How UofT Professors are Bribed into Virtue-Signalling Woke Ideology

Diversity, equity and inclusion: unless you have been hiding in some ideological ‘safe space’ expunged of today’s wokery —and let’s face it, where in Canada would that be?— these three ubiquitous terms will be instantly familiar to everyone who happens to work in an organization or institution in Canada, whether public or private.

They are, to put it bluntly, like a trio of duplicitous house guests. Polite and well-meaning on arrival, but progressively disruptive as the days pass, eventually spilling out of the spare bedrooms and sprawling unconscionably throughout your home, tactlessly overstaying their welcome and proving near-impossible to dislodge.

To be fair, these three things are well-intentioned notions. What Canadian—universally polite to within a panic-stricken hair’s breadth of impropriety towards such guests—would not wish for the world to be a fairer place, where everyone can participate, unconstrained by old-fashioned unprogressive attitudes and antiquated views? Not a single educated, responsible citizen. And yet, a not-so-underground war has broken out on the margins of DEI’s colonial expansion from the humanities and social sciences, where it was rapaciously conceived, into new territories. Where else but on university campuses has it now become a wholly unavoidable busybody mantra that has succeeded only in permeating everyone’s lives with misery. The expansionism grinds on, and, until very recently, there was no end in sight.

This month, for instance, sees myself and my colleagues in the Department of Chemical & Physical Sciences at the University of Toronto Mississauga submit our annual activity reports: in essence, competitive one-upmanship that wins us a modest salary increase. What’s new this time is the pseudo-religious zealotry of some faculty members that has foisted on us all a host of DEI components in the merit calculus. According to the new rubric, ‘outstanding’ achievement comes either from publishing multiple papers in high-impact science journals (which is as it should be), or we may receive credit—but how much is anyone’s guess—for DEI contributions that will also now be weighed in the balance. In short, this is nothing short of ideological prostitution where professors—most of them oblivious to the cultural Marxist underpinnings—rush to join the chorus of virtue signalling, vying to notch up their salaries. Mao made good with similar tactics during China’s Cultural Revolution, and many intellectuals were led to the ‘cowshed’ for discipline and correction. Though the parallel here between East and West is asymmetric—financial advance versus house arrest and ‘struggle sessions’—the strategy is no different, and certainly no less appalling.

Hence, a well-timed exercise in social whataboutery, such as our departmental chair’s recent report on demographic trends in geology can substitute, at least in part, for an article in the journal, Nature. Something should strike you as incoherent about this; that something is fundamentally wrong. It means that professors can advance financially, not so much by publishing pivotal works in their field, but rather by espousing a political ideology parroted either disinterestedly or enthusiastically from the DEI hymn sheet —I’ll leave you to guess whether there is an inherent bias one way or the other based on biological sex. I wager my score will be ‘insufficient’ on all of the DEI categories, despite publishing on it, because I hold the incorrect views.

In recent times, there have been some victories. In my own country, England’s National Health Service has stemmed the tide of medical malpractice rooted at the heart of the transgender debate by banning the publicly funded use of puberty-blocking drugs in children. Then, the Cass Review doubled down, rightly pointing to the lack of evidence for the efficacy of these harmful drugs in gender-affirming care, a finding that Canada’s left-leaning media rushed to label ‘anti-trans’ by merely regurgitating UK-based transactivist group TransActual’s comedically ill-informed press release-cum-rant. Meanwhile, in Scotland, the Scottish National Party’s ludicrous hate speech bill, The Hate Crime and Public Order Act that came into force on April Fools’ Day, was uproariously debunked by J. K. Rowling, a children’s author, and is quickly proving unworkable. And in the U.S., there’s the Claudine Gay scandal, and all the weight of embarrassment that that has entailed.

But what of Canada and the new campus ‘belief-conversion therapy?’ Like so many things in this country, we are far more understated than the Americans, but it is no less risible, and perhaps all the more embarrassing for its mild-mannered half-heartedness. It surfaces in the countless minor details, the trivia and tiny academic microaggressions that, ironically, have become the vernacular of the new breed of lightweight, second-class minds now populating the university hallways. One robust professor I know wrote a DEI statement declaring his refrain for dealing with thorny and contentious topics was to “sit down and discuss it over a beer.” Despite this being amongst the most quintessentially Canadian sentiments I’ve ever heard, he was upbraided by his direct report because “not everyone drinks.” Doubtless he would offend too many Muslim students with that remark. Elsewhere, a professor caved to a student’s plea not to overuse the word ‘adopt’ when describing the natural posture that molecules in chemistry—sorry, forgive me—adopt. It turned out the student was an adopted child who was especially triggered by that verb. You couldn’t make it up.

Just recently, I returned from a screening of Ted Balaker’s new documentary adaptation of Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind, hosted with no shortage of irony at Ontario’s Institute for Studies in Education, a hotbed of social justice activism. The story was thoughtfully compelling, told through the eyes of students experiencing the monumental excesses of wokery that have invaded US campuses since 2015. I spoke on the panel, sardonically shared my ‘lived experience’ of DEI, and tried to read the crowd. It seems clear the message is spreading. People are tired of the repetitive incantations of the ideological progressives, and I catch the faintest scent of a new-found desire for freedom in the air. I am hopeful.

But not so fast—since I am encouraged to make a statement about DEI this year for my own annual report, I will share it here. There is only one solution. The whole edifice is unmoored from the university’s core mission and needs to be deconstructed, reevaluated and reformed. A recent influential article by Harvard law-school scholar Randall L. Kennedy calls for DEI statements to be abolished. Instead, before the hallowed quadrangles crumble into ruinous decay—surely to be abandoned by billionaire donors such as Melanie Munk and Jim Temerty, Carlo Fidani, the Dunlaps and others, who are wise enough to see the inevitable wrack—we must resuscitate merit as a fundamental principle; we must value and respect effort and attainment, champion free speech on campus, and pursue equality of opportunity—but most definitely not equity of outcome, something only ever possible under a tyrannical regime imagined by George Orwell. Then, to paraphrase Ian Fleming, the DEI acolytes can race down the roasting slope of the volcano, their shoes on fire, to throw themselves at long last into the burning cauldron that awaits them. Yes, I am a University of Toronto professor who believes in merit first. After all, you only live twice.