"Diversity and the University"

The Second World War saw the shameful rejection of Jewish refugees under a bureaucratic decision that “None is too many.” That war was also the occasion of the equally shameful expropriation, deportation and internment of Japanese Canadians who were long prohibited from holding public office, serving jury duty, or entry to the professions in British Columbia.

This sad history of imposed assimilation or exclusion of cultural minorities in Canada changed for many reasons after the Second World War. The change reflected recognition of the contribution of minority groups to the War effort. It reflected Canada’s important role in the establishment of the United Nations charter and the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It reflected the decline in Canadian fertility rates and the need for immigration to satisfy the demand for labour in a rapidly growing post-war economy. It reflected the demands for refugee and family unification after the war.

Whatever the explanation, the changes in policy were rapid and significant. They were fully realized in a series of legislative initiatives: the 1967 Immigration Act which substituted skills-driven criteria for race-driven criteria for citizenship; the 1971 federal legislation on multiculturalism and official bilingualism; and the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, establishing equality rights and protecting against discrimination on the grounds of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability. Further elaboration came in the Employment Equity Act of 1986, which established affirmative action policies for the federal civil service, Crown Corporations and federal-regulated business, and in the Federal Contractors Program of that same year requiring organizations with more than 100 employees and bidding on federal contracts to establish programmes to ensure equitable employment of aboriginals, women, visible minorities and the disabled.

This legislation and social change have produced the modern multicultural society of Canada. Although the official values placed on diversity are clear, public opinion on these matters is somewhat divided. Residues of our history of racism and ethnic prejudice remain. There is a strong strain of resentment against the federal linkage of bilingualism and multiculturalism, and many, especially in the West, feel that official bilingualism involves an unnecessary and costly political deal with Quebec and with tiny Franco-Canadian minorities elsewhere. Official multiculturalism is seen as a cynical appeal for ethnic votes, and as a financial subsidy to reactionary ethnic elites whose purpose is to retain the isolation of their communities. And there is even a degree of scepticism within immigrant communities themselves that multiculturalism is merely a rhetorical fig leaf draped over the reality of ethnic prejudice and exclusion, without any significant commitment of resources to address those problems.

Aside from these divisions of opinion over the public policy commitments to diversity and multiculturalism in Canada, there are obvious challenges in the application of these public policy commitments. There are strains in the ability to sustain bilingualism, especially outside of Ottawa. There is a continuing failure to settle constitutional issues affecting First Nations, and the economic condition of First Nations peoples on and off the reserves is shocking. There are difficulties in the social and economic accommodation of immigrant communities, with ethnic stratification in employment and income, difficulties in professional accreditation for highly educated immigrants, organized crime infiltrating ethnic communities, and gang formation and interethnic violence among youth in those communities.

But despite these problems, a majority favours the public policy consensus around official bilingualism and multiculturalism. The great majority of Canadians take pride in international rankings of our cities as the most ethnically diverse in the world. That pride is not simply in the fact that Canada is internationally perceived as a highly desirable place to live. It also reflects an appreciation of the diverse cultural contributions to a distinctive urban lifestyle in this country. Most especially, the support for cultural diversity reflects the understanding of the important advantages of multinational linkages and multicultural experiences for Canadian trade relations in the contemporary global economy. Finally, it reflects a recognition that multiculturalism and diversity will continue to characterize Canadian society in response to continuing demands for high rates of immigration. Lower domestic birthrates and an ageing society, with very high rates of job vacancy and (we hope) job creation mean that the demand for immigration must increase, and that we must continue to improve our means of attracting and accommodating immigration.

For all these reasons, we need to devise a better fit between policy and practice in making Canada an open and inclusive, as well as a stable and productive, multicultural society. In that connection, I want to turn to the role of the universities.

The university is a social institution reflecting the history and social forces which shape the wider society. Canadian universities have their own history of ethnic exclusion and anti-Semitism, but they have also changed in response to changes in the legislative and political environment. For example, the universities must comply with the Federal Contractors Program requirements and they have to report annually on their internal employment equity programmes and results. As in the wider society, there are also strong and articulate voices critical of commitments to diversity and multiculturalism. In the universities, the typical argument is that “political correctness” compromises university autonomy and university standards to the dictates of public policy.

But the university has particular interests in diversity. The university is so named because of its “universal” interest in the truth and knowledge of all things. If it is truly to advance that mission, the university needs to be open to all whose intellectual gifts merit admission and to all whose scholarship merits attention. Likewise, it needs to be open to all plausible and rational argument, criticism and refutation.

Openness and inclusiveness are therefore built into the long historical tradition and culture of the university. These ideals, along with the corollary ideal of academic freedom, are the first mentioned in SFU’s Statement of Values and Commitments.

The reasons for the university’s commitment to diversity and inclusiveness go beyond its interest in the dispassionate search for the truth. The university also has a social responsibility that requires a commitment to diversity. It is established and funded by society to produce the research and teach the skills required for social and economic progress. This entails a responsibility to translate the potential economic advantage of a multicultural society in the era of globalization into reality by giving higher educational skills to students who have direct experience and understanding of foreign countries and cultures, and by giving such experience and understanding to students whose background does not provide it. The university also has a responsibility to research the complex problems of a multicultural society and to train students who can best address them. That responsibility entails the recruitment of students and researchers who have direct experience in and access to diverse communities.

More profoundly, the university has the responsibility to educate the intellectual elite of society, members of which will exercise disproportionate influence and power in society. In a democratic and multicultural society, that responsibility requires reasonable access to university education for all the diverse communities in society. Anything less puts at risk the realization of democratic politics. It puts at risk the capacity to sustain a civil society in which the power of the state is minimized while the freedom of the individual and autonomous institutions or associations is maximized.

These issues have recently been at the centre of attention in the Supreme Court of the United States ruling on the constitutionality of affirmative action admission policies designed to promote diversity at the University of Michigan. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor gives the basic argument for the majority decision in favour of the Michigan Law School’s policy to enroll a racially and ethnically diverse student body. Such diversity provides compelling educational benefits: “Attaining a diverse student body is at the heart of a Law School’s proper educational mission…. In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity.”

The argument in the US Supreme Court was far from simple. The majority accepted the specific affirmative action admission policies in the Michigan Law School. However, it rejected the university’s undergraduate admission policies as being “narrowly tailored” to a racial preference or quota, rather than adequately considering the full range of qualifications appropriate for admission. Simply put, it was argued that affirmative action is permissible in order to achieve the educational and social benefits for which a university exists, but it is not permissible if it blatantly disregards all relevant qualifications for academic success, and if it sacrifices equal opportunity under the law to racial bias. The difficulty of such balancing judgements is illustrated in the caustic, dissenting opinion of a prominent, and (surprisingly perhaps) black Supreme Court justice, who argues that any affirmative action is in practice a cosmetic cover for the denial of fair and open competition and equal opportunity.

A reading of these arguments in the US Supreme Court will convince anyone that the promotion of diversity in employment and admissions at universities will always be controversial. I think, however, that they will be equally persuaded about the fundamental need for universities to seek the compelling educational benefits that flow from diversity. One can only hope that in Canadian universities we will achieve a more easily negotiated and less legalistically complex and expensive path to the accommodation of diversity.

That hope will depend on how well we do in the employment of faculty and staff and the admission of students from the diverse communities we serve. Let me conclude with some comments on how well we are doing, by focusing on university admissions.

The critical issue, from the university’s point of view, is our ability to admit qualified students from the diverse communities that make up our multicultural society. A simple observation from a survey last year is that 40% of SFU’s undergraduate students speak a language other than English in their homes. 15% speak Cantonese, 12% Mandarin, 2% Korean, 1% Punjabi, and 10% speak other languages in the home. Although there is a significant preponderance of ethnically Chinese students, reflecting the dominant stream of immigration to BC, these data indicate the highly diverse composition of our student body, and suggest that we are meeting our commitment to being an open and inclusive community that values diversity.

Since these students are admitted in a merit-driven admissions process that is blind to ethnic background, diversity is also coupled to merit at SFU. This means that we have some confidence in expecting to produce the benefits of diversity discussed earlier. However, two qualifications to that expectation are necessary. The first concerns our ability to deal with questions of linguistic diversity. The second concerns the evenness of access across the many communities that make up the multicultural society we serve.

The problems of linguistic diversity in an educational setting as multicultural as ours can be illustrated by our survey results. Of the 40% of our students who speak a language other than English at home, close to 80% indicated that they lacked confidence writing English to satisfy academic standards, and one-third of them confessed that English language skills had a negative impact on their SFU grades. The fact that all these students have satisfied an English language proficiency requirement (either a BC English course requirement at high school or the equivalent of a 570 TOEFL score) does not diminish the reality of a lack of adequate language preparation for an academic institution in which English is the medium of instruction.

To handle this problem, SFU offers a very high quality English Language Bridge Program for students needing greater competence in academic English, and the university is engaged in a major exercise of curriculum review requiring among other things a new emphasis on the teaching and assessment of writing competence in all degree programmes. Recognizing the starting language difficulties of a very large number of our students, whose aptitudes are otherwise superbly suited to academic study, the university will be creating special “foundational courses” for students needing special assistance with written communication in English. Finally, we will be establishing a Student Learning Centre to assist students in acquiring exemplary writing skills.

Without these initiatives in curriculum reform and improved second language education, we could not fully deliver on the social and educational benefits of diversity in the university. And there is another hurdle to be overcome; a problem of accessibility to all communities in our multicultural society.

The broad index of linguistic diversity within our student body masks sharp differences in access to university for particular groups and for particular socio-economic areas. Close to 50% of graduating high school students in the lower mainland who spoke Chinese at home entered university in 2000. This was double the rate of university entrance for high school students whose home language was English. And it was five to ten times the university entrance rate for students who spoke Punjabi or Hindi at home.

These differences are compounded by regional differences within the lower mainland. For example, 32% of all high school graduates go on to university from Vancouver schools, compared to only 15% in Surrey. And the differences between Chinese speaking and Indian language speaking sub-populations are even larger in Surrey than in the lower mainland as a whole, with 49% of Chinese but only 2% of Hindi speaking students in Surrey going on to university.

We have no comparable figures for aboriginal students going on from high school to university. 1.9% of SFU students self-identify as being of aboriginal descent, as compared to 4% of the population of the lower mainland, which suggests some significant success at attracting aboriginal students. However, considering the very large proportion of this population that is under 24 years of age, university access rates from high school for aboriginal students are likely well below the average for other socio-cultural groups in the lower mainland.

Despite the sketchiness of the data discussed here, the diversity of our university student body is clear, but so are the effects of the distinctive socialization and economic situation of different socio-cultural groups, which mean that university accessibility is not evenly spread across those groups. Large differences in the rate at which immigrant and aboriginal communities are sending their children to universities in British Columbia are damaging to expectations of equity and diversity in a multicultural society and damaging to the university’s interest in delivering the compelling educational benefits of a truly diverse learning environment.

In order to correct these differences in accessibility, the university has a variety of potential responses: working with the K-12 system to increase the interest in going on to university for under-represented students; working with Faculties of Education to produce teachers and role models from those underrepresented groups in the school system; creating a more welcoming and supportive environment for those students at the university through curriculum reforms and improvements in student services; working closely with advisory councils from the underrepresented groups on strategies to increase participation and to profile the university’s involvement in their communities.

Simon Fraser University is pursuing each of these strategies. However, even if these strategies are successful in creating improved accessibility to universities among our diverse communities, the pay-off will be limited by an overriding problem that affects the access to university for all groups in the population. That problem is the historically low level of funding of university enrolment in British Columbia, and the limits on our capacity to increase accessibility without increased public funding.

In very stark terms, BC produced fewer university graduates in 2000 as a proportion of its population aged 20-29 than anywhere else in Canada except Alberta (which had more or less the same output) and PEI (which was somewhat lower). BC’s output was 25% lower than the average for Canada as a whole. This is in the context of an expected 20% growth in BC’s university entrance population aged 18-24 during the period 2001-11 which is two times higher than the growth for Canada as a whole. And demand for university access will exceed the rate of population growth because of the very rapid growth in the labour market demand for university credentials, especially in an economy like BC’s which is in transition from a labour-intensive, natural resource economy to a technology-intensive, industrial and service economy. Increasing labour market demand is demonstrated by the very high proportion of jobs requiring university degrees in all the fastest growing areas of employment, and the clear evidence of significantly greater income and employment rates for university graduates as opposed to all other entrants to the labour market.

The problems of relatively low capacity and output in BC universities coupled to relatively high increases in demand due to population and market forces are reflected in the dramatic increases in admission requirements for entrance to university. SFU’s high school averages for entrance to Arts programmes in the last cycle of admission were over 80. They were higher still for Science programmes, and they were close to the 90th percentile in Business and Engineering.

Simply put, we are turning away a very large number of students who are very clearly qualified to do university work. They migrate to other parts of Canada or the world if they can afford it, and we tend to lose them until perhaps they return to BC in retirement after living their productive economic lives elsewhere. If they cannot afford migration, they work in a less productive capacity than their abilities would allow.

Ladies and Gentlemen: we properly celebrate the development of a unique culture of diversity and a uniquely open, multicultural society in Canada. We properly celebrate the strength of our universities; their capacity to accommodate diversity and to benefit from it. But we will be fiddling while Rome burns if we celebrate these strengths without attending to the urgent requirements of increasing accessibility to our universities, and providing greater equity in university admissions across the diverse communities which make up this great country.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to discuss these matters today. Thank you also for your support in improving the accessibility and diversity of our universities, thereby improving their contributions to the economic development and quality of life of our community.