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IMPORTANT VICTORY IN U OF T ANTI-RACISM STRUGGLE
By Danny Goldstick
(This article is from the October 1-15/2000 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, Canada, V5L 3J1.)
EMBATTLED RESEARCHER Kin-Yip Chun has finally won his long fight against discrimination at the University of Toronto, which has now hired him back with compensation. This is a significant victory for the student movement, Chinese-Canadians, and all supporters of academic integrity.
Before he was abruptly thrown off the campus after vocally raising equity-hiring issues in the U of T's Physics Department, Chinese-Canadian geophysicist Chun had earned an international scientific reputation in the detection of earthquakes and underground nuclear explosions. He had represented Canada at technical conferences on monitoring observance of the Nuclear Test Ban treaty.
The Chun case is about racism at the university. Not individual racism on anybody's part so much as systemic racism. The U of T has long admitted it "exploited" Dr. Chun, but it denies any racism was involved. For ten years Chun worked for the U of T without receiving any pay from the university. He taught graduate and undergraduate courses, supervised grad students, "postdocs" and research associates, headed a lab, and served on Physics Department committees - and for all that was paid nothing.
"On the side," he brought into the university $1.4 million of outside research grants (not awarded for teaching) and had to support his family out of a portion of that. Four times he applied for a regular teaching appointment with the possibility of eventual tenure, and four times he was passed over in favour of white males. "Unrelated" racial incidents somehow kept bubbling up in the Physics Department when hiring decisions were made.
Chun first complained to the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 1992. Five OHRC Special Investigators assigned to the case came and went until number six, after a year of investigation, finally brought in a 25-page report last February which reviewed the evidence, noted the apparent workings of an "Old Boys' network" favouring Anglo-Saxons in the Physics Department, and called for a public Board of Inquiry to nail down all the facts and determine any measures to be taken. The U of T declared it welcomed a Board of Inquiry, then reversed its position on the grounds of saving public expense.
The university also claimed that each of the four job candidates favoured over Dr. Chun was better qualified. Its representatives produced lists of published research for these four at the time they were hired, with up to three times more entries than the lists of their publications provided to the U of T's own internal investigation six years earlier. No mention was made of the fact that one of the four had to be subsequently let go by the U of T.
The Human Rights Commission asked both sides to submit a response to the Special Investigator's Report. Dr. Chun was warned, "Please take note that any appendices or attachments to your submission will not be placed before the Commission when it reaches its decision." Chun abided by that but the university snowed the Commissioners with 200 pages of documentation. The 13 Commissioners eventually decided by majority vote that a Board of Inquiry was unnecessary as there was no evidence suggesting any possibility of racism worth looking into further.
The University of Toronto is a powerful institution. The 13 OHRC Commissioners are all appointees of the Harris government.
It was possible, though, to counter that kind of politics with people's politics. Many persons in Kin-Yip Chun's place would have given up quietly and left town, but Chun resisted. In effect, a coalition in support of his case developed, which came to include the Canadian Federation of Students, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, the international research physics community, and key Chinese-Canadian organizations (as well as some significant private donors to the U of T).
Eventually, in spite of its paper victory with the OHRC, the university acted to salvage what it could of its reputation.
People's Voice readers will not be surprised with what this shows around the status of human rights in Harris's Ontario. As for the U of T, the majority of its students are now persons of colour, but since 1990 the proportion of white tenured and "tenure stream" professors has actually risen slightly, from 90% to 91.3%. The battle continues.
(Danny Goldstick is a professor of philosophy at the U of T.)
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