I don't care about the colour of your skin. I'm interested in hiring 
someone who wants to work on the project and is good at it,' Prof. 
Patanjali Kambhampati say.
 
 Michael Higgins   
Publishing date:
 Nov 24, 2021
 
  
 An award-winning Canadian scientist said he has been refused two federal
 government grants for his research on the grounds of “lack of 
diversity” — even though he is originally from India and has repeatedly 
suffered racism.
 
 Patanjali Kambhampati, a professor in the chemistry department at 
Montreal’s McGill University, believes the death knell for the latest 
grant was a line in the application form where he was asked about hiring
 staff based on diversity and inclusion considerations. He says his 
mistake was maintaining that he would hire on merit any research 
assistant who was qualified, regardless of their identity.
 
 
“We will hire the most qualified people based upon their skills and mutual interests,” Kambhampati wrote on the application.
 “I’ve
 had two people say that was the kiss of death,” said Kambhampati. “I 
thought I was trying to be nice saying that if you were interested and 
able I’d hire you and that’s all that mattered. I don’t care about the 
colour of your skin. I’m interested in hiring someone who wants to work 
on the project and is good at it.”
 
 
Kambhampati said he didn’t go public after the first grant was 
rejected but decided to speak out now because the increasing use by the 
government of equity, diversity and inclusion, aka “EDI,” provisions, as
 well as woke culture, are killing innovation, harming science and 
disrupting society.
 “I believe this is an important stand to make. I will not be silenced anymore,” he said.
 Kambhampati’s
 work explores the cutting edge of super-fast laser science, a field 
that spans everything from telecom to medicine. He believes Canada can 
become a world leader in the field.
 If I want to focus on merit, fairness and equality, then you get called out as a racist or sexist
 But
 his application for a $450,000 grant this month from the Natural 
Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) was turned 
down because, the council said, “the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion 
considerations in the application were deemed insufficient.”
 
   His grant application a year ago to the federally funded National 
Frontiers in Research Fund  — whose object is “to support world-leading 
interdisciplinary, international, high-risk/high-reward, transformative 
and rapid-response Canadian research” — was also turned down on similar 
grounds.
 Because both applications were rejected at the 
bureaucratic level, it means that neither proceeded to the step where 
they would be forward to other scientists to review Kambhampati’s 
proposals.
 But Kambhampati said he believes basing his hiring decisions on merit is a valid, moral position to hold.
 “I
 think what’s happened is the woke and the social justice warriors have 
made a moralistic argument the way the religious right used to make 
moralistic arguments. And now people are afraid to challenge them. But I
 think it’s okay to say I believe that equality is a morally valid 
position. I believe that meritocracy is a morally valid position.”
 
A request for comment from NSERC was not answered on Tuesday.
 Around
 the same time that Kambhampati’s latest application was turned down, 
another arm of the government, the Canadian Institutes of Health 
Research, gave Dr. Lana Ray, a professor at Lakehead University in 
Thunder Bay, Ont., a $1.2-million grant to study cancer prevention using
 traditional Indigenous healing practices. When the award was announced,
 Ray said “We need to stop framing prevalent risk factors of cancer as 
such and start thinking about them as symptoms of colonialism.”
 
Kambhampati, 50, was born in India and moved to the United States 
when he was four. He lived and worked in Minnesota, Texas and 
California, before moving to Montreal in 2003 to take up a professorship
 at McGill. As an immigrant he said he had experienced numerous 
incidents of racism.
 “In childhood I used to get constant 
beatings and name calling,” he told National Post, adding that as an 
adult, he would also get harassed by U.S. border guards, and has been 
racially profiled in Canada, too.
 “Two years ago, I had eight 
police officers break into my house because I was sitting on my porch 
while brown. That happened on Canada Day.”
 But he says his experiences taught him to treat everyone equally and fairly.
 “People
 do different things. They have different abilities. They have different
 interests,” he said. “To me, the whole point is to treat people as 
individuals, so that’s what I do in my life. My way of dealing with 
racism, or sexism, or any other ‘ism’ is to treat people as 
individuals.”
 
As
 scientists, he said, “we don’t believe in EDI. We believe in merit, 
fairness and equality. You should be fair in your procedures and treat 
people as equals.”
 However, “if I want to focus on merit, 
fairness and equality, then you get called out as a racist or sexist and
 I refuse to let that happen to me,” Kambhampati said.
 “I 
actually get called a racist constantly by white university students who
 believe that prejudice plus power equals racism. And as a result (they 
say), I have internalized racism. So, if you are a minority who thinks 
that the racism of the woke left is overstated they say you have 
internalized racism.”
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/minority-professor-denied-grants-because-he-hires-on-merit-people-are-afraid-to-think