Canada at a Crossroads – Volume 6: Degrees of separation – Universities versus the public
Press Release
May 21, 2025
Canada is at a crossroads. The issues confronting Canada in 2025 go beyond mere setbacks and can more accurately be called crises. Unless they are resolved quickly, we face a deep and potentially permanent loss of our national standard of living and quality of life.
We hereby introduce the “Canada at the Crossroads” series of reports from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Each one is a relatively short essay explaining the problem at hand and outlining potential solutions. This series will not propose minor tweaks to existing strategies, nor will it look only for modest course corrections. Canada is beset by incompetent governance, runaway and rampant ideology, social malaise, and a national identity crisis.
Its future is at stake – and the time for small, hesitant steps has passed. It is in this spirit that we invite readers to join us as we confront the problems facing our country and set out serious, disruptive ideas to make 2025 the year Canada began to step back from the brink.
VOLUME 5: DEGREES OF SEPARATION: UNIVERSITIES VERSUS THE PUBLIC
By Ross McKitrick
May 21, 2025
Universities are facing a sharp decline in their public reputation.
In the US, the Trump administration is openly attacking many top universities – including taking steps to strip Harvard of its tax exempt status. The situation in Canada is less antagonistic, but there’s growing public frustration over the blatant left-wing bias and politicization of our post-secondary institutions. The public’s indifference to maintaining historical funding levels is a clear sign of this discontent.
In both the United States and Canada increasing numbers of people report limited or no confidence in universities and think they are poorly managed. While the collapse in confidence is largest among conservative voters it is nonetheless happening across the political spectrum and among both men and women.
The public is losing faith in part due to universities becoming political monocultures. Despite North Americans being nearly evenly split politically, surveys show that in both Canada and the US the left/right political split among faculty is about 90/10, with many social science and humanities disciplines polling at over 95 per cent left wing. This is very different from the situation 50 years ago, when universities’ political makeup approximately matched that of society at large.
The political tilt is, among other things, increasingly leading conservative students and scholars to self-censor. The implication is that, despite universities’ claims of prioritizing diversity, they have become entrenched in ideology and increasingly hostile to conservative viewpoints.
This bias did not happen by accident but represents the outcome of several decades of preferential treatment within the academy for proponents of liberal and left-wing perspectives, and the codification of those preferences into programs and curricula. The ongoing conflict between the US government and academia is symptom of the broader public dissatisfaction with funding universities in their current form.
Here in Canada the federal government bears some of the blame for the political drift at our universities because its major granting agencies, with a combined budget of about $5 billion, have moved away from prioritizing research excellence and now heavily promote so-called Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) themes. In addition, there is an increasing tendency within academia to engage in hiring practices that implicitly or explicitly impose political litmus tests.
Colleges and universities still hold considerable reputational capital in society but they are spending it down and cannot expect it to last indefinitely. In order to rebuild public trust, they should commit to several changes, including:
- acknowledging the existence of a political monoculture and committing to finding a strategy to change it;
- ending political litmus tests in hiring;
- declining new faculty positions and endowed chairs that require discriminatory hiring practices;
- ending mandatory EDI courses;
- embracing institutional political neutrality;
- ending the institutional display of special cause regalia on campus; and, most importantly,
- re-establishing a culture that emphasizes the formation of students as citizens and critical thinkers, and that fosters academic freedom and rigorous inquiry.
ILR5
