Thanks so much.

I should say that I'm a historian of Canadian politics, and this is a great honour. I am very pleased to be here, but I'm not here to speak about the history of Canadian politics, sadly. I am here to speak about a survey I did with a data analyst from Concordia University about university professors, their political opinions and their attitudes towards academic freedom and towards diversity.

The news I want to bring to you—and this has been slightly pre-empted by the other witnesses—is that federal funding agencies, federal research agencies and the Canada research program are at the moment ignoring the single biggest and most egregious diversity problem in higher education, and that is viewpoint diversity. This may seem like a partisan statement, and I would understand if you thought it was so, but it's simply an accurate description of reality.

In our survey—Eric Kaufmann found slightly different things—76% of professors we surveyed voted for either the Liberal Party or the NDP. Only 7.6% voted for the Conservatives. We asked them—because maybe party identification is not the only thing you want to think about—how they would identify politically, on the left or right spectrum, and 88% identified as left-leaning. This is, of course, significantly different from the rest of the population and of a category of magnitude that is unlike any other kind of diversity concerns that higher education is currently concerned about.

It might be tempting to dismiss this as a concern only for conservatives. Again, I would understand if some would think that this would be the case, and certainly there are consequences for conservatives. They reported in our survey high rates of self-censorship, finding the workplace to be a hostile workplace and a whole host of problems. I should say that we also found that centrists, sometimes even left-leaning scholars, particularly feminist scholars who thought about biological sex as a really important category, also reported great concerns about political discrimination, so it's not just a right/left concern.

However, I want to suggest to you that it is not a partisan concern. It's a concern that matters towards the purpose of higher education as a truth-seeking and truth-validating research enterprise. I think the lack of viewpoint diversity significantly damages the purpose of higher education, which I greatly support.

How does it do this in practice? Well, first of all, it just reduces the effectiveness of peer review. John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows [very] little”. Peer review is supposed to give you the best criticisms by the most knowledgeable people who are going to be most critical of your work. You don't have to change your mind just because you face that criticism, but you will know your side and be much more robust by knowing that. The fact is that a university higher education sector that is so devoid of divergent opinions prevents this from happening.

There are other concerns. Self-censorship makes this even worse. The small numbers of conservatives among the academics who are there reported to us that almost half of them were too frightened to have their colleagues even know their politics. Their ability to actually effectively do peer review, especially in the social sciences and humanities, is greatly diminished.

This leads to what some social psychologists call “reputational cascades”. This is a process whereby information that is untrue—or at least partial or inaccurate—can be accepted in certain groups as accurate if those who have alternative viewpoints don't speak up and aren't able to speak up. This is a major concern.

It also brings us to another problem, which is that an institution that lacks viewpoint diversity, in the way that higher education does, also leads to the possibility of group polarization. Group polarization is a well-known phenomenon whereby in groups, small or large, where many people already think alike, the absence of divergent opinions makes everyone's individual opinion—which may be more moderate—after processes of discussion and assessment, even more radical at the end, because they're not facing opinions and corrective discussions. It's a serious concern. Ironically, the current EDI policies in the tri-council agencies and in the Canada research program might actually be making it worse. To the extent to which diversity statements are required, these act as a kind of political statements.

I did hear Professor Kerr talking about the importance of diversity and having different perspectives in the research, and I fundamentally agree with what he was saying, but diversity statements ask for certain kinds of understanding of diversity and certain politicized ways of understanding diversity. It's not about eliminating discrimination. It's about having a very politically partisan idea of what EDI means. If you don't have those particular kinds of terms in your assessment, then it's very possible that you'll be rated lower and weeded out. You either have to lie on your assessment or risk not getting funding.

What's more, the other problem is that often programs that are meant to attract equity-deserving groups or under-represented groups come paired not just with a desire to improve those groups but—and I'm not sure how much this reaches this level—with certain kinds of other qualifications, so things like a position or funding might be advertised for someone who has a commitment to, say, decolonization or anti-racist pedagogy. I've seen these in ads for a whole bunch of things, and these are political statements—

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