A rchive Date
[ 13-02-2025 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[https://nationalpost.com/opinion/lawrence-krauss-the-dei-nightmare-must-be-dismantled-in-canada-and-the-u-s
The DEI nightmare must be dismantled
The full extent of it in Canadian universities is now emerging
Author: Lawrence Krauss, Special to National Post
Published Feb 13, 2025
Shortly after his inauguration, United States President Trump issued an executive order that ordered the dismantling of “radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing.” This order terminated federal diversity, equity and inclusion-related “mandates, policies, programs, preferences and activities.”
Within days, a wave, indeed more like a tsunami, overwhelmed government agencies, and much of academia, washing away decades of bureaucratic infrastructure, expenditures and programming that has done little or nothing to address any real inequities that might exist in the U.S., and has instead interfered with scientific and scholarly progress.
All federal scientific funding agencies are now following the lead of the Department of Energy science office, which is the largest funder of physical sciences in the country. Following Trump’s executive order, the office promptly ended the requirement for all scientific grant proposals to include a diversity plan, formally known as a Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) Plan as part of the proposal. PIER Plans, which had been mandated since 2022, were to “describe the activities and strategies of the applicant to promote equity and inclusion as an intrinsic element to advancing scientific excellence.” Plans that had already been submitted would not be reviewed going forward.
These plans were required for all fields; a mathematical physicist studying string theory in 11 dimensions, for example, would have to discuss how their work actively promoted “anti-racism.” This sounds like fiction, but it isn’t. Many grant review committees and university hiring committees would first read DEI-related statements and filter out candidates who were not sufficiently committed to this social justice imperative before their actual research proposals could be read. For example, Daniel Ortner, a contributor to The Hill, reported that at UC Berkeley, 76 per cent of applicants for a faculty position were rejected based on their diversity statements without looking at their research records.
These DEI initiatives didn’t meet any pressing societal needs. Affirmative action for scientists at the cutting edge generally only assists individuals who are already the products of elite institutions, and not those who might really need a leg up, like inner-city students whose schools don’t even have adequate textbooks. Moreover, it addressed problems in academia that can’t confidently be said to exist.
There is inconclusive evidence of systemic racism or sexism in academia. For example, a comprehensive literature review covering 20 years of scholarship led by Cornell University psychologist Stephen Ceci found no evidence of gender bias in grant funding, journal acceptance rates and recommendation letters. Women had the advantage in hiring, he found, though they did experience small salary gaps.
With the Department of Energy no longer requiring, or even evaluating, PIER Plans for grant applications, university DEI bureaucracies, which exist in large part to implement and control academic activities in support of supposed federal DEI imperatives, have lost their raison d’etre. Universities throughout the country are disbanding their DEI offices, and stopping work on federally funded DEI-related projects.
A year ago, the DEI juggernaut in academia, comprising thousands of staff and hundreds of millions of dollars in salaries, program funding and grants, seemed unstoppable. Now, the scientific community in the U.S. can concentrate on what it does best: science.
As DEI in American academia is being rolled back, Canada is grappling with a similar force. Here, DEI-related discrimination is actually much more severe than it ever was in the U.S. because it’s as long as the groups being discriminated against were the supposed perpetrators of discrimination in earlier times. So, university positions can legally be advertised as being off-limits to white males, for example. Indeed, hiring pools for many of the country’s most prestigious federally financed endowed chairs, the Canada Research Chairs, have been restricted to previously “marginalized” groups.
The full extent of the DEI in Canadian universities is now emerging: days after the American executive order was signed ending federal DEI programs, a study was released by the Aristotle Foundation indexing DEI-related discrimination in Canadian universities. (Full disclosure: I am a senior fellow of the foundation, which is an unpaid advisory position. I played no role in the study.) The study examined 10 Canadian universities and 489 job advertisements over the past year.
A year ago, the DEI juggernaut in academia, comprising thousands of staff and hundreds of millions of dollars in salaries, program funding and grants, seemed unstoppable. Now, the scientific community in the U.S. can concentrate on what it does best: science.
As DEI in American academia is being rolled back, Canada is grappling with a similar force. Here, DEI-related discrimination is actually much more severe than it ever was in the U.S. because it’s as long as the groups being discriminated against were the supposed perpetrators of discrimination in earlier times. So, university positions can legally be advertised as being off-limits to white males, for example. Indeed, hiring pools for many of the country’s most prestigious federally financed endowed chairs, the Canada Research Chairs, have been restricted to previously “marginalized” groups.
The full extent of the DEI in Canadian universities is now emerging: days after the American executive order was signed ending federal DEI programs, a study was released by the Aristotle Foundation indexing DEI-related discrimination in Canadian universities. (Full disclosure: I am a senior fellow of the foundation, which is an unpaid advisory position. I played no role in the study.) The study examined 10 Canadian universities and 489 job advertisements over the past year.
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 World Fact Book (CIA)]]
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