Christopher Dummitt: Racism accusations can’t stifle the truth about diversity

In a Macdonald-Laurier Institute report published last week, authors Eric Kaufmann, Leif Rasmussen and Jonah Davids dare to ask what seems to be, for some, a forbidden question in Canada: Does prioritizing diversity in hiring mean losing excellence?

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The claim that equity leads to research excellence is made regularly. Our national research funding agencies declare that equity “strengthens research outputs and increases the overall excellence of research,” and the Canada Research Chairs program itself, which mandates diversity quotas, insists that “Achieving a more equitable, diverse and inclusive Canadian research enterprise is essential to creating the excellent, innovative and impactful research necessary to seize opportunities.”

The MLI report set out to test that claim using the CRC program, which was created in 2000 to reverse the brain drain of Canada’s brightest minds abroad, hardly a solved problem.

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Since 2017, partly in response to human rights tribunal claims and criticism that it wasn’t diversifying fast enough, the CRC program imposed diversity quotas: universities that didn’t meet them risked losing chairs altogether. It worked. White male representation fell from roughly 80 per cent of positions to about 25 per cent today. So far, so good, you might say — why shouldn’t the chairs roughly reflect the population?

The MLI report then asks what the consequence has been — and here’s where things get controversial. It tries to measure how research excellence changed alongside these shifts, using h-index (a widely used, not uncontroversial metric) to score every chair-holder, controlling for sex, ethnicity and career length as a proxy for age, then putting a dollar figure on the resulting gaps. The methods are interesting, defensible and not beyond critique.

The report finds that there has been a real trade-off. Some equity gains — hiring more Asian-heritage CRCs, for instance — show no trade-off at all. But on average, research metrics are weaker for female CRCs and for Black and Indigenous scholars, even after the study’s controls for career length and discipline. The report also finds a rise in politicized language in CRC research descriptions, concentrated in the social sciences.

As you can imagine, this has not gone over well in certain circles.

The most dramatic — and most telling — reply came from Alex Usher, a prominent higher education consultant who sells his expertise to university administrations across the country. Usher was so offended that he wrote a letter to MLI director Brian Lee Crowley and published it on Bluesky, calling the report “the worst piece of social science I have ever seen published by a Canadian think tank” and “racist nonsense.” His argument: the authors hadn’t done the most basic statistical work, failing to account for how age and career length affect h-index, or how it varies by discipline, which makes comparing a historian to a chemist absurd. All the study really showed, he argued, was that white males are more likely to work in the sciences.

His conclusion: “This is not just gutter social science: it is a drive-by smear. Some people would call it clearly racist and sexist.”

This sounds horrible. Surely the think tank would retract the report and try to salvage its reputation? Not quite — because the report doesn’t make the errors Usher accuses it of, not even close. It explicitly controls for both career length and discipline. Kaufmann replied that both of Usher’s main criticisms were “manifestly false, and even a cursory read of the report would have shown this very clearly.”

So why make the critique? And how does someone steeped in assessing statistical reports miss the errors in his own? He accuses the authors of dumb, obvious mistakes, then makes much the same mistake himself.

Kaufmann’s explanation: motivated reasoning. In a world where questioning equity puts you beyond the pale, perhaps you simply assume any study that dares address the issue must be flawed, and grasp at the first argument to hand.

This is, sadly, how humans tend to think. Greater education and higher IQ don’t inoculate you against motivated reasoning. If anything, they make you better at rationalizing why people you disagree with are wrong. It’s exactly why viewpoint diversity matters in higher education: so others can catch the biases you can’t see in yourself.

Scroll through the replies to Usher’s post and you’ll find them littered with congratulatory comments from distinguished professors across the country, all piling on, insulting MLI, accusing the authors of racism and agreeing that right-wing ideas are simply beyond consideration. Usher is so certain that others will agree that he calls Kaufmann a “sh-tbag,” saying Kaufmann should debate him, with Usher promising to “jam this argument so far up your rectal cavity you’ll gain a new nostril.”

We are not living in the world of normal academic debate here.

And here is the danger social psychologist Jonathan Haidt warned about years ago in describing “structural stupidity”: information environments congratulate us for our weakest thoughts and reward us for presenting the worst-case version of those we disagree with, until it becomes easy to assume we’re right and everyone else the fool.

To be fair, there are real criticisms to make of the report. Usher’s point that the MLI press release foregrounds numbers more dramatic than what the full report supports is a legitimate complaint about framing. But it is definitely not evidence of “the worst piece of social science” anyone has ever seen.

What the MLI report is doing is useful: engaging openly with a debate that much of higher education won’t admit is a debate at all. My guess is plenty of academics privately entertain the possibility that equity doesn’t automatically produce excellence, but they don’t publicly say so because it means risking your reputation. As a result, the only people left asking are on the political right, who can then be dismissed, as Usher shows, simply with an accusation of racism, a charge that delegitimizes the question before it’s even considered.

Usher did exactly this to another MLI report four years ago, one I co-authored with Zachary Patterson of Concordia University. That report surveyed ideological conformity and self-censorship in Canadian universities, including whether professors believed diversity should be valued over their discipline’s core intellectual standards.

For asking that question, we too were accused of racism. Usher published a critique alleging assorted methodological problems; when we replied, showing he’d missed the sections addressing every one of them, he simply didn’t respond.

In the case of my report, and again now with MLI’s “The Equity Excellence Trade-Off,” Usher didn’t fact-check the report. He fact-checked the room — and the room agreed with him. Why wouldn’t it, given what we know, on average, about the ideological make-up of the profession?

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