2016/10/03: Part 2: Compulsory Political Education: A Real World Case Study at the U of Toronto

Hi, so this is the second part of my proposed three-part series on political correctness. Looks like I’ll probably expand that, but this one deals with the Department of Human Resources' policy to make anti-racism and anti-bias training mandatory among Human Resources staff at the University of Toronto. I want to explain a couple of things to you in relation to that; mostly why I think it's an extremely ill-advised policy, but also a little bit more about political correctness in general and why you should care about this, even though it doesn't directly affect you, or at least in principle, it doesn't directly affect you.

The first thing I would say is that in order to talk about or any more about political correctness, I guess I probably have to justify my belief that such a thing exists. I can tell you I have already done some empirical research on that. We did this psychometrically, which is psychometrics is the science of psychological measurement. We took an agnostic view to begin with, and the question was, well, are there a set of political beliefs that aggregate together so that they could be described using a single term such as political correctness? What are the personality and other predictors of those beliefs, and how do they associate with other classical forms of political belief like liberalism and conservatism? Because the conservatives often assume that political correctness is an extreme form of liberalism, we were also interested in whether or not that was true.

Basically, what we found was, first, yes, there are beliefs that aggregate together coherently in a manner that would make it reasonable to bring them under the umbrella of a single term. There are actually two dimensions that seem to be associated with political correctness; one is radical egalitarianism, and the other is, I would say, it's kind of left-wing authoritarianism. It's the desire to use censorship and language control to obtain certain kinds of political ends. We also found out that the fundamental personality trait that predicts adherence to such beliefs is trait agreeableness, which differentiates political correctness from liberalism because the fundamental traits that seem to be associated with liberalism—the opposite ones—are associated with conservatism. Liberals are higher in trait openness and lower in trait conscientiousness. I’m speaking of traits in a Big Five manner; there are five cardinal personality traits. There's lots of information about that on my website if you're interested in that. The personality predictors of political correct belief are not the same as the personality predictors of liberal belief, or at least there's a substantive difference.

So anyways, there is such a thing as political correctness from a technical perspective, so it's perfectly reasonable to talk about it. It’s not merely an invention of the politically motivated enemies of such doctrines, not as far as I can tell anyways. We will eventually publish that.

The next question is, well, why should you care about what's happening at the University of Toronto Human Resources Department? I think there are a number of reasons for this. First, it offers a real-world case study, and that's really important because you want to talk about something like political correctness and what might be done about it at the level of high resolution and high detail.

Imagine something has gone wrong with a military helicopter, which is a very complicated device. You don't want a four-year-old’s drawing of a military helicopter as a guide to how to fix it; you want a detailed schematic. The thing about real-world case studies is that they give you detailed schematics. We're going to take this particular occurrence apart very carefully. I'm going to describe to you what I think its significance is and what the errors are in the conceptualization underlying the policy, so we're going to talk through it very carefully.

The other thing I would say is that HR departments are doing this sort of thing in many organizations. In many organizations, it's the HR department that's the vanguard of political correctness, in both private and public organizations alike. This is not something that is by any means limited to universities. You might want to write this off by saying, “Well, the university is a bubble and the things that happen there have no bearing on the rest of society.” That's a really foolish thing to think because the university trains the leaders of tomorrow. I know that sounds like a cliché, but I mean it. The smart kids that are in university right now are the kids that in 15 years are going to be running the world. What’s happening in the universities is an indication of the shape of things to come. I think universities are largely responsible for the wave of political correctness that has rolled across North America and much of Europe as well.

I’ll talk about all that at a different time, but I want to begin by saying: don't think that the universities are isolated from the real world because they're not. They're not isolated from the world at all, and they're not nearly as much of a bubble as you might think.

Alright, so here we're going to go to the memo first. This memo was sent out to all the HR staff at the University of Toronto on September 26, 2016, and it was sent out by Angela Hillyard, who’s the Vice President of Human Resources and Equity.

So here's the content:

"Dear colleagues, next month we will be providing mandatory anti-discrimination and anti-bias training for all staff in the Division of Human Resources and Equity and the HR divisional offices. Motivated by conversations that have taken place over the past year with the Black Liberation Collective and racialized staff members of our community, this training is intended to build and reinforce the work already occurring throughout the organization and within Human Resources, recognizing that there is room for improvement to embed common understandings and evidence-based best practice within our work. The training will be co-presented by Tana Turner, I hope I have that right, Principal at Turner Consulting Group, and Merlin Charles, Concurrent Teacher Education Program, Ontario Institute for the Studies of Education.

So, easy, that’s the place that trains all our teachers. There will be six sessions hosted for all Human Resources staff throughout October 2016. Note that six sessions; you will receive a registration link soon to attend one of the training sessions hosted on the St. George campus. I ask that all colleagues working... there are three campuses at the University of Toronto, they're somewhat distributed around the city, so people are being asked to come to the central campus in order to finish the training. Please note that this is required training for all HR staff at the University of Toronto, and we will be tracking attendance and completion via HRIS, which I guess is obviously their attendance and completion tracking system. So it's mandatory, and much is made of the fact that it's mandatory. If you have questions, please contact Erin Jackson, Executive Director, IHR."

So fundamentally, Human Resources staff at the University of Toronto are now required to attend anti-racist and anti-bias training—six sessions—and attendance is mandatory.

Okay, so why is that a problem? Well, I think there are actually eight problems with it, and I'm going to go through them in detail. The first problem is the assumption of racism and bias at the University of Toronto. If there's no racism and bias problem at the University of Toronto, then why bother with it at all? So that's one assumption.

Another problem—not an assumption—is what I estimate to be the questionable legitimacy of the groups and individuals who are serving as consultants to the University of Toronto Human Resources Department. We already identified them; one of them was Tana Turner and the other was Merlin Charles. We'll talk about them momentarily. Oh yes, and also the Black Liberation Collective because the HR people have been consulting with the Black Liberation Collective. So these are people who have been deemed appropriate to advise the university on its internal policies.

A third assumption that I think is problematic is the assumption that anti-racism and anti-bias training is the way to address racism and bias at the University of Toronto, assuming it exists—because that hypothesis can be questioned.

The willingness to introduce what is clearly politicized training—or it could easily become that—into the workplace and on a university campus, which I would think would be the last place where such things should be done casually, is concerning.

The fifth problem is the assumption of guilt on the part of the HR staff.

The sixth problem is the assumption that such training should be mandatory.

The seventh problem is the assumption that the people hired have the competence to conduct such training. That’s obviously linked to my earlier point about questioning whether the people who are being consulted to make the policy, to begin with, have the competence and authority necessary—authority, legitimacy—to promote such policies.

Finally, the eighth problem is the assumption that such training will make the situation—assuming there is a situation that needs to be addressed—better rather than worse.

All right, so that's eight problems, and we're going to take a very close look at each of them. I think if even one of those problems is properly formulated as I see it, that’s enough of a reason to question the validity of this policy. But I believe that all eight of these problems exist and are each that serious, so you can make up your own mind about whether you believe that once you hear the argument.

Alright, so first, let's start with the assumption of racism and bias at the University of Toronto. Well, the first thing I would say is that if you compare any organization to a hypothetical utopian ideal, then you can be sure that it will fall short. However, I would say that comparing any organization to a hypothetical utopian ideal is a very dangerous thing to do.

If you're cognizant of the history of the 20th century, you know that there are certain dangers associated with utopian political idealism. What utopian political idealists do is posit some perfect state and then denigrate every organization that human beings have ever managed to produce on the basis that it's not up to that level of perfection.

So yes, compared to utopia, the University of Toronto has its problems, but we're not going to do that. We're going to compare it to actual real other places. So we’re going to think about this.

If you pick a country that was the hallmark of, let's call it, tolerance—I mean reasonable tolerance—if you wanted to identify a country that exemplified that above all else in the world, there'd be a few contenders. But Canada would definitely be on that list.

We’re a tolerant culture, and then Ontario, I would say, within Canada, is one of the more liberal, tolerant provinces. It’s very multicultural and ethnically diverse, and that's particularly true of Toronto, which prides itself, rightly or wrongly, on being the most multicultural city in the world. Toronto is a great city; it's big. It gets exciting; it’s developing well. It's got a booming economy, and everyone who comes here seems to get along, and that’s great. I don’t know why that is, but partly it's because the city is embedded in Canada, and Ontario and Toronto are doing some good things. So hooray for that.

Then, within Toronto, you have the University of Toronto, and the campus is so multi-ethnic and racially diverse that I would challenge anyone to find an institution anywhere in the world that has those attributes more firmly in place than the University of Toronto.

So then, I don't see that there’s a problem with racism and bias at the University of Toronto. I have to point out that measurement is a real issue here, you know, because you have to figure out—and I'm speaking from a technical perspective—how it is that you measure racism. Asking individuals if they think there is racism isn't a reasonable way of doing it. I can tell you partly why that is. If you ask people to what degree their group has experienced racism in a given context or in a given culture, they'll generally report a fairly high degree of racism. But if you ask them how much they as individuals have suffered from racism or other forms of bias, the estimates are much lower.

That's just one indication of the measurement difficulty that’s part and parcel of trying to deal with something as complicated as racism. First of all, exactly what do you mean by racism? That's a tricky thing. And second, how exactly do you measure it? You need to determine to what degree there is racism before you run around deciding that there is so much racism that people need to be educated.

It’s a technical problem, and I can tell you that if I conducted a research study that was reviewed by the University of Toronto Ethics Board on an organization— which I’m not very fond of, by the way—but assuming I wanted to do a research project of this sort, I can tell you I’d have to have a lot better measures of racism than the measures that the HR Department is using to accuse their own staff of sufficient racism to necessitate training. That’s something to think about.

The Black Liberation Collective, which is one of the groups that U of T has hypothetically been consulting with, claims that U of T is a racially biased entity because it doesn't have as many Black people in its faculty and administration as you would expect to be there if you use the census as a guideline. But you know, you can’t do that because there are all sorts of reasons, other than racism, why a population might be underrepresented in an organization, and it also ignores the broader context.

For example, if you’re thinking about non-census related representation at the University of Toronto and you're going to use that as a hallmark of discrimination, you're really in trouble because there are way more women than men students, say, for example, in the humanities. There’s way more men in the hard sciences, so to speak. There's more Jews among the faculty—and that’s almost always the case among faculty—because Jewish people tend to be over-represented in disciplines where intellectual prowess is valued. There are more Asians on campus in mathematics than there are than you would estimate from the census data.

So it's like if we’re going to use census data as the hallmark of representation at the University, we have a lot of problems. We're going to have to get rid of a lot of people who already hold positions that are often regarded as minority. So, it’s an insane policy.

Older people are also obviously over-represented among the faculty and the administration, but that doesn’t mean necessarily that it’s because of the same sort of bias you would associate with racism.

And, well, there are all sorts of problems associated with that. If it’s Black people who are underrepresented, well, which Black people are we going to try to represent more specifically? Are we going to use recent immigrants? I mean, recent Black immigrants into the United States, for example, tend to do better than multi-generational Black inhabitants of the U.S. So you might say, well, the people who are really being biased against are the people who are the multi-generational inhabitants, Black multi-generational inhabitants of North America. This whole thing can be infinitely fractionated; it’s not helpful, and we’ll never get a precise representation by census in any institution. It's a stupid way of thinking about it anyways.

Second, I don’t think that the groups that are consulting with the University of Toronto HR people are legitimate—not that they’re not legitimate as groups, and they’re legitimate as people who have a perspective, but they’re not legitimate as people who should be consulted on regards to policy at the University of Toronto because they have no legitimacy among the people that they purport to represent.

None of the kind of legitimacy that we recognize as legitimacy in a democracy—you recognize elected representatives, for example, as legitimate representatives. The racial situation in Canada and the racial situation in the United States are not the same at all. As far as I can tell, it's a spillover of what are fundamentally American problems into the Canadian political scene.

I’ll talk more about the Black Liberation Collective shortly, and also racialized members of the U of T community. I wasn’t even sure what racialized members mean because I guess I'm not capable of keeping up with the constant rapid transformation of politically correct terminology.

I had to look it up; it's a sociological term, which doesn’t really surprise me because I think sociology is fundamentally a corrupt discipline. There are a variety of corrupt disciplines on university campuses, and sociology is certainly one of them. Racialization or ethnicity is the process of ascribing ethnic or racial identities to a social practice or group that did not identify itself as such. That doesn't seem to be the definition that the HR people are using.

I looked at the Ontario Human Rights Commission website because it came up very quickly in a Google search, and not surprisingly because it’s an appalling website in a multitude of ways. The Ontario Human Rights Commission says, recognizing that race is a social construct, describes people as a racialized person or racialized group instead of the more outdated, inaccurate terms—racial minority, visible minority, person of color, or non-white. It wasn’t very long ago that, as far as I can remember, visible minority and person of color were the correct socially acceptable terms. But you know, they change very rapidly. The reason for that is that if you keep changing the terms, you can keep playing the stupid politically correct game; that’s at least one reason.

One of the rules of the game is to keep changing the terminology so that everyone is always at fault. I guess what consulting with racialized members of the U of T community means is that U of T consulted, let’s say, I don’t know how they would define who constituted a minority on the University of Toronto campus because, like I said, it’s a very multi-ethnic campus.

It's not at all obvious who is underrepresented and who’s overrepresented at first glance. But I suppose it's probably the overrepresented people would certainly be Black or white middle-class males, I suspect they’re probably not very happy about. I mean those guys are on their way out anyways, and males in general are on their way out in the university, so it’s not going to be a problem if it’s a problem now; it’s certainly not going to be a problem for very long.

So anyway, I don’t think that those groups are particularly legitimate. As I’m speaking more particularly about the Black Liberation Collective, racialized members of the U of T community is so vague that I don’t know exactly; you know, I can’t understand, I can’t get a handle on the standing of those people, and I don’t know how they would measure their effects and establish the validity of the constructs that are there being applied to these particular groups.

Okay, let’s look at the Black Liberation Collective. Who are they? This is from their website: “We are a collective consisting of Black students who are dedicated to transforming institutions of higher education through unity, coalition building, direct action, and political education.”

Well, fair enough, I suppose. If that's what they want to do, that's what they want to do. I don’t know exactly what they aim at regarding transforming institutions of higher education through unity, coalition building, etc. It’s a typical activist group as far as I can tell, and as you would expect from a typical activist group, they don't negotiate; they have demands. They have national demands and campus demands, and they make demands to universities across North America. The universities are appallingly willing to kowtow to those demands—without, I think, sufficient thought, and merely as a consequence—mostly as a consequence of fear and the desire to be, you know, viewed as always being on the side of moral virtue without having to undertake the thought necessary to actually ensure that that is where you're standing.

Here are some of the demands—oh sorry, I have to tell you a bit more about the Liberation Collective. I couldn’t find them on Wikipedia weirdly enough. I know that they demanded segregated spaces at several universities. Segregated spaces. Can I say that again? They demanded segregated spaces at several universities including UCLA and New York University. They wanted Black people only to be living together and queer people to be living together, and they also demanded safe spaces at Oberlin College.

So that gives you some indication of the sorts of things that they're up to.

Okay, a third assumption the HR department is making is that anti-racism and anti-bias training is the way to address the hypothetical racism and bias problem at the University of Toronto. This opens a whole multitude of cans of worms. First of all, as I said, it’s very, very difficult to measure something like racism and bias—extraordinarily difficult, especially bias. It’s a rat’s nest of fear, radical and empirical investigation, particularly in social psychology, and there's been some terrible things happening there, so they’re very difficult things to measure.

But you don’t only have to measure racism and bias to indicate that such things exist in a university; you have to indicate not only that they exist but that they exist and that they are causing problems of a certain magnitude. You also have to posit that the problems that such things are causing—if they exist—are the most compelling problems that need to be addressed because you have to address problems one at a time in terms of their importance, and so you need a ranking.

Let's say there is racism at the University of Toronto. I suppose there is some because there is some everywhere; that doesn’t validate just because there is some doesn’t mean that this is where our efforts should be devoted as a university. The universities put a lot of resources into this sort of thing, and I think in an ill-advised way. They’re paying an awful lot of money, and they’re paying the staff that are doing this a crazy amount of money, especially in comparison to their, what would you call it, credentials. Seriously, it’s a good indication of the actual, what would you call it, the actual value hierarchy of the university.

It isn’t obvious to me that the University of Toronto’s primary function is to address racism on the... on the University of Toronto campus. Well, I’ve already made that point: you have to measure and define racism and bias; you have to measure and define; you also have to define what your training program is going to look like hypothetically, why it will work, and what elements will work.

Then you also have to assess the outcome, and I don’t see any of that happening properly with the way that the Human Resources Department is going about this particular training program. And as I said already, I would not be allowed as a researcher at the U of T to conduct this as an intervention in an experiment; it would violate the ethics provisions that the U of T uses to restrict its researchers. It looks like it's okay to inflict on your employees, but it wouldn't be okay for scientists to ask people to volunteer for, for example...

So alright, so the point here is that there's no evidence that anti-racism and anti-bias training actually lowers racism and bias. It’s a supposition; it might be true, but it might not be true. For all we know, it would actually increase it.

And I'll go back to that.

The next issue is: should employers—especially employers at public universities—be allowed to enforce political training, enforce training that’s politically motivated on their employees? You know, maybe you could debate whether or not this constitutes political training, but I think it does, and even if it doesn’t, it’s close enough to it so that it should be discussed at least as a potential problem.

So I don’t think that employers should be allowed to politically indoctrinate, let’s use that word—or even educate for that matter—although I don’t see any evidence that what the U of T HR department is doing actually qualifies as education. I don’t think that an employer should be allowed to indoctrinate its employees on pain of the threat of job loss. The fact that this particular training program is mandatory and that attendance will be taken indicates to me an implicit threat that, you know, your employment viability is going to be judged to some degree depending on whether or not you attend these seminars.

So I don’t think that’s acceptable at all, and this looks very political to me. These ideas are associated with radical left ideology. The people who are promoting this use highly politicized language, and all of it is predicated on the fundamental assumption that group-based oppression is everywhere and that should be the primary consideration of social policy, economic policy, and organizational policy, even in places like the University.

So this is the worst one, I think, probably.

So, let’s look at it this way. Let’s say I’m an HR person at the University of Toronto and I get this memo. Here’s the problem. I decide that I’m going to... Here’s what the memo presumes: it presumes that I’m sufficiently racist, first of all; that my membership in the HR department is the cardinal element about which my guilt or innocence regarding racism can be adjudicated. The fundamental presumption is that as a group, the HR department people are sufficiently racist and biased so that they need re-education.

That, to me, is the presumption of—it's two problems with that: it’s first of all group-based, it’s group-identity-based, and second of all, it’s the presumption of guilt before innocence.

That means that if I accede to this, if I agree to go to this, I am acting out the proposition that I am in fact sufficiently guilty of racism and bias so that I need to be re-educated. I don’t think that it’s reasonable for the HR department to assume that its staff is guilty of such nefarious things. I think it violates a fundamental presupposition that’s at the bottom of the Western legal code and Western culture, and the freedom that goes along with that, and that's the assumption of innocence.

You're innocent until proven guilty, and you're innocent even if you have reasonable doubt about your guilt. You also have the right to a thorough defense. I think it’s reasonable for any given HR person to say, “Hey look, I'm not sufficiently racist to be retrained, and I don't think that it’s appropriate for you to be implying that I am, and I don't think it’s appropriate for you to demand that I attend, and I don't think it’s appropriate that you hold out the possibility of punishment if I don’t attend.”

There’s something even worse associated with this and we’ll get to this in more detail: there’s an idea that’s become very, very popular and it’s partly a consequence of a certain brand of social psychology associated with the idea called—or with the test called—the implicit association test. That is the idea that people are characterized by unconscious racism and bias. The thing is that might be true, but that’s not really relevant because everyone is guilty of all sorts of things unconsciously and structurally, and that isn't how you judge the innocence or guilt of someone.

Besides that, we don’t understand things like unconscious bias and unconscious racism anywhere near well enough or are able to measure them well enough to start assuming that we can start making statements and educating people out of their unconscious biases. It’s an unbelievably dangerous idea, and it’s an absolute misuse of social science— a terrible misuse of social science.

That should be said: it’s coming out of social psychology. Yes, by and large, and that research has been done by some of the top researchers in the field of social psychology, and right now, the field of social psychology is under tremendous attack for the fundamental poor quality of its scientific investigations, so that’s all very much worth thinking about.

To me, the once we allow the idea that unconscious racism and bias constitutes a form of guilt—here's the road we're walking down—you can be punished or threatened for the possibility of your guilt, which means you're the sort of person that could conceivably do something for which you could be held guilty. Everyone is like that because everyone has a dark side; that’s for sure. But we can't be punished because we have dark sides. We can be punished because we express those in illegal actions.

You don't punish people or fix them up until they've actually broken the law—not because they might break the law. Everybody might break the law, so if the rule is if we might break the law, we should be punished to re-educated, then everyone should be punished to re-educated. Unless you want to be punished or re-educated, that’s not a very good idea.

I think it’s even worse that we could be punished or re-educated for the possibility that we might have the intent to do something. The level of abstraction of guilt here is becoming truly, truly absurd and it's truly dangerous.

Here’s the entire Human Rights Commission again to need a terrible quote about something. If you need a quote to help you support your assumption of creeping authoritarianism on the left, all you have to do is go to the Ontario Human Rights Commission website and they will give you something you need every time. And Brewer Chua Lee said, “Every sentence racism can be openly displayed in racial jokes or slurs or hate crimes.” Well, so much for all sorts of comedians.

Toronto has a very, very famous comedian who does nothing but racial jokes. I mean people loved him; people from races all over—from every race you can possibly imagine—flock to his show to be insulted by him because it’s such a relief for someone to state straight out such things instead of walking down this particular path that people are relieved and happy to see it happen openly. I can’t remember; Russell Peters—that’s the guy.

As far as I can tell, what Russell Peters does is becoming close to illegal. You know, Russell Peters is a pretty damn funny guy, and to think of him as a racist is absolutely insane. There was a comedian already in Canada who was fined $40,000 by the Quebec Human Rights Commission for— I mean, he said some nasty things, but that’s not the point. He’s a comedian. Leave the damn comedians alone, right? They’re like the jesters in the King’s Court; they’re allowed to say what they want to say so that we can keep stupid things and crooked things out where everybody can pay attention to them.

Anyways, racism can be openly displayed in racial jokes and slurs or hate crimes but can be more deeply rooted in, here we go, attitudes, values, and stereotypical beliefs. Good luck defining them, and what will happen is they’ll be defined in a way that maximizes people’s guilt because that’s the way you can keep the PC game going, as I said.

In some cases, these are unconsciously held. Oh good, so now we’re going to be held liable for our unconscious biases—very, very bad idea, especially because we just don’t understand things very well.

We can’t measure them very well; we don’t understand them very well. There’s a lot of debate about what they are, and even if they do exist in the way that people claim, we don’t know what to do about it. Like conscious retraining programs—there’s no evidence that conscious retraining programs are going to fix this sort of thing. If there is evidence, I certainly don’t know it, and worse, if there is evidence, I don’t think the people who are doing the re-education programs demanded by the HR people have demonstrated that their particular programs have the positive benefit that’s being claimed.

Okay, next is the assumption that such training should be mandatory. That reeks to me again of creeping authoritarianism. It’s like not only are you biased and racist and you don’t get to say anything about that; we're just going to assume it right off the bat. But you better believe you will go to the training, and if you don’t, there's going to be a problem for you.

Okay, well, if all you have—why not make it voluntary? Why not make it volunteer? Why not ask people? Maybe you'd get a 95% show rate, but then of course it wouldn’t be the real racists that would go. You don’t know that. You could ask your people to go; in fact, you could ask them to go and see if anybody showed up, because then you would also be able to judge that way if there's any interest in it.

But oh no, we’re going to force people to go. We can impose our particular political perspective on them. We’re going to accuse them of guilt; we’re going to punish them if they don’t go along with our mandate—that’s the policy—even though we have no evidence that this is going to work.

Okay, now, more on another one—the competence and impartiality of the people hired as trainers. Okay, so let’s say that there is a problem with racism and bias at the University of Toronto, which I don't believe, or at least I don't believe it's enough of a problem so that it should be so high up the hierarchy of problems that we're trying strenuously to fix. As far as imperfect organizations go, it's a pretty good one.

So fine, let's say that this racism and bias does exist, even though I don't think the evidence for that is there. Well then the question is, well, who are the people that are coming in to do the training? Because I can tell you this is tantamount to a psychological intervention. You might think, well, are the people who are conducting this sort of intervention qualified to do so?

One of the things you'd hope is that they have the right credentials, and the second is that you'd hope is that they had published something, you know, in a respectable journal that had been peer-reviewed, indicating that their particular training program actually reduced racism in a cost-effective and measurable manner instead of increasing it, for example.

Because, you know, there's always the possibility that a well-meaning intervention will make things worse, and we will get to that in a moment. So we're going to look at the two people who are hired as trainers, and I'll just tell you about them and you can draw your own conclusions.

Okay, so the first one is Tana Turner. Her qualifications are a master’s degree in sociology, and as I said already, sociology is one of those disciplines that I at least regard as fundamentally corrupt. I don’t think that that constitutes qualification. She worked in public service on provincial employment equity legislation; she’s responsible for work identifying specific groups to be designated for employment equity.

She spent twelve years as an independent consultant providing Human Resource diversity, equity research, program evaluation, and community consulting expertise to a range of clients. Alright, she’s the principal at Turner Consulting Group, so this is her primary occupation, and she is an equity, diversity, and inclusion consultant.

She offers her clients a comprehensive approach to help them understand their changing employee population and client base and how to leverage that diversity for organizational success. Of course, one of her presuppositions is that diversity, defined in the politically correct manner, is a precondition for organizational success, even though I don't think that there’s any literature bearing on that that indicates that’s the case.

Here's some of the things that she claims: "Inclusion goes beyond having a diverse workforce and complying with equity-related legislation." As important as these things are, an inclusive organization can be defined as an organization that integrates the values of equity and diversity. Those of course are the top two values within all aspects of the organization, including policies and procedures, as well as individual behaviors and organizational culture.

So in my estimation, she's someone who fundamentally holds politically correct beliefs, and the reason she’s hired by the people who hire her is to spread those beliefs as widely as possible within the organization. Now at the University of Toronto, that will be mandatory, and there are implicit punishments waiting in the wings for people who aren't really happy about doing that.

So a diverse workforce includes people of different races, cultures, religions, ages, genders, abilities, and sexual and gender identities at all job levels. Yeah, well, that’s one way of defining diverse. I guess I would think more about what constitutes a competent and effective workforce, but that is a secondary consideration, I would say. It is a secondary consideration at the University of Toronto, at least in the administration as far as I've been able to tell.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t a consideration, but we don’t see this kind of discussion about competence and excellence—what a university should really be aiming at, right? They're institutions of excellence. The idea that excellence is best served by this kind of diversity is a specious claim, at least it’s a highly debatable claim. I don’t think there’s evidence for it whatsoever.

I know the creativity literature very well, and I know the productivity literature pretty well, and I don’t think there’s any evidence at all that, for example, diversity produces an increment in creativity. Creativity seems to be fundamentally a cardinal personality trait associated with openness; it’s also associated with high intelligence; it’s actually quite rare. There’s no evidence whatsoever that diversity increases workplace creativity—not that I know of.

Adding to the effective and efficient delivery of services to a diverse client population, well, those are stated as facts, and I think the evidence for them is weak at best and non-existent at worst, and they’re false claims at worst.

The evidence for them is non-existent at best or weak at worst, and I can tell you that those claims are all assumptions at best and false at worst. An inclusive organizational culture is one in which the values of equity, diversity, and inclusion—see those have got to be the only values—and I can tell you that those are associated with trait agreeableness.

Basically, what these ideologies are, they are expressions of the underlying personality trait. The ideological expression is the mouthpiece of the trait, and people who are very high in traits like agreeableness are very likely to hold this sort of value structure. They’re positing it as an absolute; it's not an absolute because there are at least five dimensions of personality that are associated with values necessary for people to live a balanced life.

Again, that's a specious claim. An inclusive organizational culture is one in which the values of equity, diversity, and inclusion are reflected in both the formal structure and in the informal practices and norms.

Her basic claim is that what she’s going to do is come in and help you ensure that the hierarchy of values in your organization is transformed so that equity, diversity, and inclusion are at the top. It’s not obvious to me at all that those are the values that should be at the top of any given organization.

Certainly, even if they are among the highest values of an organization, there are many other values that should be considered at least of equal importance, especially in an organization like the University of Toronto that in principle is aiming at excellence.

In such an organizational culture, all employees feel respected, comfortable, and are able to bring their full self to work and have it valued. Yeah, sure; I don’t buy it because I don’t think that this emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion has helped employees feel respected, comfortable, and valued or that that is what makes them able to bring their full selves to work and have it valued.

Those are propositions, not facts, not supported by the data as far as I know. Research hasn’t been done that would indicate that any of this is true, so as far as I'm concerned, it’s basically political cliché, and it’s ill-advised at best.

They’re then able to contribute their best to the organization. Yeah, it could be, but probably not, and I don’t think there’s any evidence for it. I know the literature, by the way, so if anybody would like to have a debate about this, I’d be perfectly willing to do so.

So, okay, next. This is what else she does to address the governance needs of an inclusive organization. Our services include tools, techniques, and assistance such as assessing existing diversity among board members to establish a benchmark, developing a board recruitment process that incorporates her definition of diversity, and tailoring board documents and statements to be more inclusive.

So it’s the dissemination of a politically correct viewpoint through absolutely every level of the organization. We also provide training to board members and offer board manuals to help board members understand and integrate issues related to her definition of diversity into their decision-making.

That’s what she offers, and she worked on or conducted 22 employment systems reviews for a number of private nonprofit and public sector organizations. She also developed and delivered human rights—here we go—unconscious bias training. What she actually means by that is training against unconscious bias, and I already laid out my objections to the idea of training against unconscious bias; really, this is a terrible thing.

We do not understand this anywhere near well enough for people to go around telling themselves and offering their services for sale saying, “Look, I can come into your organization and help your employees reduce their unconscious bias,” and then also to accuse your employees of having unconscious bias to a degree that necessitates their retraining—that’s an awful thing to do. It is the presumption of guilt before innocence, and it’s the presumption of a kind of guilt that no one can escape from being accused of.

It’s absolutely appalling. So conducted program reviews, conducted gender equity analyses, etc.

So anyway, that’s the sort of person who’s going to be doing the training, and I guess that's not really all that surprising.

The next person is—oh, one other thing. This is Tana Turner; here’s one of the things that she sells on her website. It’s called "Defeating Unconscious Bias"; it’s a DVD or a USB. It’s for the lovely price of $775 to $825. "Defeating Unconscious Bias" is designed to address the hidden biases that can affect hiring, promoting, and team building, and to challenge your ability to create an inclusive workplace.

Yeah, well, I don’t think so; sorry, I don’t believe that that’s something that can be done yet, and I think that people who claim that they can do it—well, you can make up your own mind about that.

Alright, so the final one is the assumption that training programs of this type would be effective. Let’s assume that there is a problem at the University of Toronto with racism and bias, even though I don’t think there is, particularly. Then let’s assume that we're going to bring people in to train everyone out of their racism and bias—unconscious or otherwise.

We need to buy the idea that this sort of training is effective. Okay, well, no problem, except this: if you’re a clinician and a research scientist, say, like me, one of the things that you’ve learned is that you do not put in place an intervention without assessing its outcome. The reason for that is that there have been well-publicized failures of social science interventions, which I would contend fall under the same rubric.

It’s an educational or psychological intervention. There have been well-documented catastrophic failures of such interventions in the past.

One of the most famous ones was called the Somerville study, which was done in the 1930s. A woman named Joan McCord, a very good criminologist, conducted a lot of the follow-up research to the Somerville study, and the Somerville study was an attempt to take kids who were in kind of rough inner-city neighborhoods and put them through psychological and sociological interventions to reduce their risk—especially of crime—in the later years of their lives.

And actually, what happened was that the intervention, although very carefully designed and I would say admirably designed and also designed by people who I do think had the best interests of the kids in mind, had consequences that were shocking. The kids in the intervention program actually ended up being more criminal than the kids that weren't.

There’s a large literature on this; it was a very shocking study, particularly to the people who did it. It’s a classic, and it’s not the only study of its type. Now, I’m posting the introduction to this book written by Joan McCord called "Crime and Family."

There are two chapters in that book that are selected writings of Joan McCord—one called "The Cambridge Somerville Study: A Pioneering Longitudinal Experimental Study of Delinquency Prevention," and then chapter four is "Cures that Harm: Unanticipated Outcomes of Crime Prevention Programs."

Well, that could be any kind of prevention program, so I’ll post that so that you can all read that. But my point is quite clear: you have an intervention, you think there’s a problem, you design an intervention—well then it’s incumbent on you to demonstrate carefully that the intervention produces its desired effects. Because there’s a high probability that it won’t. In fact, there’s a high probability that it will produce the reverse effect.

So for all the HR department knows, their mandatory training program could make people more racist and more biased. I would say the mere fact that the training is mandatory is highly likely to produce precisely that outcome because it’s going to generate resentment among people—even people who would be relatively unwilling to express that resentment.

My hypothesis would be as a scientist and a researcher if I was conducting this as an experiment; I’d have two conditions: voluntary and mandatory. Although, I wouldn’t be allowed to do that because that would be unethical, by the way. According to the ethics, that would be unethical research. But I would test to see if mandatory training and voluntary training had different effects. My guess is that mandatory training would kick back, and it would reverse the effects of the training.

But we don’t care about that sort of thing when we put policy like this into place because we already assume that we know what we’re doing. Partly we do that because we know so little about what we’re doing that we can’t even see what sorts of mistakes we might be making; we just make assumptions. There is racism; we know where it is; we have a training program; the training program will fix the racism, and then things will be better.

It doesn't matter if we make it mandatory. It’s like sorry, none of those propositions are viable; they’re all debatable, they all need to be tested, and they're all dangerous in that they might produce unintended negative consequences. There’s lots of reason in the literature to assume that that might be the case, so I’ll post that so you guys can read it; you can think about it.

Merlin Charles, she's the one along with Tana Turner who’s going to be doing the training. I couldn’t find out that much about her. She’s a sessional lecturer at the Ontario Institute of Studies on Education. I guess I need to say something about OISE. I think that educational psychology is a fad-ridden discipline; I think the level of scholarship is appallingly low.

I can identify a number of fads that rush through the education system, a lot of it pushed through by educational psychologists over the last 20 years. The idea of practical intelligence—that’s one of them. The idea of whole word reading—which was a catastrophe in the California school system—that was another. The notion that self-esteem training—that self-esteem even exists, which I don’t think it does technically speaking—I think it's fundamentally a variant of trait neuroticism, which isn't really movable.

There’s some reasonable evidence that self-esteem training turned children into narcissists rather than increasing their self-esteem, and I don’t think there’s any evidence that the self-esteem programs had the desired effect. There’s also the idea of multiple intelligences, which is an absolutely specious idea from a scientific perspective. So educational psychology is unbelievably fad-ridden, and OISE is a major offender in that regard.

Anyways, Merlin Charles has a PhD in education, and the reason I’m bringing up the fad-ridden issue is because she’s a specialist in what’s called holistic education. It’s a philosophy of education based on the premise that each person finds identity, meaning, and purpose in life through connections to the community, to the natural world, and to humanitarian values such as compassion and peace—which, I would say, are additionally reflective of trait agreeableness, by the way, especially compassion.

Holistic education aims to call forth from people an intrinsic reverence for life and a passionate love of learning. Well, to me, that’s all cliché fundamentally, and so the fact that she’s a specialist in holistic education does not indicate to me that she holds the qualifications necessary to serve as an advisor to policymakers at the University of Toronto.

So why is the University of Toronto listening to these individuals and groups? I think there are a lot of reasons for it, but I think one of them is that it’s because they effectively present themselves as oppressed or as experts in oppression, and that’s enough.

One of the things we might further discuss is what value should be being supported and presented at the University, and right now the PC onslaught is predicated on the idea that the fundamental values are equity, diversity, and inclusion. What I find troublesome about that is twofold: one, that’s a very one-sided hierarchy of values, and I mean that technically because it’s the values that agreeable people would hold as sacrosanct.

There are other sets of values that have to be included in a properly functioning value hierarchy in order for individuals and for societies to stay balanced, and I would say that what also needs to be included at the university are the values associated with conscientiousness, which would be roughly competence, excellence, and quality, and also of openness, which is creative free inquiry.

Those have to be considered at least as important, and arguably more important. The other thing that bothers me is that the definitions of equity and diversity and inclusion are defined by precisely the criteria that the social justice warrior and PC types believe are responsible in some sense for all ills in society.

We’re being asked to construe ourselves in terms of our group identity—whatever that group might be: age, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, sexual expression, gender expression, gender identity, and undoubtedly a plethora of new terms to come. We’re being asked to accept those divisions as indicative of the fundamental differences between us and then to assume that the only way that you can judge whether or not a society is functioning properly is to determine whether every person, whether all of those categories are represented numerically equally in every single situation.

Well, you know, it’s a poor game that, and it’s part of the PC game. I'm going to release a video on the PC game to explain exactly what that is.

Okay, so what might be done about such things? That would be the next question. In this particular case, what should be done? Well, I would say that HR staff at the University of Toronto and people everywhere should refuse to subject themselves to re-education regarding their putative racism and bias unless they want to convict themselves by attending. I think that’s exactly what they’re doing—if you’re forced to undergo such training and you agree, then by the fact that you attend, you agree that the intervention is justified.

I know that it’s difficult for people to stand up against this sort of thing, but I don’t think it’s as difficult as people presume—at least not impossible—because I think that the people who are pushing this sort of thing are actually not very brave. They construe themselves continually as victims, and I have a sneaking suspicion that if people push back with any degree of firmness, they would back off very, very rapidly.

But we need to find out because this sort of thing has to be stopped now. It can still be stopped by peaceful means, and I don’t think that’s going to be the case in ten years if things continue the way they are.

So it’s time for people to stand up using peaceful means, and here are some ways you should contact some of the people in charge in your organization, or in this case, the University of Toronto, and express your concern. You should do it; you should say what you have to say in a cool-headed, clear, and well-articulated manner, and you should assume, to begin with, rationality and goodwill on the part of the recipients.

You can consider that assumption an act of courage on your part. If you can’t formulate your own words, then you can tell them that you found the arguments in this video convincing. Maybe you want to highlight one or two of them. I gave eight different arguments. You could send them the link; it might also be interesting to ask these people how much the university is planning to pay for these training sessions because that’s something I’d be very interested in knowing.

So I think it’s something that’s valid—matter for public debate.

Alright, so here are the connections of the people—the contact information that would enable you to contact the people who are responsible for the policies. Here they are.

The first is Erin Jackson. She’s the Executive Director, Internal Human Resources. I took a look at her credentials; she has a bachelor's degree with an advanced certificate from the Rotman Advanced Program in Human Resources Management. I can’t see that that level of qualification ensures that she has the expertise necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of the kind of program that she's considering putting in place.

So that’s Erin Jackson; she’s at erin.jackson@utoronto.ca. Then she works for Angela Hillyard, who’s the Vice President of Human Resources and Equity: angela.hillyard@utoronto.ca.

Finally, up above at the highest plateau is the President of the university, Dr. Meric Gertler, and you can reach him at president@utoronto.ca. I would say email these folks; if you email one of them, email all three of them. Express your concern, and I would also say to the HR staff that’s going to be affected by this that you should make your opposition known unless you agree to convict yourself of your racism and bias by attending.

If enough of you did it, it would come to a halt; at least it could be put forth that this program should not be mandatory.

Okay, so thank you very much for listening, and soon enough I’ll put up lecture three, which is going to be a very pragmatic and focused lecture on tactics that can be used to push back against political correctness—against political correctness excesses. Bye for now.