked, such as in improving black maternal health and addressing “the devastating impacts of colonial violence” and “Islamophobia.”

Concerns

Robert Thomas, president of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, said he is concerned about DEI measures worsening academic rigor with regard to research, particularly when it comes to universities choosing who to hire or not.

“What Canada does not need is research where meritocratic excellence has been eclipsed by other government policy goals, whether or not these have laudatory aims. In particular, I refer to funding and hiring decisions where identity factors such as sex, gender, and race could displace focus on the individual’s work itself,” Thomas said.

Kaufmann, a Canadian who works as professor of politics at the University of Buckingham in the U.K., said that Canada’s consideration of DEI metrics in allocating research funding is also polarizing Canadian society and worsening public trust in higher education.

“DEI creates the conditions for delegitimizing research funding,” Kaufmann said. “I strongly advise Canadian Research Councils to abandon their current focus on cultural socialism or EDI [DEI], if they wish to retain public support.”

Kaufmann added that “once a sector becomes left coded, it loses the confidence of conservative voters.”

“If you create a hostile environment for certain beliefs, such as conservatism, then you are going to essentially force those people not to go down the academic pathway, and therefore deprive—particularly the social sciences and humanities—politicized disciplines that need viewpoint diversity in order to arrive at the correct answer,” Kaufmann said.

Is There Proof DEI Has Harmed Research Quality?

When asked by Liberal MP Taleeb Noormohamed whether he could point to specific instances where DEI criteria had harmed the quality of research, Saad said: “I don’t have the citations in front of me, but there is no conceivable reason why diversity along my sexual orientation or my skin color or whether I’m two-spirit or non-binary, is going to improve our capacity to map the human genome or better understand the distribution of prime numbers.”

Noormohamed said that while he agrees with meritocracy and doesn’t want to be judged by his identity, he does believe that historical inequality justifies DEI policies to some extent.

“One of the challenges though that we’ve seen in Canada and other parts of the world, is that it’s much harder to measure merit in systems where access to education, the funding, and networks has historically been unequal. So how do we overcome that so that you are in fact getting exactly what you’ve said, which is the widest diversity of viewpoints, such that you were able to do high-quality research?” Noormohamed said.

Saad said he agrees on eliminating barriers to entry but does not see this as tantamount to prioritizing certain identities over others in hiring or allocating research money.

“Any time that we find that there are lacking equality of opportunities, then we should intervene and try to solve these,” Saad said. “Wherever we see that there are truly systemic barriers to entry for any group, then we need to eradicate those. ... But that doesn’t come from saying that only queer people who are non-binary get to be a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Waterloo. I mean, imagine how insane that makes us look globally.”

According to Thomas, in Canada, it’s becoming more common within universities to see job postings that specify applicants must belong to a certain group—for example, being indigenous or being a woman—in order to be considered. This approach prioritizes identity over an individual’s skills and ability to best serve the needs of the scientific field.

Saad pointed to himself as an example of being a victim of DEI policies.

“I know for a fact that at one point, I was applying for a renewal of my chair professorship. I held a university-wide chair for 10 years at Concordia. When it came time to reapply, someone told me confidentially that, sorry, we couldn’t give it to you, even though you would be easily deserving of it, because it had to go to a woman. How do you think that makes me feel? I work 32 years as a professor. I lose because I don’t ovulate. Does that strike you as fair?” Saad asked. “The trust of the public and the taxpayer is damaged when we allow these parasitic ideas to infect our university ecosystems. It’s grotesque. It’s tragic.”

Liberal MP Helena Jaczek said that DEI has been a helpful metric in allocating funding and more diverse teams produce better research, something Hasan agreed with.

“I have a list of studies that I can cite ... I’m happy to submit them to you after the fact, but there’s studies about gender biases and research funding awards. There’s studies about the biases against people who are racialized in research studies, and also the experiences of faculty from marginalized communities, postdoctoral fellows from marginalized communities that document how, you know, there is, was, continues to be a problem of bias and prejudice in some of our funding programs in Canada,” Hasan said.

“The evidence very clearly shows that diversity in research produces better impact in research studies, it produces better innovation. It widens our epistemology. It widens the way we think. It widens the way people address problems, and it widens the way we include more and more people. We’re trying to address issue of exclusion here.”

Canada’s Federal Funding of Research

In Canada, tri-agency funding—comprising the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research—is the main federal funding support for academic research across disciplines. NSERC funds natural sciences and engineering, SSHRC funds social sciences and humanities, and CIHR funds health and biomedical research.

These agencies provide grants for research projects, infrastructure, and graduate and postdoctoral training, often evaluated through peer review. Programs increasingly include equity, diversity, and inclusion requirements, and agencies sometimes collaborate on cross-disciplinary initiatives. Together, they distribute several billion dollars annually, with last year’s budget allocating $1.8 billion over five years.

The experts provided testimony at a hearing of the Standing Committee on Science and Research Sept. 24 in Ottawa as part of a review to look at whether the current federal funding rules for research still make sense, help programs meet their goals, and encourage new ideas and discoveries.

The meeting is the fifth of six before the committee, which will subsequently share its conclusions with the House of Commons. The next meeting will be Oct. 1.