November 1, 2001

SAFS Letter to Angus Bruneau, NSERC Council Member

Dear Dr. Bruneau:

The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS) is a national organization whose goals are to safeguard freedom in teaching, research, and scholarship and to uphold the merit principle as the basis of academic decision-making regarding students and faculty. For further information, please visit our website at www.safs.niagara.com.

In response to your letter in the Fall 2001 issue of NSERC's Contact magazine, we applaud the proclaimed aim of the federal government to raise Canada's world ranking in research and development. We feel that one way to contribute to this laudable aim is to ensure that all research grants, scholarships, fellowships, and so on, are awarded strictly on the basis of merit. At present, this is not the case.

For example, NSERC has altered the awards which used to be given to beginning university faculty on the basis of merit alone (presently called University Faculty Awards (UFA)), and has designated them exclusively for women and aboriginal people in the sciences and engineering. There can be no question that this has excluded many better-qualified candidates who are neither women nor aboriginals, and that this can have only negative effects on the quality of science and engineering research in Canada. Our society has been consistently opposed to NSERC’s discriminatory program of offering UFAs to individuals who, in the first instance, must be of the "right" sex or race. Our objections are elaborated on our website in the ‘current issues’ section, dealing with NSERC.

Given that there is no credible evidence that women or aboriginal people are discriminated against in applying for faculty positions in science and engineering fields, there can be no justification, either from a social-justice or a quality-promotion point of view, for maintaining such an exclusionary award.

As a member of NSERC’s council, we hope that you will urge NSERC to reverse this discriminatory policy and direct its efforts at identifying the best scientists we have.

Sincerely,
Clive Seligman
President

c.c. T. Brzustowski, President, NSERC

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