I wonder whether the editor was conscious of the ironic juxtaposition on the front page of the December Bulletin.

Two articles, side-by-side, quote CAUT president Loretta Czernis. The article captioned ‘Election Campaign’ quotes her as saying the federal government should find ways to “better protect the quality ... of post-secondary education.”

But in ‘Research Chairs Program Review Calls for Change’ she protests that only 20 per cent of chair holders are women and only 9 per cent are visible minorities: “Two thousand new positions could have allowed Canadian universities to deal with a history of inequity.”

How does Czernis’s concern for feminist quotas consist with the desire to protect the standards of education in this great land?

If there are too many white males in the new chairs, surely that is not because they are white men but because they are inferior candidates, and should have been refused in favour of women or non-white men. This being the case, let Czernis name names because this is an outrage which must be addressed, and now. After all, the chairs are all about quality, right?

But if the chairs are about appointing women and non-whites in the pursuit of a political agenda, that places some ideological notion of social egalitarianism above the aspiration toward quality.

And so the two agendae are contradictory.

If CAUT intends to aid and abet the intellectual life, let’s get it onto the side of quality, not the feminist agenda. Let’s be sure all competitions for these chairs are fair, and dominated by the highest standards of achievement. If that means the winners will be entirely non-white women, so be it. But if it is merely a means of advancing mediocrity, obviously the universities of our country have no credibility and should be suppressed rather than encouraged.

David G. Mullan
History , Cape Breton University