How to do the Long March through the Canadian (and Anglophone) Universities
Options for an Incoming Conservative Federal Government.
— If you value higher education, this is the way to go. Aimed at the hopefully incoming administration of Pierre Poilievre in Canada, the proposals are also completely applicable to the United Kingdom (listen up Nigel Farage), Australia and New Zealand, and probably parts of Europe.
In addition to the ‘discussion starters’ listed below, look at a recently published (Feb 2024) study by Professor David Haskell of the University of Wilfrid Laurier summarizing what the research actually says about the impact of DEI training (the report is quite short but very damning and concurs with a Finnish study that has just concluded that DEI greatly increases student stress and undermines mental health)
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
Although provincial governments are responsible for their governance, Canadian universities are heavily dependent on federal funding for research ($4.6 billion) and student support ($7 billion). This presents massive political leverage. Using the carrots and sticks available, the Federal government’s overarching priorities should be to:
Introduce competition across the sector and strip established institutions and bureaucracies of their monopolies
Eliminate DEI as both a divisive scourge on civil society and undermining of meritocratic standards and technical skills.
Create a much more pluralistic funding regime.
Maximise diversity of perspective
Reduce the size of HE whilst increasing quality
Divert students and resources from unproductive and ideological fake disciplines into 4th industrial revolution craft colleges, apprenticeships and life-long learning opportunities.
TWELVE POLICY OPTIONS
Deregulated degree certification at federal level: A new landscape of micro-colleges
Ban DEI: Deny federal funding to any institution that maintained a specialized DEI office with salaried workers.
Make DEI a progressively more expensive choice
Chicago Principles and Institutional Neutrality
Banning affirmative action:
Escalating funding penalty in relation to the administrator/faculty ratio.
Replace all or part of Trisector research council funding with an open and pluralist regime of tax allowances.
Public voting/participation in the allocation of research funds.
Scaling research funding and individual grants to the ‘ideological diversity index’ (IDivX).
Reduce radically the number of social science and humanities sub-disciplines recognized and rewarded by the funding regime.
Nuclear option A: End federal funding of universities
Nuclear option B: Cease federal recognition of degrees from ideological universities
FUNDING: BACKGROUND:
In 2021/2022, Canadian universities received $4.6 billion from the federal government, down by 18.8% from $5.6 billion in the previous year (see also CUPE 2018). This reflects the conclusion of the one-time grant of $416 million awarded in 2020/2021 under the Canada Research Continuity Emergency Fund. This includes the research councils (including operating costs), the post-secondary institutions strategic investment fund and research funding through federal departments.
Federal direct support to individuals is in the region of $7 billion including Canada Student Grants ($4000 per year or $425 per month) , Scholarships the Canada Student Loans Program, the Canada Education Savings Program, the Post- Secondary Student Support Program and Tax Expenditures (Tax revenue forgone)
Across Canada, universities are experiencing a rapidly tightening financial situation - partly because of federal caps on international student visas.
According to CMEC, federal support is divided among 223 public and private universities, and 213 public colleges and institutes. Government funding is the largest revenue source for postsecondary education institutions, providing nearly 45 % of total funding, with student fees accounted for another 30 %. Bequests, donations, nongovernmental grants, sales of products and services, and investments account for about 25 per cent.
Average tuition costs in 2020/21 were $6,580 for Canadian undergraduates $32,000 for international students. Federal funding also goes directly to individual students via loans, grants, and education tax credits. According to Universities Canada, 1.44 million students enrolled across Canada in 2023,
Fig 1 a and b Average budgetary allocations in university expenditures.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/230803/cg-a003-eng.htm
LEVERS FOR TRANSFORMING /DISRUPTING THE SECTOR:
It is in both Canada’s interest and the interests of conservatives to introduce a period of creative destruction. HE is not fit for purpose. The sector wastes billions of dollars, trains tens of thousands of students for non-existent jobs, in many cases actively de-skills young people, undermines social cohesion, drains youth and energy from peripheral and indigenous communities, inhibits creativity and serves the entrenched interests of a divisive bureaucratic urban/cosmopolitan elite.
Over a period of a decade, the kinds of policies suggested below would begin to transform the culture of Canadian universities entirely, principally by removing the ideological and bureaucratic monopolies.
FEDERAL VERSUS PROVINCIAL CERTIFICATION
The dominant campus model of university is operated by provincial governments. Ottawa has relatively little direct power over the operation and governance of these institutions. However, a perfect storm of technological, economic and social changes is opening up opportunities for new kinds of post-secondary education which combine online education, small-scale intensive block teaching, part-time & on-the-job learning, and the re-emergence of high-tech/bespoke artisanal and apprenticeship models. Breaking the monopoly of universities is now in the ether. Julius Krein writing in Unherd writes:
“Conservatives and liberals who remain devoted to more Romantic conceptions of the humanities will doubtless object to this ruthlessly instrumental approach to education. But breaking the university monopoly on credentialing and applied science has benefits for liberal arts purists as well. The “right-sizing” of universities would allow liberal arts colleges of various ideological orientations, whether Hillsdale or Oberlin, to compete with Harvard and Stanford on more equal footing. All of society would benefit if universities lost some of their exalted status”
Someone musing on policy options for the UK’s Social Democratic Party wrote
“Whatever purpose this model may once have served, it has become an enormous and wasteful burden on public finances. The over-expansion of putative academic subjects and frameworks has undermined the status and resources directed towards technical and craft skills. Grade inflation (an enormous distorting incentive for institutional expansion), the proliferation of self-serving and self-regulating grievance disciplines like Gender and Postcolonial Studies, and the imposition of poorly-taught, fashionable nonsense on students who often don’t acquire the most basic academic skills, have produced an appearance of academic education that often produces very little by way of useful knowledge and very few skills. This model is about to collapse under the pressure of three forces. Economic contraction and geo-political tensions with China will likely reduce the lucrative flow of overseas students to a trickle. At the same time, the disruption of the residential model and the rapid delivery of online courses is pulling away the Emperor’s robe, revealing the reality that many courses and institutions are offering very little value. A whole generation is beginning to see the cost/benefits of the traditional model in a new light”
TWELVE PROPOSALS
1. Deregulated degree certification at federal level: A new landscape of micro-colleges
Federal government should deprive provincial campus universities of their degree certification monopoly. Overnight, this would facilitate a new era of low-overhead, open-sourced, hybrid, infinitely flexible, life-long education and distributed innovation would self-organize. Making use of online-learning platforms, on-the-job learning, collaborations with companies and not-for-profits, and a cycle of micro-residential immersive face-to-face learning opportunities, these new micro-colleges would leverage 21st century technology for a much more tailored learning experience. This could be achieved in two ways:
(a) One market-oriented strategy would be to strip all Federal funding from Provincial governments who refused to legislate for deregulation and micro-college certification.
(b) Alternatively, the Federal government could ring-fence 10% of the existing federal budget to seed-fund micro-colleges on a ‘charter school’ model. The resulting start-ups would be much leaner and more cost effective but still receive some federal funding.
By giving students and companies alternatives, the traditional university sector would be forced to compete and raise their game. Crucially these micro-colleges could be:
Extremely lean with very low-overheads.
Highly focused on particular skills or research opportunities.
Organised around the immediate needs of particular corporations and sectors.
Designed to address the niche requirements of very specific stakeholders.
Either permanent institutions or term-limited training programmes designed for a particular need, in a specific place for a designated time-frame.
Developed entirely by the private and not-for-profit sectors without any government funding.
Hundreds and even thousands of bespoke micro-colleges could thrive on a model that leverages economies of scope rather than scale, a minimal requirement for extensive infrastructure and plant, a 95% reduction in administrative costs — and perhaps most of all, an intensive, engaging learning experience that will foster much higher levels of engagement among students and faculty. Such micro-colleges would be entrepreneurial, immediately responsive to both labour market demands for particular skill sets, and corporate research needs. Run by groups of professors independently or in cooperation with firms, not-for-profits, churches, commercial/sectoral organizations and other institutions – these new centres of teaching and high level research would be completely independent, (social) entrepreneurial and run for profit (or not) — but not subsidized by the state.
All that would be required is a revolution in certification. A federal body would be set up to fast track the certification and ‘chartering’ of small educational companies established by groups of academics and other experts. This federal body would:
Licence such companies to confer degrees
Open up the Canadian market to US and European-based degree certification bodies - on a competitive basis.
Encourage the establishment of online libraries, learning hubs/platforms and other shared open-sourced infrastructures to service this new sector.
In essence, all that the federal government has to do is to use funding as leverage to force Provincial deregulation and deprive provincial campus universities of their degree certification monopoly and the era of low-overhead, open-sourced, hybrid, infinitely flexible, life-long education and distributed innovation would, very quickly, self-organize.
By giving students and companies alternatives, the traditional university sector would be forced to compete and raise their game. Tax allowances could direct funding at a much broader set of institutions — facilitating, in particular, the start-up of dozens (and even hundreds) or networked micro-colleges combining market-responsive, place-based teaching with online learning — linked to the agendas and interests of a much wider group of companies, charities, parents groups etc. These could be:
Small liberal arts colleges
Bespoke technical training/research facilities linked to corporations – or sectors (groups of companies)
Market- driven micro colleges using the Internet and geographical decentralization to eradicate the fixed/sunk costs of expensive and massive urban university campuses.
Once again this is all about monopoly busting and creating a vigorous, pluralist market-led higher education sector that is oriented to the 21st century rather than the 19th century requirements of colonial administration.
Relevance to indigenous communities and geographically marginalized towns and regions
Traditional centralized campus universities act pull indigenous youth and young people in geographically marginalized rural, ‘rust belt’ or maritime areas out of their communities to the big city and bright lights. Because they rarely return, higher education is often actively destructive of such communities (see Staley). I have a detailed reflection on this here:
Federal licensing of micro-colleges would bypass provincial bureaucracies and allow new models for high-quality, high-spec training on the job, in situ and within such place-bound communities — halting the brain drain and the outflow of young people.
The benefits for both indigenous communities and the rural and working class ‘fly over’ country across the Canadian backcountry are really powerful arguments for this model of decentralized, Internet-mediated educational provision.
Context
With the Internet and especially since COVID, there are growing questions about the value proposition about conventional universities. This centres on:
The extent to which universities shifted programmes online during the crisis
Evidence of very poor value /return on investment for many students in low quality social science and humanities programmes
Endemic grade inflation
Lowered standards in basic writing/numeracy skills
Declining male participation
A growing trend of companies recruiting directly from school and/or using their own testing procedures to screen job candidates
The negative impact of large numbers of international students on teaching quality and student experience
Inexorable increases in average student debt
Intended outcomes:
(a) Pluralism: At present we have a single overarching framework subject to the whims of government, in practice operated by an entrenched and increasingly vexatiously liberal bureaucracy and structured diffusely but implacably by the networked priorities of the chattering classes in academia, the media and the professions. This would immediately give way to a much more plural pattern of agenda setting, informed by a much wider group of stakeholders including many much more directly involved at the coal face of economic and social problems. Thus, for instance, it would be possible for some group or company to fund gender-critical research in say ‘midwifery’. This is impossible right now. Any application that eschews the term ‘chest feeding’ is rejected out of hand.
Likewise, it would be possible for a company or Foundation to foster research that challenges received wisdom of climate change and Net Zero — perhaps exploring the trade-offs and generating a real debate (I’m actually a climate pessimist, but that doesn’t change the fact that climate research has become a religious more than a scientific endeavour. I can’t remember a single time in the last ten years when the agenda or findings of climate orthodoxy were even questioned inside a Canadian university.)
(b) Strategic foresight: In place of laboured government directed ‘foresight’ schemes that are the favoured tool of UK and Canadian governments, this funding regime would engender the constant formation and reformation of informal strategic panels involving government, corporations, small start-ups and a much wider range of civil society actors. This is becoming a strategic imperative as climate change, AI, the energy transition (or not), geo-politics, global pandemics, the hydrogen economy, the internet of things, the 4th industrial revolution, digital finance and the surveillance state – and now war, threaten to force the pace of change beyond society’s capacity for adaptation. This more plural funding regime would allow a complex systems, generative, ‘swarm’ approach to constant adaptation that is much more flexible and responsive to feedback systems than any brittle government bureaucracy with focus groups.
( c) DEI and the push back on ‘woke’: One immediate benefit would be the diversion of resources away from highly ideological post-modern, anti-western pseudo research in the social sciences and humanities disciplines i.e. that kind of group think that has given us the now pervasive discourses of decolonization, affirmative gender care, indigenization and social justice and what amounts to a full scale ‘war on the west.’ Sure, there would still be a great deal of this stuff. Tenure ensures that it is baked into the existing system for 40 years. But the deregulation would create highly mobile, innovative competition for the dinosaurs — and alternatives for both academics and students which right now, simply don’t exist.
(d) Federal funding — with strings: DEI and administrative overhead
Universities are regulated by the provinces. But they rely on federal funding - for research and overhead + salaries via the research councils, direct subsidy for students and grant aid for low income students. They also rely heavily on access to federally regulated international student visas (each international undergraduate student is worth $32000).
2. Ban DEI
With regard to DEI, the nuclear option would be to deny federal funding to any institution that maintained a specialized DEI office with salaried workers. This would include all CRC Chairs and research funding that comes through any of the federal research councils. This is what Florida has just done to state institutions such as Florida State University which has just abolished its entire diversity and equity bureaucracy transferring millions into faculty hires (see 2023 Bill Summaries - The Florida Senate (flsenate.gov). The Florida bill, FL S.B. 266 (23R), prohibits Florida schools from spending any funding on most programs or campus activities that advocate for diversity and inclusion policies or promote political or social activism.
3. Chicago principles: Enforce institutional neutrality and freedom of speech
A necessary concomitant to any ban on DEI would be require universities to sign up the Chicago Principles and affirm a binding commitment to institutional neutrality, specifying not simply institutional politics but also any issues that can be shown to be polarizing and polarized in the general public. This would include all hot-button dimensions of the culture war.
4. Make DEI a progressively more expensive choice
A second option would be to create overwhelming financial incentives for universities to eliminate their DEI programmes. The objective would be to allow first mover institutions to leverage massive transfers from ideological refuseniks and laggards over three years, and a total cessation of federal funding to DEI-centred institutions in the 4th year.
The most minimal version of this would be to subtract the cost of any such division from the total amount of federal subsidy. A more nuanced and perhaps flexible approach, would be to make direct and indirect funding proportional to the ratio of the total DEI spend (DEIS) to the total operating budget. The DEIS figure would be evaluated for all universities by an external 3rd party consultant appointed by the government, and would account for faculty time allocated to DEI initiatives as well as overt financial expenditure. Universities would be ranked. The top 50% with the lowest spend would receive a scaled increase in the value of their budgets. The bottom 50% would experience a scaled decrease. This would be applied across the board to:
Per capita federal subsidies
The number of international student visas granted
The value of research council grants (all such funding allocations would topped up or top sliced in relation to the performance in scaling back DEI programmes)
The number and value of CRC Tier 1 and II chairs
A three-year period of programmed constraint would lead to the total elimination of DEI funding in year four.
5. Banning affirmative action
Since 2020 Canadian universities have hired hundreds of tenure track professors as well as administrators with overt selection on the basis of race or gender. Affirmative action of any kind would be outlawed in relation to federal funding of any kind, and institutions receiving federal funding of any kind. Equality of opportunity would be institutionalized and equality of outcome banned as the federal principle de jure in all contexts.
6. Escalating funding penalty in relation to the administrator/faculty ratio.
External 3rd party consultants would do primary research establishing faculty/student/administrator ratios (in financial expenditure and/or personnel) for every university or college in receipt of government funds.
Based on this data set, government would set a maximum admin/faculty and admin/student ratios. Above a given threshold, all sources of funding would be subject to a percentage penalty.
A threshold and penalty escalator would start low but increase, creating a sustained pressure for universities to trim bureaucratic fat in all areas of operation.
Universities Canada would report to government each year on areas of regulatory oversight that could/should be streamlined or eliminated entirely - in order to make these cuts feasible.
Each year the 50 institutions achieving the lowest admin/student, admin-faculty ratios, will receive a bump in direct funding.
7. Tri-sector Research council funding: shift from direct funding to tax breaks and public participation
The idea here is to break up and eliminate the monopoly of the funding councils. The CIHR, SHRCH, NSERC, NRC and ISEDC together operate a funding regime that is highly integrated, centralised and corporatist in nature. This institutional cabal funds fieldwork costs, capital equipment, overhead and running costs, and most PhDs, post-docs and a large number of highly paid, highly privileged Canada Research Chairs. Through mechanisms such as the Common CV, research directed at an incredibly diverse range of economic, social and cultural domains and stakeholders is stamped with a durable and inflexible mindset and way of seeing the world that is Ottawa-centric, very beholden to the priorities and worldviews of the chattering classes, antithetical to innovation and unresponsive to stakeholders that are not directly plugged into the political class.
6.1 Diversity, Equity, Inclusion: The most obvious and egregious impact of this monopoly is in the argot of DEI which has become a compulsory filtering mechanism. A normative DEI strategy is now an explicit condition for funding. This is true of individual academic funding applications. But it is also true of the host institution. Unless universities have fully fledged DEI policies and commitments, they are ineligible for funding.
6.2 Gatekeeping: Holding the keys to enormous and centralized pots of research funding, a tiny number of highly politicized research council officers (who are screened and trained for an overt commitment to approved progressive policy priorities) working with a self-selected and self-recruiting cabal of academic experts are able to allocate grants according to what are essentially political criteria.
This situation clearly reflects a relatively recent progressive ideological take-over that has affected all public institutions - with a vengeance since 2020. However, the problem is less ideological than structural. Any centralised bureaucratic mechanism for allocation will eventually deliver an ideological conformity of some stripe or other. This is disastrous for all intellectual and scientific endeavours because it undermines the process of rigorous peer scrutiny, within and between disciplines. This has been very apparent in the failures of the academic, scientific and policy communities in relation to covid policy and the suppression of public debate around trade offs.
At the same time the top down DEI agenda is compounded by onerous and often unnecessary ethics procedures carried over from the medical sciences and are used to enforce land acknowledgements, DEI statements, and to weed out of heterodox (conservative, religious) ideas and frameworks which are explicitly designed to amplify rather than question and test government policy (especially in hot button areas such as affirmative gender care, climate change, criminal justice, indigenization, decolonization and most recently COVID). This ideological vice-grip is now producing results that are genuinely worthy of Lysenko and this in areas of urgent public and policy concern.
Proposal: Replace all or part of Trisector research council funding with an open and pluralist regime of tax allowances
Over a period of 5 years reduce the provision of central funding by 70%. At the same time, the government would open up generous tax allowances for any private company, corporation, charity or other not for profit — such that these make up the slack. The system would provide for a spectrum of financial returns for companies, NGOs and NFPs taking part:
Matched or greater funding corporate investment in areas of strategic concern (STEM, tech innovation)
100-110% tax credit for disinterested funding.
The merits of this system would be that a diverse ecosystem of decentralized stakeholders would effectively replace the centralized monitoring, gatekeeping and regulatory controls currently operated by the research council bureaucracy. In exchange for civic engagement, for effectively taking on some the TriCouncil research procurement/management function, some of the significant savings in operating costs would be passed on to participating stakeholders as part of the tax-credit.
Timeline/operation: So, in Year 1, funding would decline by 14 % - the slack taken up by an emerging plurality of civil society actors with diverse agendas and ideological framings (if any). Legislation would ensure minimal government determination of goals, underlying assumptions etc. As the scheme developed, the incentive structure would be tweaked to provide a greater return for disinterested research – as with social science, humanities and pure science, preserving the sphere of autonomous blue skies endeavour. Some tax allowances/credits would be open; some tied to particular BROAD disciplinary areas – and ONLY in some cases of clear strategic national need, some would be tied to specific technical, scientific and social problems (e.g. Quantum computing, or the drugs epidemic).
8. Public voting/participation in the allocation of research funds (10% of current total)
Of the remaining 30% of funding delivered by the federal government, a third (10% of the total) would be directed by ordinary members of the public via an online voting system. The purpose of this would be further to pluralize the delivery and channelling mechanisms, but also to involve members of the public and groups in civil society in setting the public research agenda. There would be a clear incentive for mass engagement on the part of individuals, communities and lobby groups.
Real societal engagement: The diversity of stakeholders involved would include companies working with local communities, charities, research foundations and all sorts of organizations – but also with regard to the online voting system (10% of the whole), the new mechanisms would engender an ongoing discussion about research priorities and a much more knowledgeable public community.
So for instance, if the general public really DO want millions of educational dollars to be devoted to the minutiae of gender affirming care, then the system would be responsive to this. If on the other hand many more would prefer resources to be devoted to attending to basic numeracy and literacy, the system would in turn be responsive to this.
The current architecture is impervious to signals from beyond Parliament Hill and its outpost university campuses.
9. Scaling research funding and individual grants to the ‘ideological diversity index’ (IDivX).
Ideological and perspectival diversity is essential for four reasons.
(a) Group-think and intellectual monoculture weakens science and undermines innovation: Without intellectual pluralism, there can be no culture of rigorous scrutiny and interrogation, undermining the kind of detached model making and hypothesis formation that developed uniquely in early modern Western universities.
(b) Ideological monoculture undermines the kind of cultural conversations that are essential for social cohesion and integration.
(c) Freedom of speech and thought withers if it is not exercised. The collapse of ideological diversity on campus has spilled over into adjacent institutions (media, schools, health system) and now threatens the pluralist, liberal consensus of Canadian society and even the democratic integrity of the polity.
(d) According to Jonathon Haidt — a liberal champion of heterodox universities - children and young adults are ‘anti-fragile’. Just as exposure to pathogens is necessary to develop a health immune system, people need to be exposed to a wide range of potentially uncomfortable ideas and challenging social situations in order to develop into mature and resilient adults.
Proposals:
I. Retain Jonathon Haidt of the Heterodox Academy to lead a federally-funded consultation: – with Universities Canada, individual universities and the provincial governments with a view to establishing a consensus across Canada as to mechanisms to re-establish a culture of heterodox pluralism on university campuses.
II. Fund research (by Haidt and FIRE) to develop an ‘ideological diversity index’ (IDivX).
The IDivX would provide a rigorous foundation upon which to rank universities.
The university ranking would (as above) be used to create an incentive structure promoting ideological and perspectival pluralism - an institutional score being linked to a percentage top-slicing/top up of all federal funding.
III. Social science and humanities funding applications: DEI in reverse:
Starting from the institutional IDivX score, individual funding applications would be required to show how their research strategy incorporated diverse/competing ideological perspectives, rigorous interrogation of the underlying methodology and theoretical assumptions, scrutiny of the empirical data and a ‘hostile prosecutorial commentary’ of the overall integrity and likely societal impact of the project - both at the outset and the conclusion of the research.
The upside of this kind of intervention is that it would create a carrot and stick that academics understand and a process of debate and engagement that would enrol centrist voices on campus into the debate. In this sense it is a more centrist and consensus oriented proposal. A serious potential downside is that it would involve the creation of a bureaucratic mechanism that itself could be subverted or derailed.
10. Reduce radically the number of social science and humanities sub-disciplines recognized and rewarded by the funding regime
Pseudo-specialization in the social sciences and humanities has advanced way beyond what is warranted by robust and relatively detached models of the underlying phenomena. As fields of teaching and research have fragmented into ever more siloed subdisciplines — each with their own journals, arcane vocabulary, (often pseudo) methodologies, ideological frameworks and thresholds for entry, the underlying theoretical models have become much more ideologically-driven, less open to contestation and refutation and insulated from scrutiny or debate.
For example, until the 1970s sociological studies of gender or women took place in general purpose anthropology or sociology departments. A professor advancing a gendered reading of this or that empirical or historical phenomena (e.g. the role of women in the labour market) would inevitably present their case with an economist, game theorist, biological anthropologist or even a sociobiologist in the room (and vice versa). This ensured that ideas were always challenged and that even in traditionally left-wing disciplines there was a healthy expectation of rigorous and sometimes emotionally charged debate.
This condition no longer pertains. Hot house flower disciplines train tens of thousands of students to avoid scrutiny at all cost, to see intellectual cross examination as a hostile act and — along with this - to see the history of Canada and of the West as one long litany of shameful colonialist supremacy that must be broken at any cost. Graduates from these disciplines now dominate ever more areas of metropolitan life — notably the CBC, the legacy media and teaching colleges such as OISE in Toronto.
The impact of this dismemberment of academic culture is everywhere. At every point in the system, gatekeepers now deny entry to dissident voices, enforce ideological conformity and prevent any real intellectual debate. This culture which has dominated the social sciences is now spilling over into core STEM disciplines - a process which if left unchecked will have a catastrophic impact on Canadian science and technology.
There is one set of policies that could put the entire process into reverse. Federal government should redesign the student and research funding regime to force provincial governments to do the following:
Fold the myriad subdisciplines back into core social science disciplines of social psychology, sociology and anthropology. ‘Fat studies’, ‘leisure studies’, ‘womens studies’ ‘gender studies’ disciplines would no longer be eligible for any federal grants or student funding.
The expanded Sociology and Anthropology departments would be forced to retain professorial expertise in the biological (somatic and evolutionary) dimensions of human life (e.g. biological anthropology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary-ecology).
Make such subdisciplines ineligible for any kind of federal funding. If the provinces want them, they can pay.
Require all undergraduate social scientists receiving any federal money to take a core course in human evolutionary biology and /or biological anthropology.
Merge any residual federal tri-council funding streams such that grant applications are assessed by a general purpose and cross-disciplinary group of social scientists or humanities scholars - to reduce the impact of nepotistic and ideologically partisan gate keepers.
Reduce the flow of PhDs and engineer a more elite cadre of social science disciplines with higher thresholds for entry
11. End federal funding of universities
In Canada, education is a matter of provincial responsibility. Section 93 of the Constitution Act 1867 says “In and for each Province the Legislature may exclusively make Laws in relation to Education …” Federal funding for university research and student support, like with federal healthcare funding, intrudes on this jurisdiction with the consent of the provinces. The federal government essentially bribes the universities, and by extension the provinces, to abide by the rules of these federal programs in order to get the money.
These rules have made things worse. Tri-Council grants require universities to embrace Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, not just with respect to the grants but in their operations more broadly .They also provide universities with an additional justification for being woke.
The easiest and cleanest way out of this quagmire is to cancel these funding programs, including Tri-Council agencies and grants. The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) could be eliminated, and their budgets returned to federal coffers.
This strategy is clean. It would get the federal government out of an area of provincial jurisdiction. It would remove an excuse that universities rely upon for being woke. It would make the universities poorer (some of them might actually have to reform themselves or go broke). It would help to balance the federal budget. It would appeal to Conservative voters, who would be pleased to see that the federal government is no longer forking over billions of dollars to subsidise lefty academics.
12. No acceptance of degrees from rogue ideological institutions by any federal body
If you really wanted to drop a nuke, federal government could just announce it won’t accept degrees from job applicants from universities that engage in affirmative action, DEI or anything that undermines the principle of merit-based advancement.
