Marginalized, Equity-Deserving Academia

"The training is intended to further your personal journey of learning and action, regardless of  how knowledgeable or experienced you are, so attendance is mandatory irrespective of previous training or academic field of specialization."

"[By session's end, participants will understand their own] unconscious bias [and] reflect on and understand how power, privilege and meritocracy lead to inequities."

University of Saskatchewan

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | sssss1gmel and Alexandr Baranov/iStock/Getty Images

"Mandatory Unconscious bias and anti-racism training" is a course at the University of Saskatchewan, one that reflects how most other Canadian universities view their mandate as institutes of higher learning, having undergone a radical alteration in academia from the original purpose of intellectual knowledge-gathering to social engineering, while still purporting to be fulfilling society's needs to produce highly cerebral-equipped graduates in their chosen fields of professional study.

 

The course in question was labelled with the official title of Anti-Racism/Anti-Oppression and Unconscious Bias Faculty Development Session. Hiring committees of the university faculty are particularly urged to participate. Course materials inform participants to expect that they  will be given training around "systemic racism" of the university environment, coupled with the manner in which they have benefited from unearned racial privileges simply by being white, male and (shudder) cisgender. 

Michael Plaxton, a University of Saskatchewan faculty member, whose expertise is based in criminal law and statutory interpretation, spoke of the course as a "mandatory DEI boot camp", a "forced march of self-discovery". Two readings comprise the course; 1) White settler colonialism and the myth of meritocracy, composed by Indigenous activist Sheelah MacLean which details how white Saskatchewanians owe their prosperity to "150 years of racist, sexist and homophobic colonial practices".

The administration building of the University of Saskatchewan is photographed in Saskatoon. Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Heywood Yu

"The myth that Canadian society is created on individual work ethic ignores how racially dominant groups gain access to social and political power", reads the course.

 

The second course reading is comprised of a chapter from the 2022 book Confronting Institutionalized Racism in Higher Education, the chapter interviewing five "racialized" Canadian university faculty, concluding the entire system is set up to benefit white people: "Racialized faculty are expected to have accomplished more, yet their tenure and promotion files are always scrutinized through certain deficit-driven lenses of presumed incompetence". 

"Anti-racism" linked to everything from grant funding to hiring, to promotion hinges at Canadian institutions on the embrace of the doctrine of "anti-racism" with a candidate's willingness to accept the  tenets of "equity, diversity and inclusion", their key to humble admission as a penitent striving to correct a wrong while pursuing higher education. An analysis by the Aristotle Foundation found almost all Canadian academic job postings contain a "diversity requirement in the form of a mandatory diversity survey where the applicant is required to divulge various racial and sexual identities".

Alternately, in some instances a position can be explicitly limited to select demographics, such as confined to Black, Indigenous or female applicants. Research funding has succumbed to the standard practice of acknowledging and ascertaining the racial or sexual diversity of applicants. Criticism of these new guidelines pointed out that the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada requires applicants to list identity characteristics of prioritized research assistants.

 

Traditional Canadian guidelines on racial tolerance advocated for the most part, for race to be considered an irrelevance. Anti-racism on the other hand, is based on the premise that any equality of outcome is predicated on a racist system to be remedied by special treatment for groups considered marginalized or "equity-deserving". In the process, needless to say, being straight, white, and intellectually exceptional reflects an outlier, an undeserving racist to be punished in the aggregate.

 

Similar to most institutionalized anti-racism strategies, the University of Saskatchewan's DEI Framework for Action has "equity" as its goal, as opposed to equality. It defines itself as "taking the range of human attributes and qualities into account and providing each individual with what they need to be successful". 

Anyone naturally genetically endowed with superior intelligence and the will to maximize their academic credentials is just plain out of luck of they're white, straight and representationally mainstream.

 

Aristotle Foundation

"A growing number of high-profile cases suggest that diversity workshops and their supporting materials regularly promote questionable claims—particularly about the overarching, malicious character of the majority population."

"Similarly, hostility toward those who challenge DEI claims is part of the pattern."

"In Canada, students who challenge claims have been punished or expelled; employees have been suspended."

"One whistleblower who leaked DEI training session material maligning the majority population lost his employment."

Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy