00:00:00.000well we all knew that academia was well and truly off of the deep end with their
00:00:11.520wokeness and their diversity equity and inclusion measures but Canadians didn't
00:00:15.720realize until yesterday that tens of millions of dollars in public money our
00:00:21.720money is being blown away essentially lit on fire to promote and push the DEI
00:00:27.960agenda in academia. A new report from the McDonnell Laurier Institute finds that
00:00:33.200Canada research chair positions public money that goes to research funded by us
00:00:38.940to academics is being wasted to the tune of tens of millions of dollars on
00:00:45.480discriminatory woke hiring practices in academia. Well one of the authors of that
00:00:51.300report joins me next to talk about what's really going on. The Canadian
00:00:54.540government and big tech find new ways every day to shut down and silence
00:00:57.900conservative voices online. There's no longer this big moment when you get canceled. It's done
00:01:02.100so quietly, behind your back, by speaking algorithms. The only way we can make sure you
00:01:06.180receive every episode of Rayshould is to make a free account at JunoNews.com. If you want early
00:01:11.140access to each episode of Rayshould, as well as exclusive Juno News reporting, you can use my
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00:01:22.380before we get into it, be sure to drop a like on this video, subscribe to the Juno News YouTube
00:01:26.200channel and the comment question for the episode is this is canadian academia salvageable at this
00:01:32.680point let me know your answer in the comments below and let's get into it joining me now is
00:01:36.920one of the researchers of that latest mli uh discovery eric kaufman professor kaufman thank
00:01:44.200you so much for joining me it's great to be here harrison so to begin could you just outline some
00:01:50.040of the headline items of this research from what i understand the canadian taxpayer is wasting
00:01:56.920tens of millions of dollars on dei hires what's going on here yeah i mean and really this is
00:02:04.680only the tip of a much larger larger iceberg so this study just looked at something called the
00:02:10.680canada research chairs which is the most prestigious pinnacle of canada's academic
00:02:17.160research system which is receives 4.5 billion a year in funding now a lot of that is worthwhile
00:02:23.240r d so i don't want to knock the whole 4.5 enterprise however a significant chunk
00:02:30.600which is in my view it well in excess of 100 million is being wasted each year on
00:02:37.000awards to candidates who tick identity boxes but don't actually merit an award number one
00:02:44.680And secondly, money is being spent on ideological or scholar activism, which basically means making the facts fit your ideology, imposing your ideology on the facts rather than finding out about the world, letting the facts speak for themselves.
00:02:58.780So we have, that's the big picture. What was I looking at in this report? I looked at something
00:03:04.640concrete. Canada Research Chairs, it's got a $300 million budget annually, out of that $4.5 billion.
00:03:11.700But it's the most prestigious thing. You get it for seven years. At the top tier, it's $200,000 a
00:03:17.460year. At the second tier, it's $100,000 a year. It kind of makes your career, means you are bought
00:03:22.880out of teaching. It means you focus on research. So that's a big investment by the Canadian taxpayer.
00:03:28.340The first thing to say is I went through, what's happened is that the CRCs, Canada Research Chairs,
00:03:35.540have, like other parts of Canada's research infrastructure, adopted aggressive EDI.
00:03:42.820So universities are given concrete targets to meet for racialized, i.e. non-white Canadians,
00:03:51.620females indigenous and disabled. If they don't hit those targets, they are at strong risk.
00:04:00.580Essentially, they are warned that if they don't hit that target, they're going to lose their
00:04:03.780chair allocation. So they're hitting their targets. And what that means is race and sex
00:04:09.540discrimination against white males in order to achieve equal outcomes by race and sex. That's
00:04:16.980what's going on. So anti-white male discrimination. Not only that, by the way, I should say that
00:04:21.620This is really coming on the backs of young white males or people in mid-career generally are paying a bigger price than senior scholars.
00:04:31.620So it's really hitting that younger white male group. They're really being disadvantaged heavily.
00:04:39.620One of the things we were able to do is to look at all of the academics and look at their research impact using the widely used industry metric of something called the H index.
00:04:50.620index. That's number of publications times the number of times each publication is cited by
00:04:56.060another scholar. So that gives us a nice clean metric. And despite the criticism which some
00:05:01.580scholars will make of this, this is actually all other things being equal, a very good predictor
00:05:06.380of research excellence. So what does that show? Well what it shows effectively is that
00:05:12.860black, indigenous, and female Canada research chairs have a significantly lower research impact
00:05:22.060than white, Asian, or male Canada research chairs. To the tune of 12 for each
00:05:30.060so-called equity deserving appointment that is black, indigenous, or female,
00:05:36.620we're losing about 12 to 15 percent output compared to a white Asian or male.
00:05:42.780And what that's meaning is the cost to the system per year of the 300 million going towards DEI
00:05:48.780hiring, the lost productivity, is equivalent to 18 million dollars, six percent of the total budget.
00:05:56.300We then looked at EDI keywords, the number of descriptions of research chairs that use
00:06:05.020keywords like marginalize, decolonize, you know, equity, these kinds of words which we, which there's
00:06:10.940an already an established literature on these terms. There's been a doubling between 2017 and
00:06:17.3402025 in the use of these terms, heavily concentrated in the social sciences and humanities,
00:06:23.340which is incidentally where a lot of the DEI hiring is happening, particularly of Black and
00:06:29.260indigenous scholars. And so what we can see there is a huge amount of taxpayer money is being spent
00:06:37.340on ideology, people promoting what you might call woke or cultural socialist ideology,
00:06:43.820and labeling that research. And we've seen that obviously in the Jason Arday case, if you look
00:06:47.740at the kinds of things that he was publishing, it's an example of this kind of really effectively
00:06:53.900non-research or very highly politicized work. That's, we're calculating worth another 18 million
00:07:01.060or 6%. So you put those two together, there's a waste of 12%, 36 million out of that 300 million
00:07:07.480budget. But in addition, what we're doing is we're subsidizing an adversarial ideology
00:07:11.960that believes in equal results, trumping equal treatment. So racial discrimination to achieve
00:07:19.200equal results means we're not going to treat you fairly without regard to race and sex.
00:07:24.240And that is what we are subsidizing with this crime.
00:07:28.420So, I mean, it's not as if this would be that surprising.
00:07:33.360It's surprising that the number, the amount of waste that is going towards this, because
00:07:39.880people paying attention obviously would know that there is discrimination going on in university
00:11:18.900there are, you know, changes. So there's no question that Alberta, you know, Danielle Smith
00:11:24.100has changed her tune on trans, on DEI, certainly better than where she was. If people like Caroline
00:11:32.500Elliott, maybe Carolyn Finley in British Columbia get in, there's a decent chance they might start
00:11:38.580to take a more aggressive approach to this stuff. Of course, the mainstream media will be attacking
00:11:43.220them as divisive, stoking the culture war, all that's terrible Trumpy stuff. In fact, it's
00:11:48.100perfectly reasonable and it's in accord with the values of two-thirds and or more of canadians and
00:11:53.620we know that from surveys i just find it strange because this would be an attempt to make sure that
00:11:58.900everyone is treated equally and somehow that's going to be viewed as divisive i i just don't
00:12:05.060know how we've even got to that point but where does this all end up in the future because if
00:12:13.220we have all these conservative provincial governments they don't seem like they're about to
00:12:17.620mandate equal treatment and this seems like it will just continue to go forward so if white males
00:12:24.180for example feel like their future in academia is going to be cut short because the color of their
00:12:28.820skin where does this all end up yeah and of course there was a very important piece by jacob savage
00:12:35.460in the compact magazine talking all about the cost to younger white men in fields like publishing
00:12:41.220for example so is this happening in other fields as well um yeah this really can only happen in my
00:12:47.860view from the top down or from pressure from the top down so i contrast um research agency spending
00:12:57.060on dei themed projects in the united states you can see that it goes up peaks in sort of 2022
00:13:05.060starts to decline in 2024 a bit and then with the trump administration it sort of crashes down to
00:13:10.820not quite zero, but pretty close. In Canada and in Britain, DEI-themed research has just gone,
00:13:18.500it's just rising and rising and rising. There's no end to where it's rising. So this, there is no
00:13:24.180reform from within. The academics who say we can handle this somehow internally, that just doesn't,
00:13:30.740it's just not going to happen. So what is needed is a government that's serious about getting rid
00:13:35.860rid of EDI and not you know Alberta has said that they are not allowing it but until you actually
00:13:42.700enforce that and until you actually punish people who continue to flout the law it will continue to
00:13:48.160be you know continue to happen so I just think it's going to take a very determined and focused
00:13:52.840government to to get to root out EDI and make it part of their political platform and explain to
00:13:59.440the people why not only is this not divisive but what the other side is doing is is actually
00:14:04.160incredibly divisive, and they're just gaslighting people. So you mentioned the Trump administration,
00:14:10.020and obviously they did campaign on removing this diversity agenda, and apparently it's
00:14:16.780been successful. It seems that really that was enforced by the stroke of a pen. Is it really
00:14:22.860that simple? Could it just be through legislation, through the stroke of a pen, that these things
00:14:28.040eventually start to fall off. Yeah, I do believe that the existing political system, executive
00:14:34.940power can be used, legislation, also guidance to public bodies on how they are allowed to interpret
00:14:41.860these unfortunately very problematic sections of the Canadian Charter. 15-2, I think, is the
00:14:47.740particular clause. I mean, ideally you would change that, but changing the constitution requires 10
00:14:53.420premiers. That's probably not going to happen. But you can actually impose very, very strict
00:14:57.860guidelines on when you're allowed to engage in this positive action stuff and make it almost
00:15:03.200impossible. So I do think it's possible to happen, but it's going to require a determined effort and
00:15:09.060an expending of political capital and explaining to people why this is important. Why, hey, they're
00:15:14.460discriminating on the basis of race. Do you agree with that? Force Mark Carney to answer for racial
00:15:21.980discrimination and to own that policy. I mean, that's not happening right now. So I think that
00:15:26.980And partly the left is getting away with it. Partly the institutions are getting away with it because there isn't political leadership on this.
00:15:34.040So going back to some of these Canada research chair positions, which I think we can just admit some of these seem to be quite meaningless if they're being handed out for research in diversity and, you know, women's and race studies for the amount that it costs the Canadian taxpayer with that kind of angle.
00:15:54.060What are some of the examples of the research that is being created with these diversity quotas?
00:16:00.520Can you give us some examples that you've been able to find about what our public money is actually going towards?
00:16:07.140Well, for example, the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Wellbeing.
00:16:13.680You know, all kinds of research on decolonizing the environmental movement, all of this kind of thing.
00:16:20.720uh lgbtq plus two spirit all this sort of you know very sort of self-absorbed identity focused
00:16:28.960research that's what's being i i wish i had the full it's in the report i've got some
00:16:34.000illustrative examples uh but yeah really just uh taking money which could be spent on
00:16:39.840fixing roads or or improving you know medical services uh is is just going down the drain here
00:16:46.000So, you know, really, if you had a government that was serious about cutting this kind of waste, it should free up, you know, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars that could be spent on something useful.
00:16:59.780And I'm not saying, you know, a lot of the research, it's expanding knowledge, it's serving society.
00:17:05.640So there's a lot of good stuff happening, and I don't want to impugn most of the R&D.
00:17:09.160but really in order the other part of this is the public is going to lose trust in academia and they
00:17:15.960are going to lose faith in in this kind of research base if you continue to see these kinds
00:17:22.360of discriminatory policies and wasteful politically driven scholar activist kind of research so i do
00:17:29.880think that there hasn't been enough scrutiny by the media of canadian academia if you look at
00:17:35.080Republican voters in the United States, only 20% of them trust universities. If you look at
00:17:41.460conservative voters in Canada, that's more like 60%. Voters on the right in Canada are just not
00:17:48.480aware of what's happening in the institutions because it's kept away from them. It's all
00:17:54.540behind closed doors. And unless you're actually reading think tank reports or reading the National
00:17:59.500Post or listening to Harrison Faulkner, you know, you're probably not getting a bird's eye view into
00:18:06.500the kinds of moral and ideological corruption going on within these ostensibly neutral white
00:18:13.760coated institutions. So there needs to be more transparency. And also, we need to see political
00:18:19.560leadership on this. And that's, in my view, it's in a few places. And we saw that with
00:18:25.300some of the conservative campaigns like the Elliott campaign in British Columbia. We've seen
00:18:31.240it a tiny bit with New Brunswick and Alberta, but I think it needs to go a lot further. And I don't
00:18:37.920know, sometimes it's going to take people, maybe younger conservatives within their respective
00:18:43.200parties, making this an issue, pushing on the establishments to get them to take cultural
00:18:49.760issues more seriously. I think that's the only way forward. So it seems from my perspective,
00:18:55.300that a lot of these great Canadian universities are starting to lose their shine because as you
00:19:02.800point out, you discussed this moral and ideological corruption. I, for example, went, and I wouldn't
00:19:08.900describe this as a great Canadian learning institution, but my university, Ryerson,
00:19:14.120went through a renaming process due to this groundswell of this ideological corruption
00:19:19.620built on a false reading of Canadian history. But that's kind of a side point. I just wanted
00:19:24.520to put that in but overall how would you say this this this moral corruption is impacting some of
00:19:31.100these great canadian learning institutions we all know the big names but from my perspective it
00:19:36.920seems that this is really having an impact on on these universities and i think there we're going
00:19:41.980to see a future in which a lot of canadians no longer look at attending university as the next
00:19:48.420step in their journey in life? Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things there. I mean,
00:19:54.360the first thing to say is, yeah, universities are supposed to be about academic freedom and
00:19:58.340the pursuit of truth and the production of knowledge that is serving what society is
00:20:04.040interested in and advancing what we know about the world. Instead, what's occurred progressively,
00:20:11.180really starting in the 60s in a small scale, starting to accelerate in the late 1980s,
00:20:18.540accelerating very quickly in the mid-2010s, is a shift away from the pursuit of knowledge to
00:20:25.640what's known as perhaps social justice ideology, what I call wokeness or EDI ideology. That is,
00:20:32.960that the university is there to essentially pursue the ideology of equal outcomes and
00:20:38.660emotional harm protection for totemic minority groups that is really their their overriding
00:20:44.900mission and within that once they've done that okay we'll pursue some truth and knowledge and
00:20:50.100you can have a bit of freedom if there's any left over that's kind of the dominant ethos of
00:20:55.940most universities in canada now so they're not going to prioritize the traditional truth and
00:21:02.180freedom values over the social justice values um and there's no way the taxpayers agree with that
00:21:08.660But actually, most Canadians are just in the dark about what's happening, and not just at universities, but in schools, in the civil service, in even the medical system.
00:21:19.820What are the values that are being promoted there, and do they align with the beliefs of most Canadians, which, by the way, are two-thirds against the woke position?
00:21:28.100So, for example, in a 2024 MLI study I did, you know, over two-thirds of Canadians want a colorblind rather than color-conscious approach in policy.
00:21:38.660They, you know, two-thirds or more do not think Sir John A. Macdonald's statues should be removed.
00:21:45.920They don't think Canada's a racist country.
00:21:47.880All of these kinds of things run against the beliefs of most Canadians, but the Canadians remain uninformed and the politicians are therefore not responding to the scale of this problem.
00:22:00.080I think if a politician did and explained precisely what was going on, people's jaws would drop and they would easily get the public behind them.
00:22:08.660They just need to have the courage to take on the cultural elites and the established institutions which are trying to enforce this idea that you can't talk about culture war stuff.
00:22:21.840I mean, the reality is they're pursuing a cultural revolution.
00:22:25.540Any attempt to slow that down or stop that is called culture war.
00:22:28.560So it's incredible how easily the conservative politicians are being gaslit by this campaign.
00:22:34.720Yeah, and I think that Canadians do have to start taking culture more seriously and to not just say we only can talk about you conservatives.
00:22:43.900You're allowed to talk about the economy and foreign policy and nothing else.
00:22:47.180I think that kind of supplication has to end.
00:22:51.500Absolutely. Well, on that note, we'll leave it there.
00:22:54.460Professor Eric Kaufman, thank you so much for joining me.