by Chandrakant Shah and Tomislav Svoboda
Jan. 10, 2000 -- "At the last meeting of the Governing Council I spoke of my
convictions that we must ask ourselves what steps we can take to respond
more fully to the changing cultural, racial and linguistic diversity of Toronto
and our Province. The community around us has changed faster than we have
changed ourselves. It remains clear to me that we have some catching up to
do."
President Robert Prichard
U of T Bulletin, Jan. 7, 1991
President Prichard made this statement to Governing Council on the Report of the Presidential Advisors on Ethno-cultural Groups and Visible Minorities at the University of Toronto, also known as the Rossi-Wayne report and released in December 1990. Prichard's statement suggests a strong commitment, at that time, on the part of the university to address issues of ethno-racial inequity at U of T. With respect to faculty recruitment, the Rossi-Wayne report recommended the following:
"The university should establish a policy that encourages prospective faculty members from visible minorities to apply, and that gives them a fair chance of being selected. This would involve:
*Broadening the curriculum to encompass subjects of interest to a wide range of people;
* Making search committees accountable for advertising positions in such a way that qualified members of minorities are located and encouraged to apply;
*Making search committees aware that qualified candidates of all ethic backgrounds must be given fair consideration; the disposition of candidates from ethnic minorities should be reported for all appointments;
*If candidates are equal academically, the candidate from a minority background and/or a woman should be given a bonus on the hiring grid."
We would like to draw attention to where we currently stand with respect to ethno-racial diversity within the faculty at U of T and where we can expect to be if we consider different hiring practices at the university.
First, to our knowledge, the above recommendations made by Rossi-Wayne have never been actively implemented.
One of us has sat on many departmental search and hiring committees and at no point, for example, did we ever have to consider Rossi-Wayne's recommendations for faculty recruitment.
The University of Toronto is now entering a time of significant increase in new faculty hirings and we believe this may be a critical time to begin correcting still-existing inequities in faculty composition.
Provost Adel Sedra's office recently announced the university would hire 100 new professors per year for the next five years. Prime Minister Jean Chretien has promised that the Canadian government will support approximately 2000 new research chairs in universities across Canada over the next few years; U of T is likely to get a further 200 to 250 of these new professorial positions. The hirings that will occur in the next few years could have a significant impact on the ethno-racial composition of U of T's faculty for many years to come. This is due to the tenured nature of the professorial appointment, as once appointed to a job, most individuals stay at the job for a minimum of 30 years.
The university has demonstrated good intentions in trying to address ethno-racial inequities and some concrete steps have been taken towards this end. The establishment of First Nations House in 199? to serve and support the needs of aboriginal students is a good example. Then, this summer, in an effort to attract more female and minority professors to U of T, Provost Sedra appointed Professor Rona Abramovitch as his adviser on proactive faculty recruitment. But the absence of a definite plan to address the lack of ethno-racial diversity within the faculty combined with the beginnings of a large faculty-hiring spree does not bode well for the future of ethno-racial diversity on campus.
In fact we believe that if we continue hiring visible minorities at the current rate, we may never achieve anything resembling a more diverse faculty. We believe that this is of great concern as the ethno-racial composition of the faculty is a critical test of the university's true commitment to equity. Equity in faculty composition reflects equity in positions of influence in leadership, mentorship and research.
We have developed a model that forecasts the future composition of the university population given a hiring practice where, on average, 15 per cent of new faculty recruits belong to a visible minority. We also used the model to estimate the average length of time it would take for the ethno-racial composition of the faculty to reach the desired goal of 15 per cent, using a range of hiring practices. The 15 per cent figure is based on a balance between reflecting the current minority composition of the surrounding community and on minimal targets that some academic groups and authorities have set for themselves.
The current composition of the community depends on the boundaries we consider. In the Greater Toronto Area, visible minority and Aboriginal Peoples constitute 46 per cent of the population. This is projected to increase to over 50 per cent by 2000. In Ontario, the comparable figure is 15.8 per cent visible minority and 1.4 per cent aboriginal. In Canada, visible minorities constitute 11.2 per cent of the population with a further 2.7 per cent being Aboriginal Peoples.
Figure 1 - Projected proportion of faculty who will be from a visible minority at the University of Toronto (Where each year 15% of new faculty will be from a visible minority)
Note: 1) Solid curve indicates the average proportion of faculty who will be from a visible minority in each year. 2) The vertical lines i ndicate teh 95% confidence range for each year. 3) The plot is based on results from 200 simulations of a 100-year projection.
There do not appear to be many policy recommendations around what an ideal faculty composition should be. In its handbook, Toward Ethnic Diversification in Psychology Education and Training, the American Psychological Association (1990) recommends that at least 15 per cent of faculty must be from visible minorities to maintain a minimal "critical mass."
The model we developed here used the current faculty population of the university, reported to be 1710, of which 8.7 per cent self-identify as belonging to a visible minority. For the purposes of our simulation, we assumed a steady state where the yearly hiring rate would remain equal to the average reported attrition rate (due to faculty retirement or change of employment), currently about five per cent. We chose not to base our model on a quota system. For this reason we ran simulations based on a weighted coin model to account for the variation in the actual numbers and proportions hired from year to year. To increase the validity and usefulness of our forecast, we performed 200 simulations for each of four different hiring practices and reported averages and 95 per cent "simulation" ranges. The simulation ranges that we report are those within which the results of 95 per cent of our simulations fell.
Using our simulation model, and a "minimal" hiring practice where 15 per cent of new recruits belong to visible minorities, we found that it would take somewhere between 25 and 119 years to reach a desired minority rate of 15 per cent. The average as well as the median was 54 years. Table 1 summarizes the expected projections when we increased the proportion of newly hired visible minority faculty to 20, 25 and 30 per cent. The graph in figure 1 illustrates what we can expect the composition of the faculty to be in the next 100 years with a "minimal" hiring practice.
A couple of policy relevant observations derived from our results are worthy of note. The results suggest that there is less than a 2.5 per cent chance of achieving our desired goal of 15 per cent visible minority faculty within the next 25 years with a "minimal" hiring practice. There is also a greater than 50 per cent chance that it will take more than 54 years to achieve this goal. However, if we hired, say, 20 or 30 per cent of all recruits as visible minority candidates, we would reach our desired goal in a much shorter time -- between five and 24 years.
Limitations to our model include a lack of sufficient information to account for potential increases in faculty size over time. Modelling future faculty size was beyond the scope of this preliminary analysis. Finally, our knowledge of ethno-racial composition is limited to that obtained from self-reports from faculty members who are surveyed.
Whenever we debate ethno-racial diversity many people view it to be either affirmative action or development of a quota system at the expense of academic excellence. This is further complicated by questions of the nature of academic excellence. We believe, however, that measures of academic excellence are set by society, that is, that they are constructed out of social interactions and are subject to social change, rather than preordained and immutable.
To speak against or for policies for increasing ethno-racial diversity is often interpreted as a racist or antiracist. These perspectives stifle informed dialogue and lead to silence. For the university community to move forward, dialogue is essential. The purpose of this piece is to encourage informed dialogue within the university community in terms of what direction we may be going with a range of hiring practices.
Two decades ago universities across the country, recognizing barriers against female academics, focused their hiring policies in such a way that we are now fortunate to have many more women as our colleagues in academic and leadership positions. The proportion of women academics is still short of the desired goal, although we have made some progress. If we truly believe that publicly funded institutions like ours should reflect the society we live in and if we are really committed to diversity and social justice, then we may want to make similar efforts in the area of ethno-racial diversity. In that spirit, the University of Toronto should adopt the earlier stated Rossi-Wayne recommendations on hiring practices of faculty members from visible minorities as its policy. It should also set a policy objective rather than quota, which indicates the minimum percentage of faculty members that should be from visible minority and finally it should set a time frame during which this objective should be met. In the areas where there are not qualified individuals available for recruitment pool, departments should encourage visible minority candidates to pursue further study/expertise so they could be considered for future employment. We hope our actions will speak louder than our words.
Chandrakant Shah is a professor and Tomislav Svoboda, a graduate student in the department of public health sciences.
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