Need Not Apply

In 2022, the University of Calgary rolled out a “cluster hiring initiative,” with the aim of recruiting, over the following three years, forty-five new professors from “equity-deserving” groups: women, Indigenous peoples, visible or racialized minorities, persons with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. White men who were neither disabled nor LGBTQ+ could not apply. And who qualified as a visible or racialized minority? Those who were “Arab, Black, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Latin American, Korean, South Asian, Southeast Asian, West Asian,” according to the school’s Dimensions Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan.

The Calgary policy was quite obviously a case of discrimination, but advocates justified it as an overdue exercise of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The plan did not simply recommend taking these group identities into consideration; they were the criteria. Presumably, or at least hopefully, academic achievement, demonstrated excellence in teaching and research, and experience were also considered in hiring, but they were not the central requirements.

While some corporate DEI efforts have been scaled back in recent months, the drive for diversity remains either the defining focus or a highly important strategic one in many universities in Canada and the United States. But diversity — a valuable objective to promote the interchange of experiences and ideas — can morph into exclusion. Consider the University of British Columbia’s Black Student Space, where “white, Asian, or Indigenous complexions are unwelcome,” Peter MacKinnon writes. Until last fall, Trent University had a Freedom Lounge — for those who “identify as Indigenous, Black, Brown, Racialized, and Students of Colour”— that censored debate of “others’ life experiences or the different experiences of oppression.” These might be extreme examples, all drawn from Confronting Illiberalism, but there is ample reason to worry that free speech and association cannot be taken for granted and that mutually enriching discourse among people of different backgrounds and views might erode further.

In English Canada, this kind of group identification, and the self-victimization within some groups, has become fashionable to the point of being obligatory in cultural institutions beyond universities, including museums, publishing, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (in contrast with Radio-Canada), and the Liberal Party, at least as it was under Justin Trudeau. The cardinal question that MacKinnon, a president emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan, raises in his new book-length essay is whether narrow group rights are trumping individual rights, thereby creating “illiberalism,” which, in turn, leads to more political and intellectual polarization. His answer: yes. His plea: let’s work against this trend. He cites approvingly the exhortation from the journalist and historian Anne Applebaum, an expert on Eastern Europe and commentator on U.S. society, to “fight ferociously” for liberalism. MacKinnon argues, “Social cohesion in Canada is declining, and in a large, decentralized federation in which national unity is already a challenge, the decline is dangerous and could prove fatal. Illiberalism is at the root of this decline.”

Illiberalism can lead to censorship, the antithesis of liberal discourse, as when would‑be speakers who may have views that some find objectionable are barred from campuses. More frequently, administrators, professors, and students must dilute their arguments in deference to someone’s “hurt” feelings in the audience. This appropriation of hurt by particularistic groups has led to outbreaks of presentism: the injection into the past of certain attitudes deemed correct today. If historic behaviour or judgment is found to be wanting by today’s standards, statues are eliminated from public view, buildings are renamed, and the interpretation of long-ago public lives is condensed into one or two mistaken judgments, with other admirable features clouded by recriminations. Presentism has no time for Isaiah Berlin’s “crooked timber of humanity.”

Completely by chance, the politics of group grievance at the expense of national pride that has been defining many Canadian cultural institutions crumbled, if only briefly, in a wave of patriotic sentiment following Donald Trump’s repeated assertions that, as the fifty-first state, we would be better off economically, possess a superior health care system, have more military security, and be generally much happier than as an independent country behind strange borders arbitrarily drawn up decades ago. Trumpian declarations, at first considered a bad joke from a notorious exaggerator and frequent liar, got repeated so frequently by the president and his acolytes that they penetrated the consciousness of Canadians everywhere, helped Mark Carney to become prime minister, and produced manifestations of national pride seldom if ever seen in Canada, including in Quebec. The particularistic appeal of groups was subsumed in national awareness that this country was not such a bad place after all, contradicting what has been a prevailing narrative in elite cultural circles. The dilution of particularisms, however temporary, may therefore allow and even encourage Canadians to appreciate what they have in common and to value individual rights that everyone shares over narrower ethnic and racial ones.

Casting a glance around the Western world, however, it’s clear that liberalism — in the sense of free speech and individual rather than group rights — is under duress and even assault by Trump’s policies and by the right wing in France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and several Nordic countries. Certainly these intellectual — or anti-intellectual — currents have taken us a long distance from what Bernard Crick, the British philosopher and historian whom MacKinnon admires, recommended: that politics should be “an activity — lively, adaptive, flexible, and conciliatory.”

Crick wrote those words in his 1962 book, In Defence of Politics. Today, in too many quarters, they seem quaintly aspirational rather than actionable. Anyone who now cites Crick might seem an antiquarian, blinded by nostalgia for quieter times — for politics as common-room discussion over tea rather than the cut and thrust of angry debates. But these arguments for tolerance and reasonable discourse are a reminder of virtues that underpinned the liberal postwar order and that remain, however shaken, a better bet for protecting individual rights and building societal cohesion than the alternatives.

Of course, a believer in Crick’s message about politics and the liberal order such as Peter MacKinnon worries, with reason, that government institutions themselves are not working as efficiently as they could or should. None of his remedial recommendations are new, whether involving civil service reform, civility in political debates, curtailing hate speech, or curbing inequality. Each of these subjects would require a full-length book to probe deeply, and some have been written already. Confronting Illiberalism has a more modest objective as part of the UTP Insights series, which features short, easily digestible, and plainly written introductions to matters of importance for Canadian society. It certainly is a well-timed primer.