Juno News - Laurier professor pushes back against “systemic racism” claims

00:00:00.000 Welcome back to the Andrew Lawton Show.

00:00:11.340 The big cultural battle of the month is will you admit that whatever institution or country you preside over is systemically racist?

00:00:19.220 Whether it's the RCMP, a political party, Canada itself, universities, companies, everyone has to say that everything is systemically racist.

00:00:27.620 And if you don't, you are just proving it and that makes you a racist.

00:00:30.700 This is the theme we've been talking about the last couple of shows and more and more examples keep emerging of it.

00:00:36.200 Well, the latest on the list is Laurier University, which the professor and president, Deborah McClatchy, recognizes has systemic racism on the campus.

00:00:47.680 She has said in a letter to the Laurier community that Laurier needs to tackle its systemic racism in the school and across the country.

00:00:55.440 And as such, Laurier has put forward an action plan for equity, diversity and inclusion and indigeneity.

00:01:02.560 Now, there may be nothing wrong with some of the specific proposals that are called for, but it's based on something that hasn't actually been defined or established, which is, is Laurier actually systemically racist?

00:01:14.760 And what does that mean?

00:01:16.040 Well, only a little bit of pushback.

00:01:17.740 Two professors, David Millard Haskell and William McNally, wrote an open letter saying, well, hang on, you haven't defined it, you haven't given any evidence, and what you're calling for has much broader implications than what you say it's about.

00:01:30.320 This letter, of course, making waves because, well, like I said, if you deny systemic racism, you're part of the problem.

00:01:36.820 Fantastic letter, it is published online at SAFS, the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarships website, SAFS.ca.

00:01:44.120 One of the co-authors, Professor David Millard Haskell, joins me on the line now.

00:01:48.680 David, good to talk to you.

00:01:49.740 Thanks very much for coming on today.

00:01:51.340 It's my pleasure, Andrew.

00:01:52.340 Thanks for having me.

00:01:53.440 Now, it's not to say you've been a shrinking violet from the free speech fight in general, certainly not at Laurier University.

00:01:59.360 You were front and centre when the Lindsay Shepard controversy happened a couple of years back, and you've continued to stand up for free speech.

00:02:07.140 But on this issue specifically, why did you decide to stick your neck out, especially in this climate where everyone's getting cancelled, and put some, you know, criticism and scrutiny on this approach from your school's president?

00:02:19.540 Well, you know, you have to choose your battles, and both Will and I have been really concerned about the drift within academia more generally, but also the drift within our own university, where empirical evidence is no longer being used in order to justify policies and messaging.

00:02:44.480 And it seems that ideological conclusions are driving what is happening, and these ideological conclusions are based on good evidence.

00:02:56.700 So this was an example of this, where our president said that there was, she made the suggestion that systemic racism was on our campus, and not only that, she had an action plan to combat it.

00:03:10.560 And we just, we had to say, stop for a moment, you're not basing this on evidence.

00:03:19.620 And so I think that there's a subtlety there, even, we're saying, we're looking for your justification for the claim.

00:03:28.480 We're not even saying your claim is wrong at this point, although the evidence that we've found would suggest it is.

00:03:34.660 But what we want, what we want as a university, as a place that makes its living, trying to advance knowledge, we want to see the evidence, we want to talk about the evidence.

00:03:48.740 And so it was just standing up for the principle, the principles that are supposed to be the very lifeblood of a university that made us want to respond.

00:03:58.540 One of the points you and Professor McNally raised in your letter, which should have been an obvious one, it should have been the very first thing that something like this would have addressed, is the lack of a definition of systemic racism or of racism in general.

00:04:12.840 And look, people may in their own minds know what racism is by way of example.

00:04:16.980 Systemic racism is a bit more complex, and I think has a lot more baggage and loading of that term, if I may.

00:04:24.080 And there's no definition of it.

00:04:26.700 McClatchy has said, yes, the school is systemically racist, but this did not come with an explanation as to how.

00:04:33.120 And you point that out in your letter, which, again, and I am not downplaying what you're saying here.

00:04:37.480 It should have been an obvious question that you raised, but no one else was.

00:04:41.900 And the irony here in the logic, Andrew, is that part of her action plan specifically says we need to define racism.

00:04:51.580 So she's admitted right there, we don't have a definition.

00:04:55.960 And yet she said earlier in this other missive that we're systemically racist.

00:05:01.300 So that's the cart before the horse.

00:05:03.760 This isn't how you work the scientific method.

00:05:06.420 And my worry is there was language within her email that was referencing critical race theory, which is an offsheet of critical theory more generally.

00:05:19.060 And it has a lot of really anti-academic ideas behind it.

00:05:28.520 They suggest things like even empirical evidence is really promoting whiteness or white oppression.

00:05:36.780 And this is right in the works of critical race theorists.

00:05:39.680 And when you're saying that empirical evidence is oppression, what else do we have?

00:05:47.560 What else do we have that we've been using since the Enlightenment to actually try and get away from issues of bias, but instead try and advance just neutral knowledge?

00:05:57.720 So with systemic racism, what I'm what I'm worrying about is that it doesn't look like racism as we were taught.

00:06:09.460 Right. Racism.

00:06:10.960 When when we were younger, we were taught that if you say something that is negative about someone's skin color or about someone because of their skin color.

00:06:21.260 If you had words or actions that were directly discriminatory related to someone's skin color, that's racism.

00:06:28.400 And all of us agree that's terrible.

00:06:31.720 It's sickening and we should stand against it.

00:06:34.800 But systemic racism, it's this different thing.

00:06:37.560 And as I read the literature and and I read, we'll talk maybe about the single study that Dr.

00:06:44.840 McClatchy used to justify this entire action plan.

00:06:48.960 Yeah, the being raced study, I was going to ask that, ask about that.

00:06:53.440 So tell me why that's such a dangerous part of this.

00:06:55.920 Well, because it's in fact explicitly says we're using critical race theory as the underpinnings for the study.

00:07:03.600 And the idea of systemic racism as it is applied within critical race theory is that any disparity, any disparity where where black people, people of color or other people of color are at a disadvantage,

00:07:18.180 where it negatively, the numbers are negatively against them, that in and of itself is racism.

00:07:25.220 Well, that's the fallacy of saying that correlation equals causation.

00:07:29.700 And every researcher knows you don't do that.

00:07:32.900 And yet here we have a university promoting this idea, this very anti-intellectual idea.

00:07:40.020 So it's worrying.

00:07:42.340 It's worrying when the keepers of knowledge abandon their job.

00:07:47.440 Yeah, and that's one of the big things.

00:07:51.740 And I know this is not an academic point that I'm about to address here.

00:07:55.300 But when we saw last week, for example, the RCMP commissioner, Brenda Luckey, say the RCMP is systemically racist and failed to come up with an explanation for how she's reached that and, you know, ended up passing the question off somewhere else.

00:08:08.060 There's something that we see right now in this culture, and I know we're going to talk a little bit more about some of these broader issues, but where people are committed to the outcome before they even go through that process.

00:08:20.220 So that's no different than McClatchy saying that, yes, we're systemically racist, and one of the things we're going to do is come up with a definition of what racism means.

00:08:29.100 It's like they know that this is the right thing to say or the so-called woke thing to say, and whatever other processes they need to go through to get to that point, they're going to go through, but they've already determined that's where they're going with it.

00:08:41.920 Right, and it short circuits what actually is the scientific method, because we want to test and retest.

00:08:49.580 And so what actually happens when you begin to investigate this notion of systemic racism?

00:08:55.720 So if you're listening to people talk about systemic racism, especially in the context of the George Floyd death, they often talk about it in terms of policing.

00:09:07.240 But Will and I, in our letter even, we said the best empirical evidence shows that really the shooting of black people is not racially motivated.

00:09:18.760 We've got Roland Fryer at Harvard has done studies from 2018, some of the most current work we have that shows there is not evidence of this racial motivation.

00:09:32.520 Another fellow at Michigan State University from 2019, Joseph Cesaro, I think I'm getting his name right, but he did a nationwide study.

00:09:45.540 And he said, listen, it's a fact that a black man in America is more apt to be shot by a black police officer than a white police officer. 0.80

00:09:56.660 There just isn't proof that this is racially motivated.

00:10:00.960 So I look at that and I say, I want to know if there is some kind of racism happening.

00:10:08.020 And let's stick with the police.

00:10:09.900 I want to know about it so we can fix it.

00:10:12.180 But these claims that are not based on evidence aren't getting us anywhere.

00:10:16.780 Well, they're getting us into a very dangerous place, a place that is not based on evidence, but it's based on a lot of thoughts about doing things that are pretty hostile.

00:10:28.540 And you point out in your letter something here, if this research was presented in class, it might be perceived as, quote, invalidating racialized people's experience of racism, unquote.

00:10:40.160 Now, I should say I haven't read Fryer's research.

00:10:42.860 It could be that there's a scientific point to be debated there that you could, you know, take aim through the scientific method at his findings, his methodology, whatever else you'd like.

00:10:53.060 But you raise a point there that I don't think anyone can disagree, that there would be lots of people lined up, including at academic institutions, to have the discussion of that research taken off the table because of how it might make people feel.

00:11:05.380 And thanks for bringing that up, because really, you've hit the nail on the head.

00:11:09.320 This is what we're really concerned about.

00:11:11.640 So the implications of what our president was saying and also the study that she cites, the study itself, it was called Being Raced.

00:11:19.200 It was produced by some undergraduate students under the tutelage of some mentors who were professors and also people from the diversity and equity office.

00:11:28.580 And the study itself, it's a phenomenological study.

00:11:33.740 It's not, it wasn't, it wasn't a properly chosen sample in order to generalize from it.

00:11:40.760 It was also of the sort that said, anything that our participants say is racism, we are going to not question it.

00:11:51.280 And that's fine for lived experience, but that's not fine when you're going to generate policy.

00:11:56.500 So back to this, this notion about what that study also said, that study made some claims that said, from their perspective, if a professor, they called it a faculty perpetrator, if a professor were to quote from a study that went against the lived experience of a student,

00:12:22.140 and even if that, even if the professor is quoting peer-reviewed, excellent research, but it's going against the lived experience of the student in the classroom, that's racism.

00:12:34.080 Well, suddenly you can't quote those studies.

00:12:38.360 And we have to, as an institution, realize that we're going to say things that make people uncomfortable.

00:12:46.260 That's what happens in a democracy, that's what happens in, and should happen in a university where academic freedom is present.

00:12:55.100 Now, I'm all for being simple, but absolutely we cannot stop talking about facts simply because they make people uncomfortable.

00:13:04.760 We are having a little bit of a technical glitch here.

00:13:08.040 We were able to solve one, but we created another.

00:13:10.300 So we've switched over to the phone now.

00:13:12.780 David Haskell, thanks for sticking with us here.

00:13:14.820 The recording system has already decided to take an early Canada Day holiday here.

00:13:20.420 We were talking, though, about a lot of the, I'll say, frankly, shoddy research or non-existent research that's going into a lot of these declarations.

00:13:30.140 And I appreciate something you mentioned earlier, which is to say that you're not even discounting that racism or systemic racism exists on campus.

00:13:37.480 You're saying that there is no basis for the school's president to make those claims.

00:13:42.800 And I wanted to ask you, because I thought that, you know, there was a bit of a glimmer of hope a couple of years back when Lindsay Shepard, I think, exposed a lot of what was going on.

00:13:51.760 And you were front and center on that battle, as was your co-author of this letter, Dr. McNally.

00:13:57.300 And we fast forward to the present time, and it seems like, you know, any step you took forward was met with two or three steps back.

00:14:05.900 So how do you think that the campus, by and large, is responding to this sort of thing?

00:14:11.440 Because when you're making a claim that a school community is systemically racist, you're basically saying that everyone who is responsible for making up that campus isn't somehow, in some way, complicit in racism.

00:14:23.380 Yeah, well, that is the implication there.

00:14:27.880 And it is, again, that's an incredibly pejorative thing to say about a campus without having quantitative empirical data to back it up.

00:14:40.100 And my worry, and you were drawing in the history about where Laurier has been and how, in the Lindsay Shepard affair, our administration and certain members of faculty were challenged.

00:14:56.100 And they were challenged by Lindsay, first of all, saying, you're saying things that aren't true.

00:15:03.780 For example, the professor said to her that by airing a video that it appeared on public TV, she'd actually committed a hate crime, which wasn't true.

00:15:13.480 Again, here we have claims that just are not based in empirical fact.

00:15:17.500 So here we have another case just last week or two weeks ago when the president of the university says we've got systemic racism on campus, creates a plan.

00:15:30.080 I don't know why professors, we've got 550 full-time professors at Laurier, and they're supposed to be, most of them, expert in research methodology.

00:15:42.860 Why did they not look at the letter in the same way that Will McNally and I did and said, this is just not good scholarship.

00:15:52.840 This is just not empirically backed claims.

00:15:57.220 So we've got to, this is worrying.

00:16:03.420 Because when professors are willing to let unjustified claims be presented as fact, the university as an institution is worthless.

00:16:12.860 Only two professors, Will and I, questioned the administration's claim of systemic racism on campus in the absence of a clear definition.

00:16:24.000 There wasn't even a definition.

00:16:25.400 And in the absence of empirical evidence, where are the other professors?

00:16:29.040 Yeah, and that's the big problem here.

00:16:33.680 I mean, it used to be not so long ago when academic freedom arose that there was, for the most part, I'd say, enough of, not even a collegiality, but enough of a self-awareness that professors would recognize,

00:16:46.160 hey, even if I don't like the work that Haskell's doing over there, I know that if I condemn that, it could just as easily be me that's condemned next time around.

00:16:54.560 And now that's not there.

00:16:56.620 I mean, Western University, for example, where I went here in London, Ontario, they've now posthumously apologized for the work of one professor, Philippe Rushton.

00:17:06.520 And, you know, controversial or not, the idea that schools that used to protect tenure and academic freedom and academic inquiry and all of these things are now going quite brazenly in the other direction,

00:17:18.500 which is to say, not just saying, hey, you know what, we think that, you know, someone should challenge this research,

00:17:23.120 but saying you don't have a right to pursue this or you don't have a right to champion this line of questioning.

00:17:28.800 Right, and it has far-reaching implications.

00:17:33.660 You wonder, if a professor or a group of professors, if faculty at a university are willing to say,

00:17:44.340 this empirical data, this factual material cannot be published, and they're attacking their own fellow professors,

00:17:55.840 then what are they not willing to tell their students in the classroom?

00:18:05.440 Is it only politically correct messages that our students are going to be hearing?

00:18:09.980 Only messages that our professors think are agreeable?

00:18:16.720 Because if that's the case, why go to university if you're actually not going to get what might be the most compelling research,

00:18:24.960 the most methodologically sound research on the chance that it upset someone, well, then university is just as worthless.

00:18:34.640 Where do you think this goes from here?

00:18:39.740 Because I do feel like at a certain point, I mean, we see in the social justice world a lot of cannibalization on the left sometimes.

00:18:48.200 People that have been able to check off all the boxes of being an ally to this group, to this group, to this group,

00:18:53.740 they make one wrong step and boom, the mob turns on them.

00:18:57.120 Do you think in academia the same sort of thing will happen in such a way that there's enough time for a collective pushback?

00:19:03.480 Perhaps some of the people that have been adding fuel to these fires saying, you know what, we may have gone a bit too far.

00:19:09.240 Do you think that ship has sailed?

00:19:11.720 I really think, sadly, the ship has sailed.

00:19:18.220 There just is not the will on campus to push back against this.

00:19:23.760 Again, just using the Laurier example, there are 550 full-time professors who would have seen there was no empirical evidence to back the president's claims.

00:19:34.320 And only two professors challenged it.

00:19:39.280 And here's the other thing.

00:19:41.960 Apart from a media outlet in the United States, you are the only news organization who thought that this was important.

00:19:52.000 Wow.

00:19:52.480 Even the media, and we've alerted media.

00:19:56.160 And if you can't get the message out, there's just not the will.

00:20:00.420 The media doesn't want to talk about it, that we have this crisis in education where empirical evidence is being suppressed.

00:20:09.340 And then we've got the crisis within academia itself.

00:20:13.080 And where does it go from here?

00:20:16.720 It will get worse.

00:20:18.240 And what we continue to see is that the progressives, and I'm using that term not in a favorable way, the left, the far left, who have taken over universities.

00:20:33.580 And by that, this is an empirical fact as well.

00:20:39.560 Joel Inberg did a study to see what percentage, and others, by the way, he's the only one that comes to mind, what percentage of university professors in North America are conservative-leaning or libertarian or classical liberal.

00:20:54.440 And it's about 6% and dwindling.

00:20:57.220 And when he asked the people who are self-identified progressive or liberal, would you not hire, would you purposely sink a candidate if you found out they were conservative?

00:21:12.080 25% said yes.

00:21:14.060 And that was just the 25% who were willing to say yes, because that's something you don't want to admit to.

00:21:20.460 So the trouble is we've lost the universities, or the reality is we've lost the universities.

00:21:27.660 And when nobody is there to be the counterpoint, when you don't have professors who have a different set of ideas, then you've got a monolith.

00:21:38.400 And so the urge is to just get more of the same, and power corrupts absolutely.

00:21:44.740 We know this.

00:21:45.520 So we'll continue to see these linguistic traps, and by that, what they'll do is they'll corrupt the definition of a word.

00:21:52.900 This is the thing that they're doing just incessantly now, repeatedly now.

00:21:57.940 They corrupt the definition of a word.

00:22:00.760 They take a word like racism that had meaning, and it becomes systemic racism.

00:22:06.440 And it doesn't mean what you thought it used to mean.

00:22:08.720 Now it means if there's a disparity, if there's a difference in numbers, then suddenly that implies racism.

00:22:16.180 So they do this, and they've done it with things like, well, I wrote a paper called Words Lose Their Meaning at Wilfrid Laurier.

00:22:26.140 So rather than rehash that, I'd say to the listeners, take a look at that, and you'll see the numerous examples where this has happened.

00:22:34.720 But it's a linguistic trap, and it's going to get worse.

00:22:40.540 Yeah, and I think those wording things are important, because you never want to get bogged down in semantics.

00:22:45.340 But a lot of the time when you cede the language, you end up ceding a part of the battle.

00:22:50.360 And I think the racist thing is a great example of this, because, you know, a lot of people on the right, certainly those who work in new media, are used to being called racist.

00:22:59.240 I mean, this word that used to carry a lot of weight now is, you know, like, you know, cookie or the word and.

00:23:04.900 Like, it's just, it's said, and you don't really think of it now.

00:23:07.460 But it does still, to people that aren't in that world, have a lot of meaning.

00:23:10.780 And when you put that qualifier on systemic, it means something even more.

00:23:15.500 And, you know, systemic racism, ergo, requires systemic change.

00:23:19.260 So before people have even, to go back full circle to how we started here, before people have even established what that meant, we're already three steps ahead on the action plan.

00:23:28.680 That's right, without the definition of racism itself.

00:23:31.740 Yeah, and you, by virtue of asking that, prove that the system is racist.

00:24:01.740 Because only a racist system would allow such questions.

00:24:05.060 Exactly.

00:24:06.080 Similarly, we've seen what's happened with white supremacy.

00:24:09.520 The word, the word. 0.95

00:24:11.600 It used to mean people who belonged to the KKK, really despicable people.

00:24:18.600 But it now means every Judeo-Christian value and all Western thought, you know, as it's used by people who are promoting critical race theory.

00:24:28.400 That now is white supremacy.

00:24:30.180 And if that's white supremacy, what they're really looking for is to destroy society as we know it.

00:24:40.600 Well, even if it is just two of over 500 professors speaking up, I am so very grateful you two are there.

00:24:49.740 David Haskell, David Millard Haskell, professor at Laurier University.

00:24:53.440 A fantastic letter written alongside fellow professor William McNally.

00:24:58.100 David, thank you so much for coming on today.

00:25:00.220 Really great talking to you, as always.

00:25:02.480 Yeah, it's really appreciated, sir, about the glitches.

00:25:04.460 Yeah, no worries.

00:25:05.940 It happens.

00:25:06.500 Well, nothing's going to shut us up, right?

00:25:09.340 Hopefully, no.

00:25:10.460 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:25:12.700 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

00:25:17.820 Thank you.

00:25:23.760 Thank you.

00:25:43.000 Thank you.

Juno News - July 02, 2020

Laurier professor pushes back against “systemic racism” claims

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript