Routing Tokenism

Reg Whitaker’s review contains a self-congratulatory notice that he himself (“a tenured white male professor”) retired from academia early so as “to open up the faculty to a greater diversity.” His article features a number of spitballs lobbed at old professors (whether male or female) who (because of “Charter of Rights and Freedoms decisions”) no longer have to retire, and who will stay on “indefinitely.” According to Whitaker (and presumably Anthony Stewart), aged faculty members are a major impediment to “diversity” on Canadian campuses.

Somehow, age diversity—i.e., a faculty truly representative of the age structure of the larger society and therefore alive to its newly developing concerns—is not of any value for Whitaker. He comments on the “bizarre” dominance of white scholars in post-colonial studies, but one could also note that the study of age and aging is practically a monopoly of younger scholars who may not know a grey hair from a grey goose.

Certainly, abolition of forced retirement in provinces across Canada will permit old women and men to continue their academic work. But the jobs they may take away from young academic hopefuls are a drop in the bucket compared to tightfisted proportional shrinkage of tenure stream positions by government and university administrators over the last 20 years. And when a veteran faculty member departs, there is no guarantee that administrators will replace his or her tenure track position.

Professors who work past age 65 are not likely to do so indefinitely. The American experience suggests most will leave academia well before age 70, and a very small number will stay past age 75 (and these will be the most active and resourceful teachers and researchers).

Even academics drawn from minority groups will grow old; and members of these groups are more likely to start their careers late, with few productive years before reaching the former deadline of 65. Removal of forced exit was a universal victory that everyone ought to applaud.

It is of course true, as both Drs. Anthony Stewart and Reg Whitaker have noted, that the Canadian professoriate does not “look like” Canadian society or even the student body: it is more white and male than either. However, this is to compare apples and oranges. The professoriate is a stock: an accretion of 35 years of hiring practices. The student body is a flow—constantly changing and, at the moment, steadily becoming less white and more female. When it comes to looking at whether there is discrimination in hiring, one needs to look at whether or not the composition of new hires more or less matches the composition of graduating PhDs.

Take the example of female professors: although women only make up 30 percent of all professors in Canada, they account for 40 percent of all assistant professors (i.e., of recent hires), which is roughly their share of PhD graduates in 2000. Since then, females’ share of doctorates awarded has increased to 46 percent, a shift that will undoubtedly make itself felt in hiring over the next few years. As older (mostly male) professors retire, the professoriate will gradually become more and more female, and the country will likely reach full gender equality some time in the 2020s. Though there are no statistics on doctoral students by ethnicity, there are some reasonably good ones for undergraduate students that show that most visible minority groups are strongly over- represented in Canadian higher education. One might therefore reasonably expect that the faculty will get less white as the population of graduate students does.

But as Dr. Whitaker points out, the term “visible minority” covers a lot of ground. The question Dr. Stewart would likely raise is this: does this include blacks as well? And here the answer appears to be no. Youth with parents from Asia (particularly China) are much more likely than native-born white Canadians to be attending university, but youth with parents from Latin America or the Caribbean (which make up a large percentage of the country’s black population) are somewhat less likely to be attending.

The fact is that there simply aren’t that many black graduate students in the pipeline who would benefit from any proposed change to hiring procedures. So, without in any way disparaging Dr. Stewart’s critique of merit (which seems to me to be mostly correct), one can certainly question whether his remedy is actually likely to change much.