Johnston Hall, University of Guelph. Photo by Jjivkov/Wikimedia Commons.

A coterie of Canadian academics claiming to support “merit” in university hiring have sued their employers, submitted briefs to parliamentary committees, co-authored reports for conservative think tanks, and published commentaries on right-wing media platforms including The Hub and the National Post. Contrary to their claims, their aims are far from “apolitical.” From attacking equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) initiatives in hiring practices, they have moved to demanding the suppression of what they call “social justice” or “activist” research. The next step will be a demand—backed by right-wing media and political actors—to eliminate courses or degree programs with social justice content.

Sound familiar? It is already happening in the United States.

The so-called “culture war,” centred in universities, dates back to efforts by American conservatives in the 1980s to reverse the gains that were being made by social movements. They framed efforts to redress systemic racism and sexism as “political correctness” and “reverse discrimination.” Today, the labelling has shifted to “political wokeness,” or “wokeism,” but the objectives are the same: to halt or roll back institutional changes that challenge entrenched privileges. At stake is who gets to determine which forms of knowledge are legitimate. The claim to possess “objective” knowledge is a key weapon in the battle.

One prominent figure in the “neutral knowledge” camp is Dave Snow, associate professor of political science at Guelph University and a senior fellow at the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute. He was quoted in a March 5 CBC News report on developments at the University of Alberta, where he argued that EDI has “gone too far” in federal research funding policy and that grants should adopt greater “neutrality.”

In an April 2024 commentary in The Hub, Snow argued that granting agencies should fund only “objective, empirical knowledge creation” and not “activist-themed, or “social justice” research that is “utterly incompatible with the objective pursuit of truth.”

In a paper published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in February 2025, Snow wrote:

Higher education in Canada has reached a tenuous moment. For too long, it has focused on “equity, diversity, and inclusion” at the expense of research excellence. This has occurred alongside a growing lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty and concerns over the erosion of academic freedom in Canada… First and foremost, the agencies should commit to political and ideological neutrality. This means removing references to EDI from granting agency guidelines, eliminating EDI focused grants, and removing “equity targets” and any preferential awards.

There are multiple unsubstantiated empirical and causal claims in this statement. Indeed, one could argue that the reality is quite the opposite of what is being asserted here. “Lack of viewpoint diversity” is the right’s coded way of saying “the professors are all leftists.” In reality, Marxist scholarship is almost completely shut out of social science departments in Canadian universities, and always has been. The feminist and anti-racist scholarship that found institutional niches in higher education beginning in the late-1980s has been permanently under siege and only tenuously funded.

Those who hold such scholarship in contempt have typically never made the effort to study it themselves, let alone defend........

© Canadian Dimension