Sandra Bruneau’s pathetic article, "Whither Jill? A Reply to Andrew Irvine on Affirmative Action," is seriously mis-titled. A more astute editor would have published it — if at all — under the banner "Whither Reason? Jill’s Reply to Her Private Fantasies About Andrew Irvine on Affirmative Action."

Bruneau’s article demonstrates an inability or unwillingness to understand or to retain Irvine’s clearly-stated argument.¹ At the same time, Bruneau over-reacts to claims nowhere made by Irvine, and she formulates ill-conceived rejoinders to views nowhere espoused by Irvine.

Bruneau describes Irvine’s objective statistical survey as "incendiary" because she cannot stomach its findings: that females are over-represented in the Academy with respect to relative proportions of hirings from respective qualified applicant pools. Males are under-represented and are therefore disfavoured (unfairly, on the basis of gender) by current hiring policies that favour females (unfairly, on the basis of gender). Since gender bias in hiring is contrary to enlightened egalitarianism (of which Irvine is in fact a proponent), and since criteria of merit alone are pertinent to a candidate’s employment prospects, it follows that policies favoring females and disfavoring males on the basis of gender alone ought to be amended accordingly.

But Bruneau and her ilk are not enlightened egalitarians: they are misguided sexists. According to Bruneau’s sophomoric system of head-counting, that there are fewer females than males in certain positions signals a "situation" that needs to be rectified. That fewer females than males seek some positions (and that fewer males than females seek others) owes to many causes. Some causes rest ultimately on a substrate of biological sex difference, which will not be eradicated by wishful fantasizing. Other causes rest on a tradition of cultural conditioning, which has lately been reversed to the extent that relatively more qualified females than males are being appointed in an Academy that once excluded females almost ubiquitously.

But this is not good enough for Bruneau and her ilk. Their typical tactic is to debase merit itself, so that a female with few publications but many offspring will be regarded as "the better candidate" than a male with many publications. Why? Because of what the female might have produced, had she not been too busy reproducing. (On that sublime view, I ought to be the best candidate precisely for those positions which I am least qualified to hold, on the grounds that I could have been perfectly qualified if only I had sought the qualifications.) Moreover, according to Bruneau, the female in question is "the better candidate" than the male because she "has demonstrated she is able to attend to...intensive caregiving." So the Academy is to be transformed into an intensive care nursery, where students will be given suck to absurd doctrines and will thereby acquire immunity to reason. The Canadian Philosophical Association, long in the vanguard of the parade celebrating the Empress's New Qualifications, shows whither Bruneau leads: the filling of unjustifiable and impossible quotas requires that merit be equated outright with gender. ²

I do agree wholeheartedly with Bruneau that Canadians ought to be "educated" about the real causes and effects of the fictitious "situation" that she and her cohorts have reified, politicized and mythologized, and which so arouses her incendiary but irrational invective. But who will educate the educators? Bruneau should be the first to register for that course, which I will cheerfully offer as soon as well-qualified white male Canadian philosophers are once more eligible for representative employment in our home and native People’s Democratic Republic.

Bruneau’s article is an unwitting affront to reason. So much for pathos. We should not be concerned at all with raw numbers of appointments — be they males, females, hermaphrodites, or cherubs — in the academy; whereas we should eliminate policies that result in the appointment of unqualified people — irregardless of sex or lack thereof — who are incapable of coherent mentation. Your publication of pieces like Bruneau’s, farragoes of arrant nonsense that issue from the hysteria of the critically challenged, do a profound disservice to the Academy. But while Bruneau (who apparently knows no better) can be reduced to harmlessness, you are a disgrace to the vocation of editorship because you (who should know better) disseminate such tripe in the guise of choicer cuts.

If you have one iota of regard for truthful and informed debate, then you owe Andrew Irvine an abundant apology, and moreover owe his article an accurate exposure.

Louis Marinoff
Philosophy, The City College of New York

¹ Irvine, A. (1996), "Jack and Jill and Employment Equity," Dialogue, XXXV, 255-91.

² See Baker, B., Boulad-Ayoub, J., Code, L., McDonald, M., Okruhlik, K., Sherwin, S., Sumner, W. (1991), Report to the Canadian Philosophical Association from the Committee to Study Hiring Policies Affecting Women, printed by the CPA. See also Brown, G. (1992), The Employment Equity Empress Has No Clothes, Occasional Paper #2, The Gender Issues Education Foundation, Edmonton, Alberta.