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Far-right attacks on EDI goals go unanswered by Alberta’s post-secondary education leaders

Making friends in all the wrong places

Canadian PoliticsEducation

University of Alberta President Bill Flanagan has doubled down on his claims that equity, diversity, and inclusion goals conflict with building community and belonging, and should be replaced. Photo courtesy University of Alberta.

Since my January 8 commentary on the EDI (un)developments at the University of Alberta, more information has been revealed about why the decision was made to replace “equity, diversity, and inclusion” initiatives with a “new framework” called “access, community, and belonging” (ACB). It is clearer than ever that the impetus for this move was political and ultimately aimed at placating the province’s far-right politicians. President Bill Flanagan has doubled down on his claims that EDI goals conflict with building community and belonging, and should be replaced because “some people” believe that they are unfair or discriminatory (hence, in Flanagan’s language, “divisive”). As Flanagan put it in his January 2 op-ed in the Edmonton Journal: “Some perceive [in EDI] an ideological bias at odds with merit.” And the president has made it amply clear that he is not about to disabuse “some people” of this belief. A renewed assault on EDI goals has been ongoing for more than a year, coordinated by the now-familiar coalition of right-wing think tanks, parties, and media. Postmedia has led the charge.

Why senior administrators are burying EDI at the UAlberta

A January 14 editorial in the student newspaper, The Gateway, revealed some key missing pieces of the context of the President’s “ACB” announcement. First, the author, Leah Hennig, brought to readers’ attention evidence of strong student and faculty support for EDI that contradicts the president’s claim that the ditching of EDI was “grounded in the voices of our community.” At the November 18 meeting of the General Faculties Council (the highest academic decision-making body in the university), the presidents of the Graduate Students Association and the undergraduate students union tabled a motion to reaffirm the GFC’s commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion. This motion was passed, as Hennig reports, with support from both students and faculty. At the same meeting, the vice-provost for EDI (a position that was created only in November 2022), led a discussion of the report, at this point still entitled the Integrated EDI Action Plan. Second, Hennig was told by the Association of Academic Staff that it was not consulted or notified about the move away from EDI.

Following its approval by the GFC, the EDI plan was presented to the Board of Governors at its December 13 meeting. Hennig reports that one governor, UCP-appointed Janice MacKinnon, objected to language in the report referring to Canada as “a settler colonist society,” arguing that this was only “one view of Canadian history.” MacKinnon declared that she would not support the plan as it was worded. Subsequently, the board adopted a motion to change the language that offended MacKinnon. What exactly was changed is still unknown, as the minutes of the December 13 meeting have not been approved or published. On the face of it, this appears to be another instance of the board overriding the will of the GFC in matters concerning academic affairs (this pattern was documented in this 2024 collection on restructuring at the UAlberta).

In the current version of the plan, now relabelled Changing the Story: An Integrated Action Plan for transforming our vibrant and interconnected university community, there is no reference to Canada as a colonial settler state. The word colonialism appears twice, and decolonization appears three times. The section outlining recommended “practices” for the university includes a paragraph on “engaging our critical consciousness.” Surprisingly, this paragraph identifies colonialism, predatory capitalism, racism, ableism, and sexism as “oppressive systems” that “can (and must) be transformed.” That this language escaped purging, so as not to offend the sensitive eyes of UCP appointees to the board, UCP politicians, and Postmedia’s stable of “anti-woke” columnists, may be only a temporary oversight on the part of the president’s team.

Janice MacKinnon’s husband, Peter, a senior fellow of the right-wing Macdonald-Laurier Institute, has been regularly publishing columns in the National Post characterizing university initiatives related to equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization as ones that override “merit,” discriminate against white men, “politicize” universities, suppress academic freedom, enforce an ideological “monoculture” on students and faculty, and are responsible for universities’ lack of public support.

The University of Calgary gets a pass

At the University of Calgary, where Peter MacKinnon headed the School of Public Policy from September 2021 to September 2022, and Janice MacKinnon is an executive fellow of the SPP, senior administrators got a head start on Bill Flanagan. In October 2023, the provost reduced the profile of EDI by eliminating the position of vice-provost for EDI. The person holding this post retained the role of associate VP for research (EDI and accessibility), and this position was blended into an Office of Institutional Commitments, along with community mental health and sustainability initiatives. In other words, the vice provost EDI office, located in the Office of the Provost, was closed and replaced by mid-level managers. There was no op-ed by President McCauley in a Postmedia newspaper to announce the demotion of EDI at UCalgary in the guise of a new and improved product, and these changes passed under the radar of the media.

The University of Alberta, on the other hand, is viewed by the right as being a nest of “woke” academics in need of disciplining. The political impetus for the ACB announcement was clear enough to Postmedia columnist David Staples, who praised Flanagan for paying attention to events in the United States—where diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are facing a fierce backlash from Donald Trump and his supporters—and to the threats being made by the UCP to defund universities with EDI policies. It was a smart move, he said, to escape “the backlash against DEI [that] is coming hard and fast.”

Far-right propaganda goes unanswered by university leaders

Staples revealed the real animus of the far-right’s fury about EDI goals: the supposed “harm it’s doing to… young, straight, white males.” Providing no evidence, Staples asserted: “This group of students and scholars has been in a tough spot for some time now, but especially since the U of A brought in an intensive DEI regimen 2019.” He goes on to depict this group as a besieged, oppressed minority surrounded by “people of all races, sexes, and sexual identities.” It is an almost impressive inversion of power relations, suggestive of the author’s deeply rooted anxieties and resentments: if good guys who have done nothing wrong dare to suggest that they are being discriminated against, “many will gleefully and savagely brand you as a misogynist or a racist, while also insisting you’re imagining things.”

In this story, often retold by “anti-woke” think-tank fellows and Postmedia columnists, two devices are always used. The first is to misrepresent EDI policies, and the second is to repeat claims with no basis in evidence. The proof most often pointed to by inquisitors like MacKinnon, Staples, or Wiessenberger is the TriCouncil Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program, which in 2019 set targets for increasing the number of CRCs from equity-seeking groups. This followed an investigation that showed that these groups had been discriminated against in the selection process for appointments and that they were notably under-represented. In other words, past appointments were not made solely on the basis of merit, but rather under the influence of various kinds of biases entrenched in post-secondary institutions. Evidently, the context of affirmative action is inconvenient for its critics, who unfailingly omit it.

The lack of evidence for EDI policies having any impact on the enrolment of white men in post-secondary institutions is likewise no deterrent to their repetition of this claim—something I addressed in my January 8 article for CD. One might expect a university president to correct such misrepresentation and false claims. But neither in his op-ed nor in his media interviews has Flanagan attempted to do this.

In the same interview, Staples asks Flanagan how the university can rid itself of the equity language in its “2020 collective agreement” (providing a link to an agreement that was signed in June 2019). Staples doesn’t like the references in this agreement to “federally designated and other equity-seeking groups such as women, members of visible minority groups, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, and LGBTQ2S+ people.” To what, specifically, does Staples object? On investigation, one finds that this agreement commits the parties to establish a joint task force to determine whether any of these groups has been unfairly paid less than another group, despite having equivalent qualifications and work responsibilities. In other words, the parties would examine the data to see if there had been pay (in)equity. As it turned out, there had been pay inequity, disadvantaging women professors. Further work was to be done to see if other groups had also been disadvantaged. Does David Staples object to employment equity for women or other groups? Evidence and analysis may not be Staple’s strengths, but one would expect a university president to set him straight.

Perhaps disliking Staple’s vulgar denuding of the ACB’s purpose, President Flanagan’s staff arranged an interview with a more moderate conservative, Donna Kennedy-Glans, published in the National Post. Again, the author celebrates the “dying” of DEI and the “swinging back” of the pendulum to “meritocracy.” When Kennedy-Glans raises the spectre of “quotas” and expresses concern about “merit,” Flanagan reassures her that merit is “obvious.” But it is not obvious to Kennedy-Glans, who concludes that, in a “meritocracy,” disadvantaged students would not be getting financial assistance from the university. On the contrary, in a meritocracy, students would be admitted on the basis of their academic skills and intellectual preparedness, rather than their ability to pay ever-increasing tuition fees. Instead, young people from working class families face much higher obstacles to education than those from middle class and affluent households. We can talk about meritocracy when higher education is truly public—like elementary and high school—and when the other factors that stream particular groups out of higher education from early childhood onward are also addressed.

In comparison to Staples, Kennedy-Glans downplays the political impetus for the switch to ACB, asserting (wrongly) that “no one is threatening to defund the U of A.” Instead, Flanagan is credited for his good “prairie sensibilities” and “fortitude” in the face of demands that universities take positions on things—like genocide or injustice, or the “DEI tentacles” that “run deep” in the university.

Flanagan’s strategy is to downplay “diversity” and not even speak about “equity.” One of the nonsensical aspects of this language game is that he emphasizes “inclusion” while dismissing “diversity.” Surely it is obvious that more inclusion will lead to greater diversity, unless “inclusion” no longer refers to historically under-represented groups but to something else, like… more of the historically dominant group?

His comments about diversity tend to equate the term with divisions, which are then said to undermine “community.” This line of thinking only makes sense if by “diversity” one has in mind political or religious differences, and, in fact, this is directly where the interview goes next, that is, to campus protests demanding university actions in response to the genocide in Gaza. Kennedy-Glans states: “Attempts by anti-Israeli campaigners to take over university campuses last spring is a graphic example of how diversity can divide.”

Let us stop here for a moment to consider what this statement means. Setting aside the loaded ideological language that Kennedy-Glans has used (“anti-Israel” as opposed to “anti-genocide” and “take over” in lieu of “protest on the grounds of”) let us ask what is the “diversity” (or the “difference”) that “divides,” and who has been “divided” from whom? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Kennedy-Glans sees the presence of Palestinian students and their allies as the cause of disruption to a community that was previously harmonious. Where does this thinking lead?

An exclusive “community”

Flanagan’s repeated emphasis on “community” is hard to take seriously when he is widely viewed on campus as the overseer of a restructuring process that ripped apart existing communities and has resulted in the possibly irreparable alienation of faculty and staff from their institution and the further commodification of the learning experience. Faculty no longer feel that they “belong” to a university community or that they have a respected role in its governance.

The forceful removal of the People’s University for Palestine from the UAlberta campus in May 2024 (and the president’s Israel-Palestine-related actions since October 2023) have deepened the feelings of exclusion and marginalization of faculty, staff and students from Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim and progressive Jewish backgrounds as well as Black and Indigenous students. Community-building has not been Flanagan’s strength. These are not chasms that can be repaired with “a conversation” alone. And so far, it is not to the university community that the president is speaking.

Laurie E. Adkin is a professor emerita in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta.

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