January 2001
The wording of a university’s tenure stream advertisement is an indirect
indication of the institution’s relative commitment to the conflicting
principles of employment equity as against merit. The degree of this
commitment can vary considerably even if, as is the case on Canadian campuses,
all universities have an employment equity policy (if only to ensure that
they are eligible for federal funding, and are seen as conforming to the
1986 federal employment equity law). For example, as Stewart Page
reported in his “On the daily vicissitudes of equity-based hiring” in the
SAFS Newsletter 22 (June 1999, pp. 2-5), in some universities the equity
officers can exert quite direct pressures on departmental chairs regarding
job advertisements and decisions on appointments. Again, there are
federal awards for a university’s commitment to equity, and York University
retains the distinction of the only Canadian university that has won a
federal Equity Award (in 1994). In other universities, the “balance” is
tilted more in favour of merit, which is said to be the primary criterion.
Still, for example at the University of Toronto, the Status of Women equity
officer meets with every hiring committee, and asks pointed questions if,
for instance, the short list does not have any women on it.
Funded by the Donner Canadian Foundation and the Horowitz Foundation,
some students and I have been engaged in what I have called “judgmental
content analysis” of the wording of advertisements for Canadian tenure-stream
arts and science positions in University Affairs, the bulletin of the Canadian
Association of University Teachers, which carries all academic job ads.
We have used factorial analysis of variance techniques to examine the
effects of factors like time (e.g., 1971-75, 1976-80, 1981-85), location (Eastern Canada, Ontario, Western Canada, Quebec), discipline
hardness (physical science, social sciences, and humanities), and university
mission (using the McLean’s 3-level categorization of universities: medical/doctoral,
comprehensive, and undergraduate. This study has included the interactions
of these factors on both merit and equity wording.
Our studies allow one to identify latent influences on the way in which
universities achieve the right “balance” between merit and equity considerations.
The influences are latent in the sense that we assume that the advertisements
are not consciously worded to be different according to time, location,
discipline hardness, or mission.
In this note I report on the impact of political change on the employment
equity policies of universities.
There was a quasi-earthquake in Ontario politics when, after a three-year
NDP government headed by Bob Rae, the Progressive Conservatives under Mike
Harris took over in 1995. Whereas the NDP had strengthened employment
equity regulations during the Rae years, Harris abolished the requirements,
at least for private industries. Admittedly, the federal employment
equity law of 1986 was still in place, and the provincial government said
nothing about equity policies in universities as against private industries.
So it would be too much to expect Ontario’s universities to revert to considering
only merit in appointing its tenure-stream faculty. Nevertheless,
given that the major source of public funding for universities is provincial
rather than federal, one would expect the Ontario political shift on employment
equity to have at least some effect on the hiring policies of its universities.
To test for this predicted effect, we used our factorial judgmental
content analysis method on some 500 tenure-stream advertisements, and looked
at time as a two-level factor with the years 1992-1994 and 1996-1998 as
the two ‘levels.’ After several months of discussion about our rating
system, our three research-assistant judges (Sean Fidler, Yaniv Morgenstern,
and Wendy Tryhorn) rated each advertisement (with names and places removed)
on 7-point scales of merit and of equity. To the extent that the
Rae-to-Harris shift in Ontario affected universities’ commitment to employment
equity, one would expect an interaction between time and location, such
that in Ontario alone (in contrast to the three other locations, where
no such political shift against employment equity had occurred) there would
be a significant drop in equity ratings from the Rae (1996-98) to Harris
period. (Students of experimental design will note that the three other
non-Ontario locations provide quite a sound basis of control for looking
at the “experimental” effect of the Rae-to-Harris shift, even though there
has not been any experimental manipulation in the normal sense of that
term).
Contrary to prediction, no such interaction emerged, with the F value
for that effect being less than one. Nor was this result due to any
insensitivity of our measurement. The F values for a number of other
significant main and interaction effects (which will be communicated later
in a more extensive report) ranged from 9.0 to over 60.
Probably because of the large sample size involved, the data were considerably
less noisy than the “objective” psychophysiological data with which I usually
work.
The fact that a major political shift of the sort that occurred in Ontario
appears to have had no effect at all in universities’ commitment to employment
equity suggests to me that those who are committed to advancing merit over
equity aims in higher education have to work independently of the political
changes that occur outside the universities. This study also shows
that, in addition to conceptual analyses, it is also possible to do meaningful
empirical work on the effects of political correctness on Canadian campuses.
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