The Canada Research Chairs program is one of the federal government's showcases to reverse the "brain drain" and to attract - according to the prime minister - "the best and the brightest" researchers to Canada. But one of its problems is that it also is a system that reinstates all of the worst aspects of paternalistic favoritism in the university hiring process.
The CRC program was created in 2000 with a budget of $900 million to support 2,000 research chairs at universities across the country. All the chairs are to be in place by 2005 and about half of them already have been appointed.
The chairs are a good deal for whoever gets them. Senior scholars can be awarded a Tier I chair that is worth $200,000 a year and junior scholars can be awarded a Tier II chair worth $100,000 a year. The chairs also receive associated "infrastructure funding" from the Canada Foundation for Innovation. But aside from the monetary awards there is release from the other normal duties of academics that slow down research - namely teaching.
Universities have proven to be exceptionally difficult institutions to diversify. This changed somewhat over the years mainly through demands for openness in hiring to allow scholars from traditionally excluded groups to compete for jobs. Something as simple as the requirement to advertise all academic positions made an enormous difference in the selection pool.
The results also changed once department committees conducted the hiring process and departments voted on the candidate. These procedures eliminated the most blatant aspects of cronyism associated with the old boys networks, because it became harder to justify hiring only white men when good candidates from other groups were clearly available.
These normal hiring procedures in universities have been bypassed in most cases with the federal government's CRC program. This is because the government does not require that universities design and comply with an appointment process that ensures equitable treatment of historically disadvantaged groups protected under the Canadian Human Rights Act. It just gave the money to the administrators. It also set up the program so that individuals could not apply directly for these chairs, but had to be nominated by a university.
Universities are behaving shamelessly in divvying up the CRC chairs. Many administrators ignore normal hiring practices and conduct "single candidate" searches to hire people they know, their best friends, or their favourite students. The Tier II chairs, which were intended for junior researchers, have sometimes been filled with full professors who can't measure up to the Tier I requirements.
The results are reminiscent of the 1950s. Only 16 per cent of the CRC chairs are going to women, despite the fact that 25 per cent of tenured faculty are women and 39 per cent of those in positions leading to tenure are women.
Some universities are worse than others. For example, of 14 chairs given out at my own university and 11 at the University of Saskatchewan, only one was given to a woman. But Carleton University is worse: 11 chairs have been allotted and none have gone to women. Other universities, like McGill, seem relatively progressive, with nine of 43 chairs going to women, but it is still a middling performance.
The biggest scandal in the CRC program is the complete disregard for the other groups covered by human rights legislation in Canada. The law prohibits discrimination based on sex, age, race, sexual orientation, colour, disability, national and ethnic origins and family status. But the government does not collect these statistics on CRC appointments and does not require the universities to keep records either.
These groups already are poorly represented in universities. Visible minorities, for example, have about 19 per cent of the PhDs in the country, but hold only 10 per cent of the faculty positions. The CRC program seems designed to accentuate these kinds of inequalities.
Alan Rock, the minister responsible for the CRC program, was questioned in the House of Commons on March 21 about human rights violations in the program. He said, "we have, among other things, asked the secretariat to strictly enforce rules on the distribution of the chairs to both genders." This would be good, if there were such rules, but none exist for women or any other groups.
Marjorie Griffin Cohen is a professor of political science and women's studies at Simon Fraser University. She is one of eight professors who have initiated a complaint with the Human Rights Commission against Industry Canada over the discriminatory practices in the CRC program. The others are Louise Forsyth, University of Saskatchewan; Glenis Joyce, University of Saskatchewan; Audrey Kobayashi, Queen's University; Shree Mulay, McGill University; Michèle Ollivier, University of Ottawa; Susan Prentice, University of Manitoba and Wendy Robbins, University of New Brunswick.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of CAUT.