February 2001
University Employment Equity Commitment Unaffected by Provincial Politics
by John J. Furedy
The wording of a university's tenure- stream advertisement is an indirect indication of the institution's relative commitment to the conflicting principles of employment equity and merit. The degree of this commitment can vary considerably even if, as is the case on Canadian campuses, all universities have an employment equity policy (if only to ensure that they are eligible for federal funding, and are seen as conforming to the 1986 federal employment equity law). For example, as Stewart Page reported in his "On the daily vicissitudes of equity-based hiring" in the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship Newsletter #22 (June 1999, pp. 2-5), in some universities the equity officers can exert quite direct pressures on departmental chairs regarding job advertisements and decisions on appointments. For example at the University of Toronto, the Status of Women equity officer meets with every hiring committee, and asks pointed questions if, for instance, the short list does not have any women on it.
Funded by the Donner Canadian Foundation and the Horowitz Foundation, some students and I have been engaged in what I have called "judgmental content analysis" of the wording of advertisements for Canadian tenure-stream arts and science positions in University Affairs, the bulletin of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which carries all academic job ads.
We have used statistical techniques1 to examine the effects of factors like time (e.g., 1971-75, 1976-80, 1981-85), location (Eastern Canada, Ontario, Western Canada, Quebec), discipline difficulty (physical science, social sciences, and humanities), and university mission (using the McLean's 3-level categorization of universities: medical/doctoral, comprehensive, and undergraduate. This study has included the interactions of these factors on both merit and equity wording.
Our studies identify latent influences on the way in which universities achieve the right "balance" between merit and equity considerations. The influences are latent in the sense that we assume the advertisements are not consciously worded to be different according to time, location, discipline difficulty, or mission.
In this article, I report on the impact of political change on the employment equity policies of universities.
There was a quasi-earthquake in Ontario politics when, after a three-year NDP government headed by Bob Rae, the Progressive Conservatives under Mike Harris took over in 1995. Whereas the NDP had strengthened employment equity regulations during the Rae years, Harris abolished the requirements, at least for private industries. Admittedly, the federal employment equity law of 1986 was still in place, and the provincial government said nothing about equity policies in universities as against private industries. So it would be too much to expect Ontario's universities to revert to considering only merit in appointing its tenure-stream faculty. Nevertheless, given that the major source of public funding for universities is provincial rather than federal, one would expect the Ontario political shift on employment equity to have at least some effect on the hiring policies of its universities.
To test for this predicted effect, we used our factorial judgmental content analysis method on some 400 tenure-stream advertisements, and looked at time as a two-level factor with the years 1992-4 and 1996-8 as the two "levels." After several months of discussion about our rating system, our three research-assistant judges (Sean Fidler, Yaniv Morgenstern, and Wendy Tryhorn) rated each advertisement (with names and places removed) on 7-point scales of merit and equity. To the extent that the Rae-to-Harris shift in Ontario affected universities' commitment to employment equity, one would expect an interaction between time and location, such that in Ontario alone (in contrast to the three other locations, where no such political shift against employment equity had occurred) there would be a significant drop in equity ratings from the Rae (1992-4) to Harris (1994-6) period. (Students of experimental design will note that the three other non-Ontario locations provide quite a sound basis of control for looking at the "experimental" effect of the Rae-to-Harris shift, even though there has not been any experimental manipulation in the normal sense of that term).
Contrary to prediction, no such interaction emerged. The change in government was not a statistically significant factor. (We measure this with an "F" test, in which higher values mean greater effect. The "F" value for the change in government was less than 1.) Nor was this result due to any insensitivity of our measurement. The "F" values for a number of other significant main and interaction effects (which will be communicated later in a more extensive report) ranged from 9.0 to over 60.
The fact that a major political shift of the sort that occurred in Ontario appears to have no effect at all in universities' commitment to employment equity suggests to me that those who are committed to advancing merit over equity in higher education have to work independently of the political changes that occur outside the universities. This study also shows that it is possible to do meaningful empirical work on the effects of political correctness on Canadian campuses.
Note
1 Factorial analysis of variance techniques.
John J. Furedy, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and has a cross appointment at the Center for Brain Research at Ege University in Turkey. He is also Vice-President for International Affiliation for the Foundation for the Advancement of Sexual Equity.
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