Treating people differently based on race doesn’t improve social harmony — or any other outcomes

Affirmative action discrimination and other forms of racial preference are pervasive in Canada’s public institutions. See, for example, Toronto Metropolitan University’s (TMU) new medical school admissions policy, which reserves 75 per cent of its seats for Indigenous, Black and other “equity-deserving” groups, who may still be considered for admission in certain circumstances if their undergraduate GPA is below 3.3  — an already low standard for admission.

There is already good evidence to suggest the race-based admissions policy is ill-advised, as the negative impacts of affirmative action in university admissions over the decades in the United States and elsewhere are well documented. But on top of the evidence of the general harms of affirmative action, new reports provide yet more reasons to believe TMU’s medical school admissions policy will backfire. The most obvious drawback: the quality of medical practice could be reduced as academic standards for admissions are lowered and as race and other irrelevant factors are considered instead of ability.

Indeed, a new American study on affirmative action in another industry — intelligence — suggests this concern is well-founded. In an article in Econ Journal Watch, John A. Gentry of Missouri State University’s School of Defense and Strategic Studies outlines the effects of affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies on the operational performance of 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Defence Intelligence Agency.

Like other federal agencies, Gentry writes, the intelligence agencies have “been a setting of burgeoning DEI policies and programs, especially since 2011, designed to favour privileged demographic groups in hiring, promotions, awards and assignments.”

What have been the results? First, while the intelligence community has historically emphasized apolitical public service, the introduction of DEI inserted political motivation into its procedures and activities. Second, teamwork was damaged because “the heavy-handed orthodoxy of DEI is causing significant self-censorship by government personnel who do not support the DEI agenda.”

Third, numerous intelligence officers have said that DEI resulted in more tolerance of bad management and poor operational performance in the name of protecting diversity. This has damaged human intelligence collection. Intelligence analysis was likely negatively affected for similar reasons. Lastly, DEI-motivated activism reduced public confidence in intelligence agencies.

“Politically driven advocates of DEI not only fail to understand that domestically demographic diversity does not improve the performance of foreign-focused intelligence services, they have significantly damaged the operational performance of the agencies,” Gentry concludes.

While Gentry’s journal article was on the intelligence sector in the United States, it is not difficult to see how many of the same negative results — such as the politicization of the profession, self-censorship and reduced public confidence — could arise from the insertion of racial quotas in Canadian medical school admissions and the promotion of “social justice” over medical expertise in the medical profession more generally.

More recent evidence that TMU’s affirmative action policies will backfire comes from a New York Times Magazine review of the University of Michigan’s expansive DEI initiatives. It concluded that, “Instead of improving students’ ability to engage with one another across their differences, Michigan’s DEI expansion has coincided with an explosion in campus conflict over race and gender.” Students and faculty members at the school reported a less positive climate on campus and were less likely to interact with people of a different race after the introduction of DEI programs.

The report is devastating because of how widespread DEI initiatives are at the University of Michigan: it has spent nearly US$250 million since 2016 on DEI staff and programs. “Each and every university department, unit and office must have a DEI action plan,” wrote Robby Soave for Reason magazine. And “some 241 employees of the university work in DEI offices or have one of those key words — diversity, equity or inclusion — in their job titles.”

When this latest piece on the University of Michigan is added to the voluminous evidence on the negative impacts of affirmative action at universities, the TMU medical school’s admissions policies cannot be expected to be beneficial. Nor should this evidence give anyone confidence that other illiberal policies — such as race-based anti-poverty programs, race-based federal procurement or a race-based justice system — would deliver benefits to Canadians.

Treating people differently based on race doesn’t improve social harmony — or any other outcomes.

Matthew Lau is a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy and author of “Systemic racism claims in Canada: A fact-based analysis.”