Diversity mandates are killing Canadian science: Heterosexual White Males Given only 19% of $300-Million In Fed Funded Research Money

Diversity mandates are killing Canadian science

• National Post
• 20 Sep 2025
• TRISTIN HOPPER

Diversity mandates as practised by Canada are eroding basic science and discrediting the academic system, the renowned Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker warned in recent testimony to a House of Commons research committee.

“Allocating funding to scientists based on their race or sex works against the interest of science and the nation,” Pinker told a meeting of the Standing Committee on Science and Research this week.

Rather, said Pinker, universities need to drop their “obsession” with enforcing ethnic diversity and focus instead on cultivating “viewpoint diversity.”

“As the joke went, in a university, diversity means people who look different but think alike,” he said.

Born and educated in Montreal, Pinker ranks as one of the world’s most wellknown Canadian academics. His books can regularly be seen atop The New York Times bestseller list, and his 2002 work The Blank Slate was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Pinker’s testimony was mostly a broad critique of diversity quotas, which he said had their origins in the 1970s in the United States. Nevertheless, in recent years it has indeed become standard practice for Canadian universities to ascribe racebased quotas to everything from admissions to hiring to grant funding.

In a February report, the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy found that it was a near-universal practice of Canadian universities to either screen for candidates based on race or sexuality, or to require them to file “diversity statements” expressing adherence to campus “anti-racism” policies.

Multiple Canadian universities have also begun setting aside program seats for members of a specific race. Toronto Metropolitan University, for one, opened its medical school last year with a requirement that 75 per cent of all admissions go to Black, Indigenous and other “equity-deserving” applicants.

Pinker told the committee that his own Harvard students, when faced with mandatory diversity statements to obtain a research position, have sometimes filled them out using the AI program CHATGPT.

Said Pinker, “they could not honestly fill them out; it would go against their conscience to say things that they knew were not true, but they knew they would be blackballed and eliminated from a job if they expressed their true opinions.”

In Canada, many of these identity-based policies have been driven by federal order. The more than $300 million in annual funding for Canada Research Chairs, for instance, requires universities to meet strict hiring quotas on race, sex and ability: 50.9 per cent of funds must go to women, 22 per cent to “visible minorities” and 7.5 per cent to “persons with disabilities.”

Pinker told the Commons committee that it’s not reasonable to expect that every single branch of science is going to have an ethnic makeup that’s exactly proportional to the general population.

“It leads to rather monstrous consequences like saying ‘there are too many Asians on this committee,’ or too many Asians are getting funding, or too many Jews, or too many Sikhs, or too many Arabs,” he said.

Pinker said that under the guise of “looking” diverse, universities have increasingly become subject to chilling “monocultures” that shun and punish dissenting opinions.

“As a cognitive scientist, I can attest that the human mind is vulnerable to many biases and fallacies. The strongest is the ‘my side’ bias, the conviction that my tribe or coalition or party is

POLITICIZATION IN SCIENCE, IT’S LIKE BACTERIA IN AN OPERATING ROOM.

correct and that a rival coalition is ignorant or evil or both,” said Pinker.

Pinker said the usual way around this is to maintain an intellectual culture in which biases can be freely attacked and criticized by colleagues who think differently. “One person can point out another’s errors and the whole community can be more rational than any of the individuals in it,” he said.

Pinker has previously described his political alignment as “liberal Democrat” and once told a writer for the Harvard Crimson that a framed candid photo of him meeting then prime minister Justin Trudeau was “one of my proudest possessions.”

Nevertheless, in recent years Pinker has become an outspoken critic of a “social justice monoculture” at North American universities.

He’s a co-founder of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, a group pledged to endorse free speech and viewpoint diversity at the Ivy League school.

When multiple Harvard campus organizations openly endorsed Palestinian terrorism in the immediate wake of the October 7 massacres, Pinker published a five-point plan in the Boston Globe on how to “save Harvard from itself.”

Among Pinker’s points was a call for the university to “disempower” DEI. “Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified,” he wrote.

Also testifying at Monday’s committee was Azim Shariff, a UBC psychology professor whose research has touched on how institutional politicization affects public trust.

In a 2024 study, Shariff’s team found that even when an institution (such as the Catholic Church, police or Major League Baseball) had politics that aligned with a person’s own leanings, it still caused that person to lose trust in the institution.

“We found that the perceived politicization of institutions — the extent to which institutions were perceived as allowing their political values to impact their work — was associated with lower trust toward those institutions as well as lower willingness to support and defer to their expertise,” it read.

Shariff told Parliamentarians that “Canada, unfortunately, has a reputation for having a somewhat politicized academy.”

“Politicization in science, it’s like bacteria in an operating room,” he said. “There’s no way you’ll be able to get rid of it entirely, but you do want to do as much as you can to remove it, and I don’t think you should trust any surgeon who’s not trying to do that.”

Article Name:Diversity mandates are killing Canadian science

(National Post, September 20, 2025)

Author:TRISTIN HOPPER

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