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6-8 February 2009, Toronto, ON

by Eve Haque, York University, Department of Languages, Literatures, & Linguistics

9 Mar 09 –

Friday February 6th

The Equity Forum began Friday night with a welcome from Penni Stewart (CAUT President) in a short speech in which she highlighted CAUT’s interest in issues of equity. Jim Turk followed with some remarks. The focus of the evening was on a play entitled “Equity In Your Face” performed by Kristine Nutting and Cortney Lohnes. This play consisted of a series of vignettes which demonstrated the different ways in which racism occurs on campuses e.g., silencing, appropriation, racist practices during hirings, making faculty and students of colour invisible, harassment and so on. After the play, there was a discussion led by Rinaldo Walcott and Piet Defraeye. This was an effective way to focus attendees’ thoughts on the issues around racism and equity that were going to be discussed at the forum.

Saturday February 7th

Saturday morning began with the panel “Recasting Equity” which was a panel to examine the origins of equity and to explore what diversity means. Notable issues raised in this panel include Audrey Kobayashi’s history of the Abella report, the four designated groups (women, Aboriginal groups, people with disAbilities and visible minorities), the Federal Contractor’s Program, and her claim that it was time to move beyond numbers and targets for designated groups. This last claim is problematic in that the struggle is still to get representative numbers for faculty in several of the designated groups – especially Aboriginal faculty, faculty of colour and faculty with disAbilities. Therefore, any call to ‘move beyond number targets’ should also continue to consider that having a representative critical mass is the basis for achieving other equity goals. Next, Piet DeFraeye told the story of the University of Alberta Office of Human Rights. This was an instructive example of how campus Equity offices (often started as a result of grassroots organizing on campuses) are co-opted by administration into entities like ‘offices of human rights’ etc. in order to make administration look like they are doing something concrete about equity but, more often than not, are actually designed to minimize and neutralize issues of equity (particularly around racism) on campuses. This, of course, is happening / has happened across the country including here at York, and the best recent case is Carleton University where the Equity Office which many students (including myself), staff and some faculty of colour worked hard to establish many years ago has now become a repressive extension of the Administrative regime to muzzle student and faculty free speech on campus.

The next presentation was by Yasmin Jiwani who spoke about the difference between Equity and Equality. Equality implies ‘sameness’ but in the 1970s, there was a shift to ‘equity’ i.e., the equitable distribution of resources. This language of equality has been universalized and finds expression in such events as white feminists arguing to the Quebec Government against the hijab as an issue of equality. The question Jiwani asks is why focus on such epiphenomena as the hijab instead of fundamental issues of equity such as discriminatory wages and work conditions for women of colour? Jiwani also made the important distinction between ‘elite racism’ (such as the case of the white Quebec feminists) and ‘ambient racism’ which is the racism which exists and circulates around us all the time on a daily basis.

Richard Atleo also presented and began with this question: can the principles of equity actually work in the academy given the fundamentally inequitable (and corporate) bases of higher education in Canada? Increasingly, it is a corporate story that gets told in the academy – i.e., the survival of the fittest – and the responsibility of the university as corporation is to make money and not to serve / be accountable to people. The retention of Aboriginal students is a huge problem and filters into the problem there being few Aboriginal faculty. Richard argued that equity put into practice results in an economic benefit to society. The oppression of Aboriginal peoples in Canada costs the Canadian Government billions of dollars.

Following the presentation, there was an extensive Q and A session and many important issues were raised which I believe are important to consider:

• The corporatization of the university has meant significant structural changes to the academy in which we have become front line service providers and the students are our ‘clients’. This means that racism comes from the top down (from administration) as well as from the bottom up from students. Minority faculty, seen as low ranked service providers, often experience threatening, hostile and even violent behaviour from students.

• The limitations of the Abella report were flagged – queer category gets left out with only four federally recognized groups.

• The disinterest in age discrimination by CAUT was also flagged – this is particularly acute for women. Other disadvantaged groups are disproportionately penalized for ‘being old’ – there is very little legal protection from age discrimination.

• Malinda Smith stated that ‘equity’ discourses gets fixed on certain bodies i.e., the equity-seeking groups, and for everyone else, it’s not their issue, they “just need to get along” with everyone – so the question is: who is accountable? And who does the work of equity?

• There is a tension between ‘equity’ and ‘diversity’.

• Women’s equity is always about gender (only) equity and is an issue of social justice etc. and diversity is for the rest and ‘nice if you can get it’ – therefore issues of equity are not integrated i.e., race and gender and disAbility are separate issues so may get movement on one, but not on another issue and of course this means e.g., women of colour and their specific struggles are invisible.

• Audrey gave the example of the CRC challenge which was unable to move beyond the question of gender (only gender data was collected) and in the media the issue was represented as a problem of “women and other”…

• Seeking justice around equity issues will require money / resources AND political will.

Following the morning session, there were breakout groups, and the one I attended (for the whole conference) was the group on Faculty Recruitment, Promotion and Retention.

• There was an in-depth discussion in the breakout session and I will list some of the highlighted topics:

• The need for bullying policies was highlighted – a lot of racial and other forms of discrimination go on through bullying but these practices remain invisible because of the lack of language / policies around them. Quebec has work place bullying policies in place – so it is entirely possible and feasible. CAUT and faculty associations / unions should push for these policies. YUFA should push to have a bullying policy put into place.

• The problem of having a segregated approach to equity at CAUT was highlighted. This is exemplified by the fact that there is a separate women’s conference (which I have also attended) and where issues to do with racism continue to be sidelined and marginalized. Again, there was a call for both the CAUT and faculty unions to have a much more integrated approach to equity.

• The need for the collection of data around race was emphasized. Currently, Statcan does not collect this data – CAUT should lobby for the collection of this data. Also, CAUT should spearhead an effort to collect this data nationally – AND faculty associations and unions should collect data in their own institutions as soon as possible. The Guelph application centre also does not collect this data – again, lobbying for data collection should be taken up by CAUT.

• The importance of job ads – how they are written and where they are advertised is extremely important for recruitment purposes.

• There is an insidious filtering process where we have increasing numbers of racialized undergraduate students in Canadian universities, much less at the graduate level – especially PhD (and especially in Social Sciences and Humanities) and then severe filtering at the faculty level and then almost no significant numbers of faculty of colour in administration.

• We are becoming risk managers for administration – surveillance and legalistic management practices around e.g., plagiarism etc. are downloaded onto faculty, all of which has implications for our workload, our teaching practices and our pedagogical relationship with our students. Some universities have a designated Academic integrity office which takes over any suspected case of plagiarism and then the issue is dealt with through this third party leaving the instructor out of the process. This model should be implemented at York and YUFA should push for it.

• The (f)utility of teaching evaluations and how they penalize women and faculty of colour as subjective evaluations should be considered seriously. Research in the US has shown that in fact anonymous evaluations supply little ‘objective’ information but rather are often mobilized against faculty of colour (as a result, many reputable American institutions have abolished student evaluations for tenure and promotion). Therefore, the utility of teaching evaluations here in Canada should be reconsidered. This is not to say that student feedback is not useful – particularly student comments – and should not continue to be solicited – but their usefulness as instruments which can influence tenure and promotion needs to seriously be reconsidered in relation to research on race, gender and teaching evaluations. YUFA should take this on.

• One member of the breakout session – a faculty member with a disAbility – told the story of how a student was disciplined for their Ableism / racism by being forced to take a course with this particular faculty member without consideration of how it might impact him – the faculty member – to have this student with problematic attitudes in his class, and the assumption that it was this faculty member’s role alone to educate this student in this respect.

• It is important to remember that it is our colleagues (other faculty members) who are implicated in the enactment and maintenance of these exclusionary and marginalizing policies / tactics as most administrative posts are filled by faculty members.

• The problematic nature of ‘collegiality’ – particularly as a part of tenure and promotion processes was mentioned – particularly in relation to faculty of colour who were often characterized as ‘angry’ and ‘ungrateful’ (i.e., for being ‘given’ a position) and therefore uncollegial. This is a very common experience for many faculty of colour at York and speaks to the insidious nature of ‘collegiality’ as a formal part of academic life. How can YUFA begin to tackle this?

After the breakout session, we had lunch and then we went to Panel 2 which was on Academic Freedom and Equity (“Tensions and Complements”)

Mark Neufeld from Trent began by telling his story about his experience of discrimination for depression. Neufeld suffers a form of depression called SAD and he spoke of how his illness was not seen as an authentic condition (unlike his broken leg or even his Type I diabetes) – however, his depression was seen by his department and the university as a form of ‘malingering’ and he was told to take long term disability leave and banned from campus. CAUT was able to help him but this story points to the discriminations that still exist around mental health issues.

Bonita Lawrence spoke about the censure by CAUT of First Nations University. She began by stating that although she wanted to speak about the censure, in no way did she intend to minimize the suffering of faculty and staff at the university. She then spoke compellingly about the need to contextualize the existence of the few recognized First Nations Universities within the history of the ultimate destruction of Aboriginal worldviews (through residential schooling, forced relocations, and so on) and the fact that mainstream university education for Aboriginal students is educa