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SSHRC (the major research funding source in Canada) now requiring “diversity” in “research questions, methods, theoretical frameworks, literature reviews, analyses, and the interpretation and dissemination of findings”

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 15 (first posted October 13)–INTERESTING DISCUSSION CONTINUES IN THE COMMENTS

A philosopher in Canada called to my attention this development, which would seem to have a significant impact on academic freedom.   As this philosopher wrote:

I'm not opposed to thoughtful projects on topics related to diversity in various ways, but I worry that a requirement like this for *all* proposals is going to drastically reduce (if not eliminate) the funds given to great projects that just happen to have nothing to do with diversity.

Lots of my colleagues in Canada are terrified to say anything publicly about this that even resembles mild criticism (myself included). I'm hoping you might draw some attention to this issue on your blog.

One of the strange things about this initiative is that Canadian law is not beholden to "diversity" the way American law is since Bakke.  Why not just specify that a certain amount of SSHRC funding will go to certain minority groups, and leave it at that?  Does anyone know what's behind this?  Given the climate of fear that apparently obtains, anonymous posts are fine, but please include a real email address, that will not appear.

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46 responses to “SSHRC (the major research funding source in Canada) now requiring “diversity” in “research questions, methods, theoretical frameworks, literature reviews, analyses, and the interpretation and dissemination of findings””

  1. Mohan Matthen

    SSHRC is at arms-length from the Government of Canada, so one would assume that a requirement like this was internally generated and approved by Council. So, what one can reasonably surmise about the diversity "module" is that it was likely developed by a committee, presumably an academic committee, that reports to Council. One can easily imagine how this came to pass. (I think it is possible to find out by asking if somebody wants to do the work.)

    I'm a little puzzled by the claim that academics in Canada are "terrified" to criticize this. Are we supposed to be scared of SSHRC or of our own colleagues? I don't think we should be worried about SSHRC. It is a highly decentralized organization and its adjudication committees have autonomy of action. The academic members of these committees are not going to hold it against you that in some public forum you criticized SSHRC. (Why would they care?) And the secretariat is not supposed to voice any non-procedural opinion about adjudication. But I guess I see why people are worried about blow-back from their academic peers. Academic peers are a judgemental lot these days.

    Reply
  2. Sergio Tenenbaum

    I share Mohan's puzzlement here. In fact, in the few debates I've witnessed regarding this new requirement, people were clearly not terrified about being critical of it. But, of course, different institutions and different contexts in Canada might be under different pressures.

    Reply
  3. Kevin E Davis

    The guide to which you linked states:

    "SSHRC is increasingly requiring or encouraging applicants across its funding opportunities to consider applying such approaches to their research projects’ design, when appropriate. As part of these efforts, all SSHRC doctoral and postdoctoral applicants must complete the Diversity Considerations in Research Design module….[T]he module promotes research excellence by encouraging you to reflect on how your research design can be strengthened by considering diversity and identity factors…"

    The guide goes on to suggest that the module permits applicants to indicate that diversity considerations are not applicable to their research.

    I fail to see how requiring applicants for funding to consider and explain the relevance, if any, of specific factors to their research proposal implicates academic freedom. I also fail to see how this is comparable to a requirement that SSHRC funding be allocated to certain minority groups–surely you are not suggesting only minorities ought to take diversity considerations into account in their research design.

    BL REPLY: If "diversity and identity" in research design is not a requirement for funding, then it does not implicate academic freedom. That was not how my correspondent interpreted it, but you may be right. If the goal was to insure funding for under-represented minorities–which is usually the point of "diversity" initiatives–there are simpler ways to do that in Canada, as you know. If that was not the goal, then that's irrelevant. Since "diversity and identity" are, however, irrelevant to many research programs, one might then reasonably wonder what the point was.

    Reply
  4. Brian Leiter

    Sergio and Mohan: I can't speak for my correspondent's concerns as expressed in the quoted remark, above; one could imagine that in many contexts, criticizing any "diversity" initiative might lead to adverse consequences.

    Reply
  5. OP

    I'm the OP. I would be quite happy if it turns out that my worries are completely overblown. While this criteria isn't subject to 'merit review' this year, the document reads "Although diversity considerations may not, at first, seem applicable to your research, do fully consider their relevance before selecting “No.” You must provide your justification whether or not you deem diversity considerations relevant to your research." We might not think that this is an ideological requirement because applicants are free to select 'no'. I hope this is right. My own pessimistic view is that this is basically codifying a requirement that is going to block lots of great projects from funding. The way SSHRC evaluates proposals is a black box anyway, so we will likely never know definitively how this gets applied.

    With respect to being terrified to criticize this, I wasn't referring to being scared of SSHRC. I was referring to be cancelled by a social media mob…

    Reply
  6. Michel Xhignesse

    Like Mohan and Sergio, I wouldn't worry about blowback from SSHRC. There aren't many forms that blowback could take, beyond denying your application for funding–but since applications are reviewed by a committee whose membership changes (and whose members are drawn from faculty at Canadian institutions, not the institution of SSHRC itself), that's pretty unlikely. Nor are philosophers (and their public comments!) likely to be known to committee members, not least since the committees usually have only one philosopher on them (and sometimes not even that).

    As for the policy itself… having read only the linked material, it seems pretty weak, on the whole. For one thing, as Kevin says, you can tick the box that says it's irrelevant. Having said that, I serve on my university's research ethics board (which is guided by Tri-Council guidelines), and applicants *frequently* indicate that their research carries no risks because they clearly haven't thought about things very carefully (pro-tip: there's almost always a risk, even if it's quite minimal. The point is to show you've considered it carefully.). It's one of the main reasons why we request revisions, in fact. Similarly, in the past I've helped a few people with their SSHRC postdoc applications, and many simply neglect to do much to justify their choice of institution at which to hold the funding, even though that's explicitly mentioned in the guidelines. You need to take the time to address everything they want addressed, and do so in more than just a cursory way.

    I would expect a similar dynamic to play out here, so candidates would be well-advised to think carefully and along the lines suggested by SSHRC, even if there's a pretty minimal application to diversity issues. And it's worth noting that those lines are pretty broad: what counts as 'diversity' is very inclusive, and although most of the suggestions are geared towards social science research and are thus irrelevant to most philosophy (this is always the case with SSHRC), some of them are easy for any philosophy project to satisfy. So, for example, when preparing your proposal, pay attention to the bibliography you've crafted, and make a genuine effort to include work by women and people of colour–or, indeed, Francophone scholars (this is Canada and SSHRC is a bilingual agency, after all). When talking about dissemination and your expected impacts, think about the venues where the work will be submitted–is anything, maybe a French article, going to Dialogue? Will you be trying to publish in an Open Access venue? Will you make your work available to affected communities, if there are any?–the conferences you'll present at (are any of them Canadian conferences? Are you going to try to submit to the Francophone side of the Congress of the Humanities? Are any of them geared towards particular communities, or topics of interest to particular communities?). If you're proposing to organize a conference or workshop, what will your target audience be? Will it be open to the public? Will you be aiming to achieve a balance of speakers in any way? Are you going to reach out to the Francophone academic community in your advertising?

    IMO these are the kinds of thing that a good SSHRC proposal should be doing anyway. So: you can tick the box, but I'd think carefully about doing so. If it were me, I might tick the box but still talk about some of the ways in which my proposed project will satisfy the mandate at the more meta level of sources and dissemination. (Full disclosure: I had a SSHRC postdoc.)

    I imagine the training module they mention is somewhat dull and irrelevant, but I doubt it's particularly onerous or problematic. But I could well be wrong!

    Reply
  7. Andrew Sepielli

    I'm less puzzled than Mohan and Sergio are about why my colleagues, especially junior faculty, post-docs, and grad students, might be afraid to speak out on this or any other hot-button political issue. I've grown less afraid as my hair has gone greyer, so let me just say I think this new requirement or, uh, "module", is a mistake. Note, first of all, that diversity "reflections" are to be considered in the allocation of doctoral and post-doctoral funding — and not (yet) in determining funding for faculty projects. Now, I should say, before we even get to the diversity stuff, that I don't like this model of funding graduate study in the humanities; I never have. I'd much rather see funds go toward enabling graduate students across the board to live comfortably, and in reasonable proximity to their departments, than for a few "winners" to be picked by SSHRC committees that, in my judgment, are not fully up to the task. But if we are going to stick with the SSHRC system, then I think we must exercise great care not to exploit grad students' economic vulnerability to steer them down avenues of research that accord with certain influential parties' political views, and maybe less with those students' intellectual scruples and passions. The SSHRC seems to be doing just the opposite; this looks like an attempt to get young researchers to fall into line.

    The anonymous philosopher in your post, Brian, writes "I'm not opposed to thoughtful projects on topics related to diversity". Neither am I. This is partly because I'm not opposed to thoughtful projects on virtually any topic, and partly because, having studied anti-discrimination law, I know full well how some work in this vein provides a valuable theoretical framework for thinking about important issues. With that said, in all honestly, there's a greater proportion of scholarly work focusing on "equity, diversity, and inclusion" than I regard as ideal. (I could say the same thing about plenty of other topics, political and non- — and maybe people want to say that about stuff I think is super-important; no problem.) But I have always favoured a kind of "intellectual federalism", if you will, in which members of different scholarly communities judge work within their communities by their own norms, and if this generates a distribution of output that doesn't match the "pattern" that I'd most prefer to see, so be it. That's the price of being hands-off, of letting a thousand flowers bloom. Part of what bothers me, then, about this new "module" is that it seems to represent a willful failure to reciprocate this laissez-faire stance.

    Some people in this thread have suggested that applicants can simply click the “no” box with no adverse affects. Like the OP, I am pessimistic about this — for many reasons. Given the reasonable uncertainty here, I think we should proceed with open discussion and caution in implementation. I would not want to be in a position next year where it’s clear that clicking “no” does have some adverse affects, and the policy, by that point, is being treated as fait accompli.

    Reply
  8. Mohan Matthen

    Like Andrew and OP, I think it would be unwise for an applicant just to say that diversity is irrelevant to their research. There might be an academic on the adjudication committee who would take offence; indeed, let's say there's bound to be at least one.(And even if the diversity thing is not supposed to be a part of the merit review, who needs a snarling opponent adjudicating your work?) That said, I am sticking to my position that you shouldn't be terrified to criticize SSHRC for this requirement. Maybe I'm being over-sanguine, but things don't seem to me to have gotten quite so bad that every chance remark puts you at risk of being "cancelled by a social media mob."

    Reply
  9. Not OP

    Mohan Matthen wrote: "Maybe I'm being over-sanguine, but things don't seem to me to have gotten quite so bad that every chance remark puts you at risk of being "cancelled by a social media mob."

    I find this view hard to understand, given that it has been less than 10 days since Brian first posted about a geoscientist whose lecture at MIT had been cancelled for (and by) just that.

    https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2021/10/mit-cancels-distinguished-lecture-by-geoscientist-who-expressed-incorrect-views-about-diversity.html

    Do you think there are circumstances which make that real case and its outcome distinct from the hypothetical one considered here?

    Reply
  10. Martin Mellish

    In pure mathematics and physics, diversity considerations may be irrelevant to most topics. However, in research in the social sciences (which SSHRC funds) diversity considerations will almost always be relevant, since we live in a diverse society.

    As Michel Xhignesse says above, if you have a social science project to which you believe considerations of diversity are completely irrelevant, the most likely explanation is that you haven't thought about the issues hard enough. Or perhaps you have an insufficiently general experimental design (are your results applicable to different linguistic communities, to immigrants, to Indigenous peoples, to city/country dwellers, etc? Are you interested in finding out? Do you have control groups? What's your randomization strategy if you're doing an RCT?).

    Also as Mr. Xhignesse says, there is a 'diversity considerations irrelevant' box that you can check if diversity considerations are genuinely completely irrelevant to your research. But you would be well advised to think long and hard before doing so, not merely from the funding point of view, but in the interest of doing better, and more generally applicable, research. So, I don't see anything wrong with the SSHRC's guidance.

    Also, I'd like to put in a plug for considering diversity even when doing 'I just study X dead white philosopher' research. When I introduced Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations' to Chinese native speakers, for example,I found that certain pieces of 'linguistic philosophy' that sound inspiring and challenging in English or German, in Chinese just sound rather silly, in ways that make one reflect on how much sense they made even in the 'original'.

    Reply
  11. Canadian Philosopher

    "However, in research in the social sciences (which SSHRC funds) diversity considerations will almost always be relevant, since we live in a diverse society." I think this is a red herring. After all, we live in a commercial society, but we don't ask SSHRC applicants to explain the commercial implications of their research. We live in a legally regulated society, but we do not ask all SSHRC applicants to explain the relevance of their work to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Etc. So why is one aspect of society, as important as it may be, singled out by SSHRC with a "yes/no" and justificatory requirements? Why not simply consider the scholarly merits of a proposal, which, if diversity (or money, or law) is both truly relevant and also ignored by the applicant, can be penalized by the referees on those grounds? I see the original poster as worried that this is not only a change in procedure, but one that is related to a current wave of social disagreement that is beyond white hot, and includes such behaviour as cancelling Dorian Abbot's MIT lecture on planetary atmospherics because he argued against diversity initiatives in favour of the consideration of individual merit. So, the worry that one could be penalized by SSHRC for the "wrong" answer is not unreasonable.

    Consider this line from the linked web site: "Recognizing diversity enables a better, fuller understanding of experiences and perspectives…". This is not the suggestion that recognizing diversity *might* enable a better understanding, or does so in *some* cases. It is the simple statement that it enables a better, fuller understanding. So indicating 'no' becomes an admission that your work promises a poorer and less full understanding.

    A little further along, we find: "Not integrating diversity can lead to misrepresentative or inaccurate results, misapplication of findings, and missed opportunities." Obviously, but there are many other sources of error as well, such as incomplete data sets, motivated reasoning, statistical paradoxes (e.g. Simpsons'), etc. All reasonably foreseeable sources of error should be addressed in a proposal, but one is emphasized. How secure will an applicant feel in indicating 'no', even with justificatory argumentation, given sentences like this? Further, in the humanities, covered by SSHRC, the sources of error are far more nebulous and hard to pin down, so almost anything could be held against a proposal in these disciplines.

    If you indicate 'no', you are essentially admitting that your research has problems that you will try to justify. In a highly competitive environment, that can very well be decisive.

    Reply
  12. Joshua Harris

    Another consideration is what this implies for the status of work that is *critical* (either directly or by implication) of core concepts/assumptions at work in these sorts of EDI frameworks. What would happen to a proposal written by the next Adolph Reed, Barbara Fields or Walter Benn Michaels under these guidelines?

    Reply
  13. Canadian Graduate Student

    I don't find this worrying. The adjudicators of these awards are panels of Canadian academics, and as the above comments indicate, Canadian philosophers mainly agonize over the scholarly merit of SSHRC proposals. The linked module also doesn't "require" any diversity considerations in SSHRC proposals; it reads to me as a rather milquetoast suggestion of more research in a particular vein.

    Here is an anecdote to further illustrate why I don't believe anyone researching topics unrelated to equity/diversity should worry. Last year I applied to a SSHRC award. There is the option to submit a diversity statement, but I declined since I don't belong to any marginalized group. I did wonder whether submitting a proposal on the trendier equity and diversity adjacent issues I've written on would improve my odds, but I decided to submit a proposal on something that had nothing to do with equity/diversity. My proposal was ranked first in the nation-wide competition. If diversity considerations were in any way decisive or highly weighed, I can't imagine my proposal would be ranked first. Though, on the other hand, my proposal being ranked first clearly indicates that merit has nothing to do with these awards either. Jokes aside, my point is that considerations of equity, whether having to do with one's own identity, or their topic of research, don't seem to count for much in deciding which proposals are funded. But that's just my experience.

    Reply
  14. Martin Mellish

    Canadian philosopher: an analogy with medicine may make my point clearer. The overwhelming majority of medical research on many conditions has been done on white males. So women and Black and Indigenous people, in whom the condition presents differently, are often misdiagnosed or even accused of 'faking' (there are many horror stories about this.)

    So if you make a research proposal to study such a condition e.g. heart attacks), the grantor may reasonably request that you structure your study so as to give useful information about as many groups as possible – particularly under-studied groups. This isn't politics or'woke-ness'- it's just good research practice. Similarly with social research. You may believe that your results are independent of class and linguistic,social, ethnic,and cultural background, but that's not something you should assume, but rather something that you test, and prove or disprove, through your research.

    Reply
  15. Brian Leiter

    No one denies there are cases like the medical one you give; the point is there is no evidence that it generalizes.

    Reply
  16. Canadian Philosopher

    I do not take issue with your specific example, but my reply is the same as Brian's: can we assume this generalizes to all social science and humanities research?

    Reply
  17. Canadian Philosopher

    First off, congratulations on placing first. Secondly, however, as we teach in inductive logic, generalizing from a single case is epistemically risky. Thirdly, as Hume pointe out, it is difficult (to put it mildly) to justify the claim that the future will resemble the past.

    Reply
  18. Nick Stang

    Just wanted to chime in and express broad agreement with Mohan and Andrew. (And show that many of us in Canada are not "terrified" to speak up!) As several people have noted, this new pilot program at SSHRC is worded in such a way that it could be implemented in a benign way (you can just self-certify that EDI considerations are not relevant to your research questions and methods) or a less benign way (committee members are empowered to mark down projects if they find their explanation of their EDI-irrelevance insufficient). I'm currently trying to get clarification from SSHRC on precisely this point. So stay tuned. (These things take months, so don't hold your breath.) I just want to emphasize that the worry is not only that this would prevent valuable research from being funded (and I think it very likely will have this effect): consequences aside, EDI considerations are not relevant to research methods and questions in many projects and fields, and so evaluating research projects on this basis is not appropriate. It simply is not a criterion for the value of social science and humanities research as such. By contrast, the other criteria on which SSHRC applications are evaluated (e.g. dissemination of research, scholarly importance) are relevant criteria for the value of social science and humanities research as such. If people in a given field think that is important for EDI-considerations be factored into research methods and questions then they should argue for this, do their work accordingly, maybe even evaluate projects in their field accordingly, etc. It isn't the place of SSHRC to decide that this should apply to all social science and humanities research. Many of the considerations that Martin Mellish and Michael Xhignesse bring up are already covered by other evaluative criteria: 'knowledge mobilization' (and for the record anglophone SSHRC applicants are under no obligation to publish in French, just as Francophone applicants are under no obligation to publish in English, and that is not what this module is about in any case), or simply the research design standards of individual fields (e.g. don't do ordinary language philosophy in just one language, have a large enough sample size, etc.). We don't need a new 'module' to evaluate SSHRC applications on these bases.

    Reply
  19. Tom Hurka

    As Mohan says above, adjudication committees, which make the decisions about awards, have considerable autonomy. My experience, most recently for two years on the jury for the SSHRC Impact awards, which cover all SSHRC disciplines, was that many members already had fairly strong tendencies to favour work on progressive topics or with progressive themes; they would downgrade, often on what I thought were spurious grounds, candidates from more traditionally prestigious fields such as international relations and economics. (One member pretty much thought all awards should should go to people working on indigenous topics.) A departmental colleague reports a similar experience on another SSHRC committee. The worry is that the proposed EDI initiative will only strengthen this often existing tendency, encouraging juries to downgrade work that doesn't have an EDI component or whose explanation why it doesn't isn't sufficiently "acceptable." As for the claim that we needn't worry because philosophers on a committee will look only at a proposal's scholarly merit, the committees for postdoctoral (and maybe doctoral?) fellowships are multidisciplinary, and the crucial first reading and scoring of a philosophy application is typically done by two non-philosophers and just one philosopher. (My experience on a postdoctoral committee was that the non-philosophers were very poor judges of philosophy track records and proposals.) Imagine that you're someone working in political science or political philosophy and want funding for work defending some conservative position, e.g. that what would most benefit indigenous people is the recognition of private property rights, e.g. in their houses, on reserves. You might well decide, in light of the EDI initiative, that it's not worth applying to SSHRC because your chances of success are too low. Though SSHRC officials may say nothing in the initiative is meant to discriminate against proposals without an EDI component, what matters is whether the adjudications committees, which, again, are largely autonomous, will discriminate or use a kind of political test in assessing proposals. The worry is that they very much will.

    Reply
  20. Former SSHRC recipient

    Honest question here: what are the implications for academic freedom that are hinted at in the OP? Is the idea that if some researchers don't have their projects selected for funding, this will stifle academic freedom? Maybe I am just dumb but having a funding body incentivize certain research projects over others doesn't seem to have any such consequences (or, if it does, then academic freedom in Canada has been under threat for some time, insofar as there have long been suggestions that aligning one's research with whatever SSHRC's "Future Challenge" areas or whatever would make one more competitive.

    Reply
  21. Brian Leiter

    A public body funding scholarship should not impose extraneous moral or political demands on the content of the scholarship: doing so violates the academic freedom of researchers to frame their research proposals in terms of the methods and standards of their discipline, which is the core of academic freedom with regard to research. Of course, if the SSHRC were only a minor source of support for research, then the impact on academic freedom would be less significant. But I take it that is not the case with regard to the SSHRC's role in Canadian higher education.

    Reply
  22. Franz Huber

    Perhaps it helps to consider how this criterion may affect an application. Suppose someone submits a proposal to study Nietzsche's moral philosophy. As I understand it, SSHRC wants to be able to respond as follows.

    A lot has been written on the works of Nietzsche and other white male thinkers. We'd like to encourage you to study thinkers currently underrepresented in teaching and research in philosophy. We'll happily approve your application if you study the work of an Indigenous thinker, a female thinker, or a racialized thinker. However, if you stick to Nietzsche's works, then our money is better invested elsewhere.

    Reply
  23. Canadian Philosopher

    This is the danger. The new guideline is either intended to influence the direction of research in Canada, or it is not. If the latter, then it is just virtue signalling. If the former, then SSHRC is overstepping its bounds, since that direction should be determined by the relevant scientific and academic communities. Either way, the guideline is out of place.

    Reply
  24. Michel Xhignesse

    That's an awfully uncharitable reading of what SSHRc actually says, Franz.

    Applications are scored by section (or were, when I was an applicant). One section is the bibliography. My understanding is that the policy means, among other things, that committees are advised to pay attention to the diversity of secondary sources when scoring the bibliography. (There is also an opportunity to address your sources in the methodology section).

    Likewise, your dissemination section presents an opportunity to explain that you aren't just writing for precocious teens ranging against the world.

    Plenty of historical and logical work will get funded.

    That said, it's worth noting that philosophy tends not to do very well in such competitions in the first place. We're not great at speaking to what interdisciplinary granting agencies are looking for or familiar with. That the criteria tend to explicitly target work in the social sciences (e.g the methodology section) doesn't help.

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  25. Brian Leiter

    But the "diversity" of a bibliography is irrelevant to actual scholarship; what matters is whether the relevant high quality literature is included. If relevant and high quality literature is missing from teh bibliography, that's a problem. It's not a problem if the demographics of the authors in the bibliography are skewed. To demand equal representation of demographic groups in a scholar's research is a straightforward violation of academic freedom.

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  26. Franz Huber

    I am not particularly fond of this change, but I think SSHRC is within its rights when it intends to influence the direction of research in Canada. SSHRC is a federal agency. It is the government that decides how much tax it collects and on what, as well we what the collected tax gets spent on. Canadians have twice re-elected a progressive government.

    Reply
  27. Michel Xhignesse

    Brian,

    I don't think it's a demand for equal demographic representation at all. I think it's a demand (well, that's a bit strong) that researchers take some time to reflect on their citation practices, among other things.

    But, again, I think it's worth remembering that their concerns are clearly (I think!) about the social science side of things, where data-gathering, interviews, etc. are an integral part of the research, and where worries about sampling, community consemt and engagement, etc. are more properly applied.

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  28. Canadian Philosopher

    It seems that two philosophers have a philosophical disagreement. To me, SSHRC should be a facilitator of high quality work, as determined by the relevant academic communities. The country will still benefit if this is done well. Suppose that some future government decides to have SSHRC subtly favor research defending private health care, advancing religious values, or questioning climate change? Seems inappropriate to me, and not just because of the particular examples, which were chosen to be blatant. What is objectionable, in my estimation, is the attempt to influence what is properly judged by the experts, i.e., scientists and scholars. If they cannot be trusted, then why can we rely on SSHRC policy-makers in their place?

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  29. Brian Leiter

    If it's about social science projects, then it should be limited to those social science projects where "samplling, community consent and engagement" are relevant. None of that is relevant to working on the interpretation of Nietzsche, or Kant, or Marx, or Adorno, or Foucault, or Leibniz etc.

    If someone working on Nietzsche isn't aware of the work of a senior scholar who happens to be a lesbian, then they are incompetent. It has nothing to do with "diversity" and everything to do with scholarly competence!

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  30. Franz Huber

    I don't think we disagree. You are making an evaluative claim about what SSHRC should be. I am making a descriptive claim about what SSHRC, as a matter of legal fact, is.

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  31. Peripheral Canadian philosopher

    I trust we all want SSHRCC to fund excellent research. The debate is over what criteria should be in place to facilitate this. I think it’s naive, or worse, self-serving, to view these criteria as strictly objective, in the strong sense of being fixed and finished for good. In the past, under previous criteria, excellent research will have been funded. In the future, under somewhat adjusted criteria, excellent research will still be funded. Just not precisely the same specific kinds of excellent research as earlier. Times change, excellence generally prevails, but those researchers who exercise their freedom to do excellent but peripheral research will always face additional, often publicly unacknowledged, barriers when it comes to putting food on the table.

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  32. Canadian Philosopher

    I see. By 'within its rights' I took you to be speaking normatively, rather than descriptively (of the legal system). I apologize for misunderstanding. You have accurately characterized my position.

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  33. Brian Leiter

    Would the University of Toronto–also supported by taxes–be "within its rights" to influence your direction of research? Presumably not. The whole point of a commitment to academic freedom is that the state (or any other entity) shoould not be telling researchers what to research or how.

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  34. Canadian Philosopher

    Even if this is right, it doesn't alter the fact that we must use only scientific and scholarly considerations when updating our evaluative criteria. Otherwise we cannot complain if a future government imposes criteria that favour climate change denial, religious values, the free-market, etc., in order to further its vision of a good society. Some such government could reply to our complaints as you have, i.e., by pointing out that evaluative criteria are not fixed and finished for good, that excellent research still gets done under their regime, and that excellent work was missed in the past anyway. This would strike me as beside the point and, further, I am not confident excellence would prevail in this environment – there are examples of regimes that effectively killed scientific research during their reigns.

    Part of the problem in all of this is that SSHRC seems to be implicitly assuming that the community of social scientist evaluators cannot be trusted to detect a source of genuine and general error in research proposals, so they must be told by SSHRC to do so. This is strange. If a certain kind of consideration is in fact scientifically relevant, then social scientists will either detect its absence in a proposal or else they are generally incompetent, in which case SSHRC really shouldn't be funding social science. If, on the other hand, it is not a relevant consideration, at least not in all cases, then why is SSHRC requiring all applications to speak to it? The overall situation really makes no sense, unless you assume either that SSHRC administrators know more about how social science should be done than social scientists themselves, or else that SSHRC is introducing a non-scientific criterion of evaluation. Each possibility is disconcerting.

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  35. Jeff White

    Notice that the SSHRC does not include "sex" among the list of "diversity" characteristics, despite the longstanding concerns that some areas of research are heavily male-oriented and produce data and conclusions that don't apply to females. This is entirely in keeping with the "woke" project to replace "sex" with the ultimately undefinable terms "gender expression" and "gender identity" in anti-discrimination law and in language in general. Governments, universities, schools, NGOs, the police, the corporate media, and the entertainment industry, among others, have already been captured by this project in Canada.

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  36. Canadian Philosopher

    You are correct, Brian. SSHRC is almost the only game in town.

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  37. Former Canadian Philosopher

    With regard to the question of government guidelines and academic freedom: a decade ago Canada’s then-Conservative government announced that SSHRC should prioritize funding research related to business issues. The directive was vague but all the philosophers I knew where aghast (were they supposed to start citing Hayek more? It wasn’t clear).

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  38. Michael Ruse

    As an evolutionist, I believe that questions of the present are often solved by digging into the past. On this principle, I might be able to throw some light on the present attitude of SSHRC with respect to diversity issues. Back at the beginning of the 1980s, I was virtually unique in the philosophical community in expressing enthusiasm for human sociobiology. Naturally, I incurred the wrath of social scientists (who feared they would be out of a job) and Marxists (who worried about "genetic determinism"). In 1982, I put in for two grants — a Guggenheim and 10K from SSHRC — to work on philosophical naturalism, which for me started with Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection and its relevance for human beings. I got the Guggenheim but was turned down flat by SSHRC, on ideological grounds. I know the latter because one of my referees was Richard Lewontin, the Platonic Form of Marxist Biologist — assuming that Marxist biologists do have forms, unlike hair, dirt, and mud — and I know it was Lewontin because he recycled in his letter material critical of me already in print!

    Some ten years later, poacher turned into a gamekeeper, I was on the SSHRC granting committee for a number of years. Importantly, after a year in Montpellier, I was functionally bilingual — English/French — a necessary condition for being on the committee. I discovered that the committee was hugely overrepresented by people in the social sciences, because they (in Canada) are much more likely to be bilingual than, say, your average analytic philosopher. This reflected into the grants awarded — you were much more likely to get money if you were working on feminist issues or problems to do with indigenous people than if you were working on, say, the Ding an Sich.

    I have lived now for over twenty years in the USA and things may have changed. I no longer applied for grants from SSHRC — actually, thanks to funds attached to my professorship, no longer had to apply for grants period, thank God. But, it would not surprise me to learn that SSHRC is influenced by the same factors as long ago.

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  39. Franz Huber

    As mentioned before, I am not particularly fond of SSHRC's new policy and don't want to defend it, or any of other policy for that matter. That being said, there is a difference between a federal agency such as SSHRC on the one hand, and a public university such as U of T on the other hand. Now, U of T has its own EDI initiative (described on page 22 of the PDF that can be obtained by following this link: https://research.utoronto.ca/reports-publications-metrics/institutional-strategic-research-plan). However, it is much less clear, to say the very least, that the latter infringes on academic freedom.

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  40. Brian Leiter

    I agree an EDI policy at the university probably does not infringe on academic freedom, but it would if it required you to adjust your teaching and/or research, which is what the SSHRC policy *may* be doing with respect to research. That both the University and the SSHRC expend public funds does not matter, if in fact there is a commitment to academic freedom in the higher education sector.

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  41. Franz Huber

    You are right that the fact that both SSHRC and U of T receive public funds does not matter for this question. However, my point was a slightly different one, namely that SSHRC is, but U of T is not, a federal agency.

    U of T is committed to academic freedom (see the statement of institutional purpose: https://governingcouncil.utoronto.ca/secretariat/policies/institutional-purpose-statement-october-15-1992)

    Furthermore, U of T is governed by a council that is elected by and from its members. SSHRC, on the hand, is governed by a council that is appointed by the federal government. Whether it is committed to academic freedom is a different question, and one that is not settled by a statement of institutional purpose, but, ultimately, by the federal government.

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  42. Mohan Matthen

    Franz, I don't agree with one of your crucial assumptions. You seem to suggest that the Government of Canada determines SSHRC policy. As far as I know, this is inaccurate both de jure and de facto. De jure it is false because SSHRC is meant to be at arm's length from GOC. Its policy is meant to be determined by SSHRC Council acting independently, just as the Bank of Canada is supposed to act independently. Of course, this can be subjected to multitudes of abuses. Nevertheless, GOC is not "within its rights" to exert direct influence.

    Which brings me to my second point. De facto, I don't believe that Government of Canada does try to influence SSHRC policy. I could be wrong, of course, but I believe that policies such as the one we have been discussing are in fact put into effect by Council, which consists mostly of academics. So, if you don't like SSHRC's diversity direction, fine, and I agree with you. But don't blame it on the Government of Canada.

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  43. Franz Huber

    I don't think I've said that the GOC determines SSHRC policy. What I have said is that the GOC appoints the council that governs SSHRC. I also think, though I am not sure, that a different SSHRC council can be appointed at any time. Furthermore, while I may be wrong about this, I think there is a further difference in the corporate structure of SSHCR on the one hand and the BoC and similar institutions on the other hand: SSHRC is headed by the minister of innovation, science and industry; BoC is not headed by the finance minister.

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  44. Franz Huber

    Here is the link to the corporate structure of SSHRC which, unlike the BoC, is headed by a federal minister:
    https://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/home-accueil-eng.aspx

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  45. Nick Stang

    I think there is a danger of the forest being lost in the trees here: the issue is not whether SSHRCC has the legal right to do this (of course it does), whether standards of research excellence change over time (yes they do, obviously) or its exact relation to the GOC (who cares?), but whether it is a *good thing or a bad thing* for research funding to be dependent on whether EDI considerations are factored into research methods and questions across *all* humanities and social science fields. I think this is very clearly a bad thing. If you agree, then we should think about ways to convince SSHRCC to abandon this pilot program or implement it in ways that will mitigate its negative effects. SSHRCC is not a democracy, but there is no reason that we Canadian scholars (and our international peers) should not tell SSHRCC that we think this is misguided, and every reason that we should.
    It is also worth noting that, however bad this is for philosophy, it is much worse for many of the social sciences, where you need funding to even conduct your research. The issue of academic freedom was raised above. I confess to being (sincerely) uncertain as to whether my academic freedom has been violated if my research is not funded for extraneous moral/political reasons unrelated to its excellence, given that I do not *need* this money to conduct my research. But surely my academic freedom has been violated if I cannot even *conduct* my research because I do not have the funding to gather the necessary data for extraneous moral/political reasons. This in fact would be a grave violation of my academic freedom. So if you are not worried on philosophy's behalf, then you should be very worried on behalf of the social sciences.

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  46. Franz Huber

    I don't want to overstate the relevance of this question, but it does pertain to the means to take towards attaining your end: if an institution violates your academic freedom, but is legally bound to preserving it, you can take legal action; if an institution is not legally bound to academic freedom, you can lobby (via the CPA, say). The latter works well if the majority of the social science and humanities community agree that the SSHRC policy under discussion is a bad thing. I am not sure this is the case, though. Perhaps the majority of contributors to this blog post think so, maybe even the majority of readers of this blog. But go to a different blog (or ask the CPA) and, I think, the picture changes.

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