Routing Tokenism

I admit, right off the top, to approaching a book on diversity hiring in the university with more than a little trepidation. This is a field so pitted with the academic equivalent of improvised explosive devices as to make the ivory tower look like an outpost in Afghanistan. Negotiating that field is made even more delicate by the fact that I am a retired white academic and Anthony Stewart is a young black academic who points critically at a near white monopoly in university departments.

It did not take many pages into You Must Be a Basketball Player: Rethinking Integration in the University to shake off any such concerns. Stewart is a most engaging writer whose own argument for preferential hiring of minorities is straightforward and persuasive.

He makes quick work of the restitution argument that preferential hiring is required to right past wrongs. The problem with this, as he rightly indicates, is that today’s faculty can hardly be held responsible for the attitudes of past generations— even when they benefit from the built-in bias. Many people react with understandable resentment when told that they must atone for the sins of the fathers. And for those who willingly wear guilt, this ends up looking like a patronizing latter-day version of the white man’s burden: “we” must do something for “them.” Since whites continue to dominate faculties, the we and them are pretty clearly defined, and the burden is deeply ironic.

Stewart has for twelve years been the lone black professor in Dalhousie University’s English Department, a typical “only,” as he puts it. This experience has made him finally decide to speak out, but it has not made him bitter. Like Barack Obama, he has a knack for seeing the other person’s perspective, even when that perspective is hurtful. Although a foreword by Cecil Foster mildly criticizes Stewart for being too polite, this misjudges the strength of Stewart’s method, which, by fairly laying both sides of the picture on the table, leads the reasonable reader more readily toward Stewart’s own conclusions than would a more harsh confrontational approach.

Race is a very complex, difficult subject for a liberal society. Stewart uses personal experiences to convey the hidden injuries of racial attitudes, especially those that are unconscious. This is caught in the title. Stewart, a tall black male who happens to be a professor of English, has too often been addressed (once, for example, by a retired Nova Scotia judge) as a basketball player, a contemporary cultural and racial stereotype. Yet he disarmingly admits that on occasion he himself has made mistaken or misleading assumptions about white people based on their appearance and manner. He has an amusing story about sitting uncomfortably next to someone on an airplane heading to the American South whom he takes to be a skinhead and probably a white racist due to his haircut and clothes. Stewart plots a quick getaway upon arrival, only to learn inadvertently that the skinhead is a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University who is bound for the same conference as Stewart—a conference on cosmopolitanism! The pair then share dinner and drinks, and spend considerable time together at the conference.

Racial stereotyping is a multi-directional phenomenon that inserts distorting mirrors into relations between people in a multi-racial society. But the costs are far from being equally distributed. They bear very disproportionately on the minority.

Some might make light of the experiences recounted here. For my part, I think it ill behooves a white reviewer to pass off as trivial the multitude of sometimes small but cumulatively humiliating lived experiences that stand outside the reviewer’s own experience and full capacity for empathy. Nor is it justifiable, as some have argued, to denigrate the complaints of the black middle class as less deserving of attention than the more unsubtle injuries racism inflicts upon poorer, working-class blacks. Stewart understands this perfectly well. He loves his job, he says, and appreciates his relatively privileged position. But none of this makes for colour blindness, which is an illusion, and a potentially pernicious one at that. It is precisely the liberal illusion of colour blindness that stands as a barrier to genuine racial integration on the campus.

Stewart wisely confines himself to the world he knows best, which is Dalhousie University and the large humanities disciplines, English, history and philosophy. Despite this focus, much of what he says does have wider application. Few academics of any discipline could fail from time to time to catch glimpses of themselves and their colleagues in the pictures he paints of his own particular experiences, and the glimpses are often unflattering.

Stewart points to a particular irony in his own discipline. While English is increasingly dominated by post-colonial studies that emphasize the central role of race, the very minority subjects who are the focus of post-colonial studies remain resolutely underrepresented in the ranks of the professoriate. Bizarre scenes of academic conferences dominated by white speakers, panelists and audiences earnestly discussing race in the virtual absence of non-white participants are punctuated by even more bizarre moments when Stewart questions this contradiction to polite but puzzled incomprehension.

Stewart’s point is not to seek historical redress, or to turn the tables on the majority, but simply and reasonably to make the faculty look more like the increasingly multi-racial society and the student body they teach. Of course he is right about this. The academy can only benefit from wider racial and cultural diversity among the faculty, just as it has already benefitted and will even more in the future by the greater participation of women in the faculty as the gender balance among the students has tipped decisively away from former male domination. These are unalloyed benefits, in the result. But, alas, the same cannot be said for the various methods and mechanisms that have been deployed to achieve these results.

Stewart is acutely aware of the pitfalls of plans for employment equity or affirmative action, however well intentioned. I would recommend that university equity officers—or whatever the watch-dogs appointed to ensure that equity is observed are now called—read Stewart closely to understand how perfectly good intentions can lead to perverse results.

Stewart points out an inescapable fact: in the case of racial minorities, employment equity has simply not worked. The hiring of the odd “only” like Stewart here or there has not advanced the integration of minorities into the faculty mainstream very much, if at all. What is needed is a critical mass sufficient to change the complexion of the mainstream, but universities are nowhere near approaching that point.

Standing in the way of improvement is the myth of merit as the sole legitimate criterion for hiring. As soon as merit is described as a myth, alarm bells start going off. Are we talking about hiring incompetents just because of the colour of their skin? Stewart is advising no such thing. Rather, he subjects the concept of merit to a cool critical eye and finds it full of contradictions. Qualifications for a teaching position are neither fully objective nor free of context. The quality of publications, teaching, etc., does count, and should for a candidate of any colour, or either gender. But it is never, or rarely, all that counts. Background—family, schooling, opportunities, connections—all help prepare, or impair, a candidate as a saleable package to prospective colleagues. “How will he or she fit in?” is a question usually pondered, and once you think about the existing composition of the professoriate, the implications of this question can be devastating for outsiders trying to break in, rather than fit in.

I found Stewart’s critique of the merit myth convincing. From my own experience I would add another point. Hiring is a means whereby particular approaches, theoretical schools and, if we are honest, political ideologies among faculty are reproduced and perpetuated. This can be a very divisive, not to say, unpleasant aspect of academic life. While its intersection with issues of race is somewhat unclear (Stewart’s ironic depiction of the disjuncture between theory and practice among the post-colonial crowd suggests severe tension), it does further contest the meaning of merit. The spectre of like hiring like does not inspire confidence in the objectivity of the standards implied.

Stewart does not want simply to rubbish merit, as its elimination would render the entire process meaningless. Rather he suggests that merit is a concept that can, and has in other areas, been expanded to include additional relevant criteria. For instance, he points out that in the selection of judges to the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court of Canada, the choice does not rest simply upon legal qualifications, although they are a condition, necessary but not sufficient, of merit. The province or region of a prospective judge’s origin, gender and ethnicity all count. A certain number of judges are chosen from Quebec with its distinctive civil code. Few, Stewart points out, question the application of these criteria, which are generally accepted as reasonable.

Why, Stewart reasonably asks, should race not be taken as a merit criterion in the university, when the student body and society at large are much less white than the faculty? It should not be the only criterion, of course, but it should be taken in conjunction with other qualifications.

Why not indeed? Unfortunately, as so often happens in the Alice in Wonderland world of academe, theory and practice may bear only passing acquaintance. I am afraid that Stewart’s reforms, sound and reasonable as they are, may not get very far. Let me elaborate, in the spirit of someone caught for speeding who offers the police an explanation, but not an excuse.

There is generational inertia. Academic positions come with tenure, and faculty are not cycled in and out of employment the way people may be in the private sector. The weight of the past in the face of changing demographics is heavy. There is also potential generational injustice in any attempt to advance equity: it is precisely those who bear least responsibility and have been rewarded with the least benefit of past privilege, young white male graduates trying to embark upon an academic career, who are forced to bear the costs of preferential hiring. Those who have benefitted the most, older tenured white male professors, are not threatened in their tenure, even though they may ironically play a role in designing and administering the very equity programs that are made necessary by their own preponderance. In practice, of course, many young white male graduates do find academic employment despite preferential hiring programs, but this actually indicates the relative ineffectiveness of the programs.

The weight of the past is made heavier yet by Charter of Rights and Freedoms decisions that have had the effect of blocking mandatory retirement for professors, many of whom now choose to stay on indefinitely past 65.

Equity itself can be an impediment to change. Stewart talks about the importance of minorities developing a critical mass. Equity programs, like that at York University where I taught, show that this can have unexpected consequences. The drive behind the York equity program came from women, who were already present in sufficient numbers to push successfully for a program that was focused on addressing the gender imbalance. Women candidates were given various kinds of special consideration. Additional search requirements to seek out potential female candidates were imposed on hiring departments. Shortlisted female candidates appearing for interviews were given special meetings with female faculty and graduate students.

Obviously, addressing the gender imbalance was an entirely laudable objective, but there was no equivalent extension of special consideration to racial minority candidates. In fact, the equity program de facto, and to a degree, de jure, actually established a hierarchy of preference, starting with women, followed by racial minorities, aboriginal people and persons with disabilities—in all cases, preference given only where candidates were of comparable merit. (I have been gone from York for almost a decade, so my remarks refer only to the situation at that time, but I believe that this describes a more widespread situation in the academy.) There is no reason to believe that women ever intended to trump minorities. Their perfectly understandable desire to rectify a serious gender imbalance simply has the effect of unanticipated collateral damage.

Stewart, whose parents immigrated to Canada from the West Indies, faces another problem. In the United States, the terrible history of slavery, civil war and segregation has placed African Americans in an extraordinarily significant position in the American conscience. Canada’s multicultural society is increasingly non-white, but there is no one minority group with the numbers and the historical visibility of African Americans. It is unlikely that the variegated category of visible minority in this country describes a group with the relatively strong identity of African Americans. At least, not a group that can focus its claims for a stronger position in the academy in a disciplined and effective manner.

Stewart’s book has appeared just as the economic crisis has set in, with very nasty implications for university finances. Private funding has been drying up with the huge losses by investors, and public money is stagnant if not declining (the Harper government has judged that economic stimulus for the universities means bricks and mortar, not expansion of faculty). Job opportunities for young applicants of whatever colour or gender are disappearing quickly. Pleas for preferential hiring will get a stony reception in this darkening environment.

I take no pleasure in throwing cold water over an admirable cause. But perhaps Stewart can take courage from one very positive example, albeit outside the university and outside Canada. The election of an African American as president of the United States, a man who by his remarkable abilities explodes all racial stereotypes, may prove to be something of a historical game changer. And by the way, as well as carrying the world’s hopes for dealing with the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression, Barack Obama plays pretty good basketball.