By Momin Rahman and Naomi Nichols
In November 2024, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research held a session questioning the value of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in the research granting ecosystem in Canada. The arguments against EDI were scattershot, moving from assertions of ideological bias in evaluation committees to discrimination in hiring and peer review, all without any relevant or convincing evidence.
Nonetheless, we cannot rely on the lack of rigour to dismiss such critiques. This hearing is another example of a widespread anti-equity movement that has emerged over the last few years, targeting academia, public and private organizations, governments and social institutions. Whether it is anti-trans hysteria, claims of reverse racism against white people, or the banning of Critical Race Theory or queer studies in education, western culture is suffused with the odour of reaction against ‘woke’ ideas.
In Canada, we are facing the prospect of a Conservative federal government after the next election, helmed by an explicitly anti-woke leader who recently critiqued the current government for deploying “wokeism” and “an extremely radical ideology.” With calls for Canadians to “put aside race” and the “obsession with race that wokeism has reinserted,” Poilievre’s Conservative Party represents an escalation from previous incarnations, railing against social analysis as the quasi-criminality of ‘committing sociology.’
On top of the continued funding crisis for post-secondary education across Canada, the incessant tribulation of dealing with an avowedly socially regressive U.S. administration, and the threat of similar changes coming to Canada, the future for EDI can seem bleak. Our energy to support and advocate for it can seem pointless. EDI work is always frustrating in its slowness to effect institutional and cultural change — and there is evidence to suggest we are experiencing a backslide, such as Meta’s announcement that it will end its EDI program for hiring, training and procurement.
But are we really losing ground? There may be reasons to feel more positive than recent events would suggest.
First, the Tri-Agencies’ move to implement an EDI strategy over the last two decades has become institutionalized in important ways. The strategy was initiated because of statistically significant demographic differences in award allocations — differences that pointed toward systemic processes of exclusion. We often forget that the equity targets in the Canada Research Chairs program, for example, were the result of a legal settlement, not simply the ideological whim of some ‘woke’ academics and civil servants.
Perhaps more important than specific programs or policies is the culture shift in our institutions, both within universities and colleges and within our various national and international professional associations. In Canada, it is fair to say that this was initially driven by the emphasis placed on EDI by our funding councils, but other factors have contributed to making EDI relevant beyond grant applications. Social movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have impacted public discussion. Demographic shifts towards increasing racial diversity and continued efforts to meaningfully grapple with and advance Reconciliation have irreversibly changed our public culture, which includes our current and future students and our future colleagues.
Given this reality, would any university or college really claim to be against diversity and equity? Are we going back to being a workplace that doesn’t want to see the various communities it is part of or understand their struggles?
Of course, it is a different matter when it comes to the recruitment of faculty. That is where some of the most contentious arguments have occurred, both in terms of expressing preferences or setting targets for equity-seeking groups, and in terms of setting up our profession as ‘purely’ focused on merit and excellence, rather than exhibiting institutional biases. In both senses, EDI is, we would suggest, a corrective; there are no universal measures of scholarly merit that hold across disciplines, history, society or culture, and in considering ‘merit,’ our analytical skills sometimes fall short anyway.
For the most part, universities have inherited conceptualizations of merit that reflect the scholarly activities and priorities of those who created and historically held power in these spaces. A failure to reflect on, and update, these scholarly ideals risks academic stagnation and irrelevance.
In terms of numbers, we must also ask ourselves if the historical and current distribution of classed, racial and gendered identities among our ranks is normal. Or, in fact, is it somewhat ‘weird’ that in the 50 or 60 or 100-year history of specific departments they have only had one or two, or maybe no, women or racialized colleagues? Isn’t getting that sense of something being a bit weird a part of planning research, or at least of identifying good research questions? Instead of listening to those who decry EDI as simply ‘ideological,’ what honest answer can we give ourselves as a cohort of colleagues and/or as a group of union members about why our departments look the way they do?
Surely, our anti-woke colleagues are not suggesting that we fall back on previously held ideological explanations that these statistical differences reflect a naturally-occurring variation in capability — particularly based on race, ability, class and gender? Forswearing biological racism or sexism, they might continue to suggest that these differences simply convey the outcomes of an objective assessment of scholarly merit. But is that an honest answer when we know that all hirings are about preferences, and solid research shows how easily this becomes systemic bias?
On the issue of meritorious pursuit of excellence, various Tri-Agency programs have made the case that research excellence is unfulfilled if particular groups are excluded from research design and research training. This is the same argument that keeps many corporations bought into diversity, whether they retreat from EDI policies or not, drawing on the vast range of evidence that diversity of experiences relates strongly with diversity of social identities, widening our understanding of the world beyond a single set of experiences. Effectively, EDI enhances and fulfils research excellence rather than undermines it.
Making this case has been the more difficult area of EDI mainstreaming within academia, but we suggest that difficulty has more to do with the limits of our own vanities than the corruption of merit.
Part of the peer review process, which is so crucial to our credibility, is precisely the exposure to other experiences that may illuminate our own biases or blind spots. We shouldn’t be afraid of it, even when it comes dressed as EDI. EDI initiatives provoke because they threaten our own fragilities, our own biases, and the fundamental realization that merit isn’t pure and never has been (even when our own is in question). To admit that is to admit that maybe we got to where we are partly because of who we know, where we come from, how we look and talk, and not simply on the grounds of our research or teaching excellence.
Can we respond to this kind of peer self-review that EDI forces upon us or do we need to remain blanketed by our own vanity? We’ve all done it — rejecting the reviews because they hurt our pride, but we know we have to face up to them eventually. EDI is the same mirror to our blind spots and biases, and we cannot ignore or decry it and remain a credible profession.
In our department, where we ‘commit sociology’ regularly, we have worked hard to establish our own EDI policy around hiring and subsequent mentorship, both pushing Trent towards an EDI preferred hiring policy in our last collective agreement and trying to fulfil those commitments in our own practice.
In doing so, we learned a lot about ourselves and our own biases, and we have been the better for it, particularly by committing to changing our processes. For example, we got rid of the social dinner with a shortlisted candidate after we all reflected on how full of prejudice and bias our own experiences with that process had been. Instead, we were forced to design searching questions about the approach to and hope for a collegial working environment, and we used those instead. We also set up alternate meetings for candidates with members of the department and the wider community without the hiring committee, so the candidate could ask practical questions about working with us, working at the university, and living in the city. We got there, and it took some time, but it also changed our culture.
And guess what? We look different, do different and wider things, and we are smarter for that process.
EDI is fundamentally about justice, and that is also the core of any labour movement — wages and benefits are about justice, too. But EDI isn’t only about justice — it is also about us being smarter and more connected to our core professional skills and the communities that we engage in. As such, don’t be disheartened, because EDI is, in fact, normal, in the best expression and practice of our profession.
Momin Rahman is a Professor of Sociology at Trent University. He served as the Co-Chair for CAUT’s Equity Committee from 2018-2022 and is currently serving on the Advisory Committee on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion for the Tri-Agency’s Institutional Programs Secretariat. Naomi Nichols is a Professor of Sociology, and Canada Research Chair in Community-partnered Social Justice at Trent University.