It is hiring season at many Canadian law schools, when they fill or expand their faculties’ ranks with rookie professors or, more rarely, newcomers from other schools. Usually (not always), hiring is restricted by seniority level and by area of research or teaching. Sometimes, hiring at Canadian law schools is explicitly restricted by demographic characteristic: it may be that only Indigenous applicants will be considered for some positions, or in other cases, that white men need not apply. This is supposed to make law schools more equitable and representative (though see Joseph Heath’s recent post at his In Due Course Substack on the limits of demographic representativeness as a metric for Canadian institutions).
But at some Canadian law schools, would-be academics must be meet another set of criteria: ideological ones. This is not a new phenomenon. For example, way back in 2018, the University of Victoria was publicizing its hiring with a tweet calling for candidates “passionate about social justice“. But I have been reminded of it once again by this tweet from a member of the hiring committee at Windsor Law:
And Windsor’s actual ad is pretty clear too. Immediately after listing the areas of interest to the school, it explains:
Windsor Law welcomes candidates who bring social justice and critical perspectives, including interdisciplinary, comparative approaches, intersectional, critical race, feminist and/or queer theory, to their research, teaching, and service.
Granted, this isn’t an explicit statement to the effect that people who do not bring “social justice and critical perspectives” are not welcome. But, even apart from the extrinsic evidence of Prof. Ceric’s tweet, the implication is unmistakable. It’s not as if people might be in doubt about whether “social justice” devotees would be considered for a job at a Canadian law school, and at Windsor of all places, to the point that they, and no one else, need to be reassured about this. On the contrary, if not an absolute requirement, then ideological acceptability is, at least, a major advantage.
Nor is Windsor alone. This year’s ad from the University of Toronto Law School “seek[s] candidates who value diversity and whose research, teaching, and service bear out a commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion”, and requires applicants to “submit a brief statement of contributions to equity and diversity”. This is not just a generic “social justice”, but one specific (though very popular) pew in that ideological church. If you do not subscribe to what, for example, Yascha Mounk has described as the “identity synthesis” view on equity, diversity, and inclusion, or indeed if you simply devote your legal research to other matters, UofT will not even look at your application, which will be incomplete without the statement.
These ideological litmus tests are antithetical to the spirit of free inquiry and the pursuit of truth which define a research university. The point of a university is to expand and share human knowledge ― not to be the research arm of a political movement, no matter how righteous. We do not know in advance which way the data and the logic of our arguments will point; we might guess, of course, but we have to be open-minded about the possibility that our assumptions will be disproven. Maybe data and logic support “social justice”; but maybe they do not. If the latter possibility ― or the former ― is peremptorily foreclosed at the outset, then what is being done is no longer scholarship but advocacy falsely flying the scholarly flag.
This is troublesome enough when an individual does it, but, as I have argued in my contribution, over at the Verfassungsblog, to the ongoing debate about “scholarly activism” (or “scholactivism”), individual activists can contribute to academia ― provided that they are checked by people who disagree with them. But when entire institutions commit to ideological dogmas, this checking cannot take place. Indeed, attempting to fundmentally question the activist findings of a colleague becomes a form of sabotage to the institution’s mission. An institution that does research with a pre-determined valence is not a university at all but, at best, a think-tank. And when many, if not most, of a country’s law schools ― and let’s not kid ourselves; for ever Windsor, Vic, and UofT who are explicit about their ideological requirements, there is another law school or three that simply isn’t transparent ― make the same ideological commitment, that country no longer has a legal academy. At best, it has a thriving industry of social justice think-tanks.
It is worth noting, too, that these are public universities we are talking about. A public university is not merely failing to discharge but actively abandoning its public mission if it decides to put itself into the service of a movement whose ideology some significant portion of the public rejects ― rightly or wrongly, this does not matter. It becomes a partisan actor, albeit one that has the privilege and the gall to be financed by its opponents as well as its supporters. When the opponents wise up to what is going on and decide to tie the purse strings, the university should not be surprised ― let alone accuse them of authoritarianism and other frightful things.
Let me address, briefly, some objections that have been made to me when I have raised some of these points on Twitter. One claim is that “social justice”, for example, is not at all an ideological term, but simply a way of saying that legal scholars should be thinking about how to make society more just. Quite apart from the fact that the idea of a just society is already ideologically contentious (see e.g. the second volume of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty ― called The Mirage of Social Justice), these claims are beyond implausible. Nine times out of ten, at least, the phrase “social justice” describes the ideal, or an ideal, of progressive, left-wing politics, and one has to live under a rock not to know this. The same sort of argument used to be made about “equity, diversity, and inclusion” back when the Law Society of Ontario demanded that all the lawyers in the province “promote” this stuff, and it was equally disingenuous. And the suggestion that it’s all about being able and willing to teach the “social justice” or “critical” views (as in, teaching about them as part of a balanced overview of existing opinion, as opposed to imposing them on students), which is anyway belied by references to research in both the Windsor and the UofT ads, is just as detached from reality.
And then there is the view that what Windsor, in particular, is doing is fine because its mission statement describes it as “justice-seeking: Building on a long-standing commitment to social justice that seeks fairness, equity and dignity, with a particular focus on relationships with historically marginalized communities”. It’s not obvious to me that UofT, for example, has a similar excuse, but never mind. Much more importantly, few, if any, of the people who might find this argument persuasive would have accepted it in the context of a mission statement imbued with a different set of values.
Consider, for example, the Trinity Western University’s “covenant” that required students and faculty to, among other things, abstain from sex outside a heterosexual marriage. TWU has a mission of its own, that of being an evangelical Christian institution ― a private one, mind you, not a public one. But, when it wanted to create a law school of its own, law societies in British Columbia and Ontario demanded that it drop the “covenant” because it discriminated against gay and lesbian students. If you think that TWU’s mission is no excuse for excluding people who do not fit in, but Windsor’s is, then you are applying an obvious double standard.
You might, like the academic who made this argument to me on Twitter, describe it as “pluralism”, but it’s an awfully convenient sort of pluralism, one that only imposes obligations on the people you disagree with, and allows you to indulge your pre-existing preferences at no cost. It all sounds fine so long as you get to be in power and call the imposition of your preferences on others by various high-minded names. If the other side gets in and starts ordering the public square to what it regards as the common good, or the highest good, or whatever other label it describes theocracy with today, you’ll have no cause for complaint. They’ll be doing unto you what you are already doing unto everyone.
Canadian legal academia has an ideological groupthink problem, which becomes worse every year as many law schools restrict hiring to people who share the prevailing orthodoxy. The solution is simple enough ― stop imposing litmus tests, and remember that people with whom you disagree, including about values and principles, can still be smart and interesting to engage with even they are profoundly mistaken. If they are willing to argue with you in good faith, return the compliment. And if you are so convinced of your values’ and principles’ superiority, you have nothing to fear from students being exposed to some others. They’re smart enough see the difference as well as you.
Double Aspect 