April 2007
It
is clear from pages 1 and 12-13 of the November 28 issue of the Bulletin that
the university administration is not only proud of putting the university “at
the vanguard of North American post-secondary institutions for the breadth and
scope of its equity policies”, but it is now excited about being “poised to take
its commitment to practices significantly further through an emphasis on
excellence” (“Linking Equity, Excellence”).
News of this latest expansion of administrative commitment to equity led me to
recall the times when the equity movement was in its infancy at this university,
with the creation of one or two equity offices. The stated mission of these
offices was to look after matters that the administration no longer felt could
be done by the ombudsman’s office. That office dealt with injustices against
individual members of the academic community independently of those individuals’
skin melatonin content, race, ethnicity, genitalia, or preferences in sexual
partners.
If
the aim of the administration has been to develop the emphasis on equity at this
university from these small beginnings, then it has indeed succeeded. So I am
impressed by the various “equity events” advertised on page 12, and even more by
the number of equity offices and officers that were advertised on page 13. As I
am no longer a member of the academic board, I cannot obtain the approximate
annual budget for these offices and officers, but would guess that they
significantly exceed the $3.5 million per annum estimate that I obtained about 5
years ago, which itself exceeded the $1.0 million estimate that I obtained about
10 years ago for the administration’s expansion of the “breadth and scope of its
equity policies.”
A
continuing source of logical embarrassment for the administration’s equity
efforts has been the discrepancy between two goals of the university. One
goal is the maximizing of academic meritor excellence, while the other
goal is the maximizing of so-called equity and diversity. The former goal
requires that only academic merit counts in competitions such as tenure-stream
faculty appointments, while the latter (social-engineering) goal requires that
other non-merit-associated factors be taken into account. Depending on the
weight assigned these other factors, the competitions are biased either in favor
or against individuals as a function of whether they belong to “designated
group”.
This conflict between merit and equity was implicitly acknowledged by most
university administrators, as they referred to the importance of “balancing”
excellence and equity considerations. Only conflicting goals need balancing,
and so the proponents of equity in universities were vulnerable to logical
criticisms from such organizations as the Society for Academic Freedom and
Scholarship (www.safs.ca)
which argued that only merit should be used in the allocation of competitive
academic positions, and that the criteria of “equity” were essentially sex- and
race-preferential, and hence unfair in a university, even if they may
justifiable in some circumstances in society (e.g., composition of police to
reflect racial characteristics of the neighborhood).
My
university’s administration has recently dropped the concept of “balanced” and
has shifted over to the position that excellence and equity are equivalent.
This move probably originated with former president Robert Birgeneau, a
physicist, who asserted that “excellence and equity go hand in hand” (e.g.,
http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bin6/040913-432). He also added the term
“equity” to the title of Angela Hildyard’s provostial appointment. Consistent
with the equivalence assumption is the vice-provost’s current declaration that
in the equity-vanguard administration, “we are talking about equity, diversity
and excellence all at the same time, that’s unique to us here at UofT” (“Linking
Equity, Excellence”, November 28).
Asserting the equivalence between excellence and equity may work as a
slogan to eliminate the perceived conflict between these two goals, but if the
equivalence assumption is considered as one that is open to empirical test, then
there are two consequences that have recently been tested in research funded by
two non-governmental agencies, the Donner Canadian Foundation and the Horowitz
foundation. The research (summarized in the 2nd section of
http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~furedy/equity.htm) examines the impact of such
factors as time, university status, discipline hardness, and locus in Canada on
the phraseology of tenure-stream advertisements. The data are ratings provided
by trained judges who are blind to those factors when rating the ads on their
degrees of emphasis of merit and equity (or affirmative action for American
universities). If the equivalence assumption is true, one consequence is that
the examined factors should yield the same pattern of results for merit and
equity. In fact, all studies, from the initial one (http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~furedy/Papers/me/JUDGM6.doc)
to the most recent ones in California and Australia, have consistently yielded
results where the factors impact quite differently on merit and equity emphases.
The
second consequence of the equivalence assumption is that the correlation between
merit and equity ratings should be as high as those among the judges for both
merit and equity. In fact, the merit/equity ratings correlations range from 0
to 0.35 (the latter accounting for only about 10% of the variance),
whereas the inter-judges correlations (a measure of rater reliability) range
between 0.80 to 0.95 (these reliabilities have been going up with our later
studies, as our methodology improves, and are veryhigh by the standards of
social science research).
So
unless the equivalence assumption is merely a slogan to be enforced through
power rather than truth (as was the case with the Orwellian slogans of “four
legs good, two legs better” and “2+2=5”), I suggest that our administration
abandon the idea of “talking about equity, diversity and excellence all at the
same time”. We should be competing with York University not for Employment
Equity Awards, but for genuine excellence in teaching and research.
John Furedy, professor emeritus, University of
Toronto, and former president of SAFS.
University of Toronto Bulletin, 10, January 9, 2007.
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