Like Dr. Joseph Facal, Bambi strongly believes that merit must remain the criterion for selection of Canada’s researchers if we want to keep the level of research and teaching high. Therefore, the current post will translate Facal’s column, which was recently published in the Journal de Montréal because it addressed this topic in a clever way (https://shorturl.at/fqJT6). As usual, Bambi thanks her loyal friend, Mr. Google Translate, for his assistance.
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“I did my undergraduate studies at UQAM a long time ago.
I have excellent memories of it. I made friends for life there.
Since then, I have contributed to its annual fundraising campaign, even though what happens there often annoys me.
This is over until further notice.
Forget that!
Remember the outcry when we learned that Laval University wanted to hire professors while formally excluding white men.
It was difficult to explain to us that it was to comply with the requirements of the federal government which subsidized the positions in question. A true explanation, but insufficient.
I hope you don’t imagine that this outcry put an end to the practice.
The Faculty of Political Science and Law at UQAM has just launched a competition to hire two professors as part of the Canada Research Chairs Program.
The competition will be reserved for people in four categories: women, Indigenous people, visible minorities and disabled people.
UQAM could have chosen not to open this type of position subject to federal requirements. Rather, it does so with enthusiasm, presenting these requirements as imperative and unavoidable.
In short, white men without disabilities, forget it, you are excluded from the start.
In the federal document which sets out the criteria for granting these specific positions, it is explained in particular that people from visible minorities are “people, other than Indigenous people, who are not of the white race or who do not have white”.
Obviously, there are all kinds of human skin tones, like the colour palettes at Sico.
A candidate’s membership in one category or another will be done by self-identification.
The questionnaire to complete asks:
“Do you identify as a person from a racialized minority?”
“Do you identify as an Indigenous person?”
“Do you identify as a woman or as a person from a gender minority?”
Is UQAM reluctantly complying with federal requirements? No way.
In its action plan, it states: “[…] UQAM must be exemplary in its desire to have in its ranks a cohort of professors holding a Canada Research Chair (CRC) who reflect the diversity of our society. More than taking targeted measures, UQAM must now act at the structural level and adopt systemic and lasting changes.”
In short, we believe in it thoroughly.
Gear
UQAM is laughing at us by adding that it will not compromise on quality since it reduces the pool of applicants from the outset.
Any institution that acts in this way is therefore caught in a perverse spiral.
As soon as we modify the hiring criteria to favour a category, we are inevitably led to modify the criteria to then evaluate performance, since the objective of diversity takes precedence over that of merit.
And this is how we are dragging our universities down“.
