{"id":4477,"date":"2025-09-23T05:47:28","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T05:47:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/?p=4477"},"modified":"2025-09-23T05:47:28","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T05:47:28","slug":"prominent-scientists-warn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/?p=4477","title":{"rendered":"Prominent Scientists Warn"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Diversity mandates are killing Canadian science: Heterosexual White Males Given only 19% of $300-Million In Fed Funded Research Money<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Diversity mandates are killing Canadian science<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>National Post<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>20 Sep 2025<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>TRISTIN HOPPER<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/t.prcdn.co\/img?regionKey=Mt0DCY4oyxpEi9uUomY%2bTw%3d%3d\" alt=\"\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><strong>Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker says allocating funding to scientists based on race or sex works against the interest of science and that universities need to drop their \u201cobsession\u201d with enforcing ethnic diversity.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cAllocating funding to scientists based on their race or sex works against the interest of science and the nation,\u201d Pinker told a meeting of the Standing Committee on Science and Research this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rather, said Pinker, universities need to drop their \u201cobsession\u201d with enforcing ethnic diversity and focus instead on cultivating \u201cviewpoint diversity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cAs the joke went, in a university, diversity means people who look different but think alike,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Born and educated in Montreal, Pinker ranks as one of the world\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pinker\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u201cdiversity statements\u201d expressing adherence to campus \u201canti-racism\u201d policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u201cequity-deserving\u201d applicants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Said Pinker, \u201cthey 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u201cvisible minorities\u201d and 7.5 per cent to \u201cpersons with disabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pinker told the Commons committee that it\u2019s not reasonable to expect that every single branch of science is going to have an ethnic makeup that\u2019s exactly proportional to the general population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt leads to rather monstrous consequences like saying \u2018there are too many Asians on this committee,\u2019 or too many Asians are getting funding, or too many Jews, or too many Sikhs, or too many Arabs,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pinker said that under the guise of \u201clooking\u201d diverse, universities have increasingly become subject to chilling \u201cmonocultures\u201d that shun and punish dissenting opinions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cAs a cognitive scientist, I can attest that the human mind is vulnerable to many biases and fallacies. The strongest is the \u2018my side\u2019 bias, the conviction that my tribe or coalition or party is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>POLITICIZATION IN SCIENCE, IT\u2019S LIKE BACTERIA IN AN OPERATING ROOM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>correct and that a rival coalition is ignorant or evil or both,\u201d said Pinker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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. \u201cOne person can point out another\u2019s errors and the whole community can be more rational than any of the individuals in it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pinker has previously described his political alignment as \u201cliberal Democrat\u201d and once told a writer for the Harvard Crimson that a framed candid photo of him meeting then prime minister Justin Trudeau was \u201cone of my proudest possessions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nevertheless, in recent years Pinker has become an outspoken critic of a \u201csocial justice monoculture\u201d at North American universities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u201csave Harvard from itself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Among Pinker\u2019s points was a call for the university to \u201cdisempower\u201d DEI. \u201cUniversities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Also testifying at Monday\u2019s committee was Azim Shariff, a UBC psychology professor whose research has touched on how institutional politicization affects public trust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In a 2024 study, Shariff\u2019s team found that even when an institution (such as the Catholic Church, police or Major League Baseball) had politics that aligned with a person\u2019s own leanings, it still caused that person to lose trust in the institution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe found that the perceived politicization of institutions \u2014 the extent to which institutions were perceived as allowing their political values to impact their work \u2014 was associated with lower trust toward those institutions as well as lower willingness to support and defer to their expertise,\u201d it read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Shariff told Parliamentarians that \u201cCanada, unfortunately, has a reputation for having a somewhat politicized academy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cPoliticization in science, it\u2019s like bacteria in an operating room,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s no way you\u2019ll 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\u2019t think you should trust any surgeon who\u2019s not trying to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Article Name:Diversity mandates are killing Canadian science<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(<strong>National Post<\/strong>, September 20, 2025)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Author:TRISTIN HOPPER<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Start Page:A8<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>End Page:A8<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3126,3128,3127,3129],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4477"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4477"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4479,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4477\/revisions\/4479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}