At some universities, expanding the struggle for equity to include all groups designated under the Federal Contractors Program (women, people with disabilities, aboriginal peoples and racial minorities) and those who are not (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered peoples), has met with some success. At the same time, this shift in the equity agenda has brought into sharp relief critical questions about strategy. How are we to address the multiple, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes conflicting, agendas of equity-seeking groups in the university?

This is a problem of significant proportions. For example, in 2001, in response to a challenge by three white women, the United States Federal Appeals Court ruled unconstitutional the affirmative action policy of the University of Georgia which gave nonwhite and male applicants for admission extra points to balance a predominantly white female student population (Lee, 2001). Such a ruling would also apply to hiring decisions.

Although in Canada the Federal Contractors Program and human rights legislation create a different environment for affirmative action hires, nonetheless this case does signal a real concern: how to organize in such a way that the legitimately-diverse agendas of various equity-seeking groups are not played off against one another?

Abstractly calling for solidarity among equity-seeking groups will be no more effective in the universities than similar exhortations for class solidarity have been in public and private sector unions. Rather, we need to invent practices of solidarity relevant to the university context.

CAUT has recently established an Equity Committee as a subcommittee of the executive, and its Status of Women Committee continues its important work. At this time, the Equity Committee does not yet have a formal mandate nor is the relationship between these two committees worked out. This article offers some reflections on envisioning the mandate of the new Equity Committee and on developing a dynamic and efficacious relationship bewteen equity and women's organizing.

Equity Discourse & Equity Consciousness

Equity is often defined through numbers: the demographics of the professoriate, the proportion of women hired or tenured, the number in senior ranks. Undoubtedly, we need such bench marks. They also provide useful reference points in collective bargaining.

A reductionist focus, especially on recruitment numbers, however, can create zero sum struggles where marginalized identities are pitted against one another. It also may co-opt the larger equity project. Rather than a narrow emphasis on recruitment, we need a broad equity vision which will link the equity project to globalization, internationalization and corporatization, and highlight educational equity (concerned with access, curricula, pedagogies and climate).

In its 1992 brief to the employment equity hearings in Ontario, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations argued presciently that without an increased focus on educational equity, the success of employment equity measures was uncertain. The current context demonstrates the heightened relevance of such a view.

What are the strategic implications? I would argue for equity discourses which emerge out of process rather than objectives and which thereby focus attention on organizing. Such discourses need to be local and contextual as they involve a university community actively defining the equity project relevant to its particular culture. They are both a product of and impetus for equity consciousness.

Perhaps in one university questions of climate or the gap between the profile of the student body and the professoriate will provide the starting place for the emergence of equity consciousness. In another, the absence of aboriginal faculty or the patterns of wage discrimination between the fine arts and marketing faculty. In yet another, the lack of curricular attention to diversity or the problems of access for working-class students.

Such an approach highlights inequalities systemically structured around race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and First Nations status. It also makes visible the local practices of universities which exacerbate such inequities, such as pay differentials between various departments or cohorts of faculty, the exploitation of part-time and contract faculty, or the failure of women's tenure files in disproportionate numbers.

An equity discourse helps address the potential tensions among equity-seeking groups. It offers an organizing tool to bridge various experiences of inequity and facilitates co-operation among disparate groups. During the eight-week faculty strike at York University in 1997 a wide range of equity concerns coalesced into an "equity discourse" which became a central focus for the whole membership and provided the basis for such collaboration (Briskin and Newson, 1999). Such an approach mobilizes the political potential of "unity in diversity," that is, solidarity built on a foundation of diversity rather than homogeneity.

Constituency Organizing & Equity Committees

A second way of thinking about equity organizing is to consider the kinds of union and association structures which will maintain the delicate balance between addressing the concerns of specific equity-seeking groups and the need to work across groups to develop a strong equity consciousness, culture and collectivity.

Over the past decades, almost all mainstream unions — though fewer faculty associations — have developed women's committees which play a key role in politicizing women and producing them as a vocal constituency. Increasingly, women and men of colour, lesbians, gay men and native peoples are organizing separately inside the union movement, often through Aboriginal Circles, and Human Rights, Rainbow and Pink Triangle Committees.

This expansion in self-organization has made germane the question of how to organize effectively across constituencies. A common response has been to move towards generic equity or human rights committees, folding constituency committees into one integrated structure which would then address the diverse needs of various groups.

Undoubtedly, organizational vehicles which promote a practice of equity across identities are critical to the project of building alliances between diverse groups and co-ordinating cross-constituency organizing. Such structures may facilitate the development of a contextually-relevant equity discourse. They can help ensure that equity concerns are mainstreamed into all union practices, policies and projects. The responsibility for equity, then, is borne by the entire union and the marginalization of equity issues may be prevented.

Such committees can also address the interrelationship of equity issues, and highlight the fact that many faculty face discrimination on the basis of multiple identities. For example, sexual and gender harassment experienced by women of colour often takes race-specific forms. They can decrease the potential polarization among various equity-seeking groups. For an equity committee to be effective, then, it cannot see itself simply as a pragmatic structure that represents multiple equity-seeking groups. It needs an equity vision.

There are other risks associated with a uni-structure. It can exacerbate rather than ease tensions among various groups and reproduce, rather than challenge, existing power relations inside the university community. Thus strong constituency organizing — a faculty of colour committee or a women's committee, for example — continues to be critical. Such organizing highlights the specificity of concerns and guarantees that the most marginalized are heard. Representatives to equity committees can be elected by such caucuses thereby ensuring accountability and resisting tokenism. Perhaps counter-intuitively, strong constituency organizing provides the foundation for an effective equity committee and for successful alliances across equity-seeking groups.

Successful equity organizing then depends on a dual structure, one that combines integrated equity initiatives with constituency-based organizing for marginalized groups. The York University Faculty Association has been experimenting with such structures since the 1997 strike. In the first few years of the Standing Committee on Equity which was institutionalized in the YUFA constitution after the strike, disappointingly there was little constituency organizing. In fact, the fledgling attempts in this direction during the strike vanished with the exception of an Aboriginal Caucus initiated by a member of the equity committee. Recently the faculty association has established a Queer Caucus and a People of Colour Caucus. It will be worth monitoring how such initiatives impact on the agenda and efficacy of the equity committee.

Autonomy & Integration

In the scholarly work I have done on union women's organizing, I have argued that the success of equity organizing depends on maintaining a strategic balance between autonomy from the structures and practices of the labour movement and integration (or mainstreaming) into those structures (Briskin, 1999).

Autonomy structures prevent political marginalization and the dissipation of the radical claims for inclusivity and democratization often embedded in such initiatives. They offer a vehicle for equity-seeking groups to assert their specific concerns. Integration into union structures, on the other hand, prevents organizational marginalization, creates the conditions for resource allocation and encourages the mainstreaming of equity into union policy and strategy.

It may be useful to assess equity structures and policies in relation to the goals of both autonomy and integration. And it may be that the dual structure of equity committee (the integration structure) and constituency caucuses (the autonomy structure) supports an effective strategic balance.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly it is difficult to craft an effective equity strategy. In the current context the struggles around hierarchical organizational practices, affirmative action, curricular development and pedagogical innovation face mounting challenges. The promotion of marketization, the university-corporate nexus and private universities, combined with chronic underfunding and attacks on the mission of the academy, especially in the area of the liberal arts are endemic. These trajectories undermine collective consciousness and community and exacerbate the individualism and competition already inherent in university culture. Further, globalization and neoliberalism are limiting access to university education, legitimizing attacks on equality-seeking by marginalized groups and reshaping the practice and meaning of citizenship.

Unions and faculty associations offer a vehicle to counter the ideological onslaught supporting competition and the neoliberal promotion of radical individualism which is weakening the tolerance for making claims on the basis of systemic discrimination. In fact, the constituency organizing of marginalized groups and the coalition-building through equity committees can model a proactive alternative.

Equity organizing faces difficult times ahead. Strategies to resist the marginalization of equity concerns will be critical. Indeed, an argument can be made that attacks on equity are central to the project of corporate rule, and thus an equity vision must be central to the resistance mounted against it.

Linda Briskin is a professor at York University, cross-appointed to the Social Science Division and the School of Women's Studies.

This article is loosely-based on a talk I gave on "organizing for equity" at the University of Saskatchewan in May 2001. I thank those at the University of Saskatchewan Faculty Association for inviting me. It also reflects my experiences during the 1997 faculty strike at York University, and as the coordinator of the first YUFA Standing Committee on Equity. It draws freely on a variety of popular and scholarly articles I have written, some coauthored with Janice Newson. I very much appreciate the feedback of colleagues who read an earlier draft of this article.

Silas Lee. "Case for Affirmative Action Must Be Made Stronger." Women's Enews, 29 August 2001 (www.womensenews.org). The full ruling can be found at http://laws.findlaw.com/11th/0014340opn.html

Briskin, Linda. "Autonomy, Diversity and Integration: Union Women's Separate Organizing in North America and Western Europe in the Context of Restructuring and Globalization." Women's Studies International Forum, 22 (1999), 543­554.

Briskin, Linda and Janice Newson. "Making Equity a Priority: Anatomy of the York Strike of 1997." Feminist Studies, 25 (1999), 105­118.

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of CAUT.