Across Canada and internationally, equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI)1 efforts are facing intense backlash. Whether through legislation, policy change or political pressure, EDI efforts are being dismantled or curtailed.
Academic staff associations must defend EDI as core union activity. EDI shapes who is hired, whose work is valued, how workloads are distributed, who is protected from discrimination and harassment, and who is most vulnerable to precarity, job insecurity or discipline.
Academic staff associations also have a distinct role in safeguarding the conditions for thriving academic work. This includes defending academic freedom and ensuring that a diversity of perspectives and methodologies can flourish. When EDI is strengthened, conditions improve for everyone. When EDI is weakened, the work of the union to ensure fairness and protect the labour and professional rights of members is more difficult.
Defending and advancing EDI is not a discretionary, symbolic commitment or an individualized accommodation. It is essential to upholding collective rights, limiting management discretion, and strengthening shared governance. This playbook seeks to support efforts to defend EDI as central to labour rights and union solidarity.
Review and strengthen the collective agreement
- Review the collective agreement to identify enforceable EDI-related protections, including non-discrimination, accommodation, hiring and promotion, workload, evaluation, and academic freedom. CAUT’s Auditing a collective agreement for equity checklist can be used as a starting point.
- Develop a bargaining strategy to strengthen EDI policies and practices to protect against policy rollbacks.
Enforce the collective agreement
- Pursue a grievance strategy to defend EDI. EDI rollbacks may violate the collective agreement, and associations can pursue grievances where appropriate.
- Appointments, workload, evaluation, compensation, discipline, and health and safety clauses may all have EDI elements.
- Encourage the identification of patterns and documentation of systemic issues.
- Consider whether changes to EDI-related policies, practices or programs violate existing collective agreement language on governance when changes are framed as administrative discretion or financial necessity.
Reframe EDI as a core labour and solidarity issue
- Consistently frame EDI in terms of workplace fairness, predictability and protection from arbitrary power.
- Emphasize that EDI strengthens the rights of all members and that weakening equity protections ultimately undermines union solidarity.
- Counter divide-and-conquer narratives by emphasizing shared interests in limiting management discretion and defending collective rights.
- Highlight that attacks on EDI typically impact first the most vulnerable members and then expand outward.
- Develop a communications plan for policy grievances and other enforcement actions, reinforcing the principle that an injury to one is an injury to all.2
Enforce collegial governance and defend institutional autonomy
- The association should ensure that academic staff will be meaningfully engaged in EDI policy-related processes. It should also ensure that governance bodies, including the senate or equivalent, will play the decisive role in initiating and approving policies, and in assessing how well they are working.
- Campaign to ensure governance bodies publicly affirm a commitment to EDI and do not engage in pre-emptive compliance by eliminating programs, scrubbing websites, and removing particular words or phrases from syllabi, course materials, and course titles and descriptions.
- Academic staff associations should secure provisions requiring the regular collection, analysis and public reporting of both quantitative and qualitative EDI data, including data on hiring, promotion and tenure outcomes, compensation, and workload distribution. Through collective bargaining, joint equity committees, the administration and enforcement of the collective agreement, and occupational health and safety structures, these requirements should be embedded in enforceable processes. Data collection must be linked to clear accountability mechanisms and concrete action plans to address identified inequities. See the Equity Data section in the CAUT Equity Toolkit for more information.
Strengthen academic freedom protections
- Attacks on EDI can take the form of restrictions on certain teaching, research, service and scholarly expression. Academic staff associations must treat efforts to limit or police equity-related scholarship, pedagogy or institutional critique as direct threats to academic freedom.
- Defend the rights of academic staff to teach, research, publish, speak and participate in institutional and community life without fear of reprisal for work that examines systemic discrimination, colonialism, racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of inequality.
- Challenge attempts to characterize EDI-related teaching, research or service as “political,” “ideological,” or outside the scope of academic work. Such framing is often used to justify censorship, discipline or program elimination and must be resisted.
- Monitor and respond to directives or informal pressures that restrict course content, research topics, grant applications, hiring criteria or evaluation standards related to equity, diversity and inclusion as possible threats to academic freedom. Monitoring can be done through member engagement in the form of surveys and face-to-face outreach.
- Treat investigations, complaints or disciplinary processes targeting EDI-related speech or scholarship as potential academic freedom violations and pursue grievances or other formal challenges where warranted.
- Educate members about the link between EDI and academic freedom, emphasizing that limits placed on equity-related scholarship narrow the scope of inquiry for all and undermine the core mission. Ideas include hosting a discussion, posting materials on campus, or sharing information.
Organize and mobilize members in defence of EDI
- Build an organizing committee of interested members to bring people together, share ideas and empower new organizers.
- Focus on internal communications first, keeping members informed and emphasizing solidarity across the entire membership.
- Communicate about equity-related grievances and disputes, reinforcing that attacks on EDI are attacks on collective rights.
- Work in coordination with other unions, student associations, and allied groups on campus or in the community on campaigns. Campaign targets could be the employer or governments.
Campaign ideas include:
- Calling on the employer to defend equity and academic freedom in the face of government pressure, hire diverse permanent academic staff, achieve equitable compensation, reduce racist incidents in the workplace, or provide more childcare spaces.
- Calling on governments to reverse or adopt policies, or to take an EDI approach to budgeting and funding.
- Elect and support academic staff members on governance bodies.
Campaign tactics, for example, are:
- Getting a senate or board motion passed
- Writing letters or signing petitions
- Holding an event to grow support and generate broader awareness
- Reaching out to the media (CAUT is available to support)
- Meeting with decision-makers in government
- Building a coalition to grow voices speaking up for EDI
Have ideas or case studies to share? Please reach out to education@caut.ca.
1. We use the term equity, diversity and inclusion as an inclusive umbrella encompassing related frameworks and initiatives, including justice, accessibility, belonging, human rights, anti-racism and anti-oppression, and belonging, as well as other evolving and community-based efforts to address systemic inequalities.
2. Claims that privacy law prevents disclosure of grievance or enforcement activity are often overstated. Canadian courts and labour tribunals operate under a presumption of openness, and grievance arbitration awards are routinely made public. Privacy law permits disclosure of labour-relations information where it is reasonable, proportional and connected to legitimate union purposes, including member accountability and collective mobilization.
| Equity Toolkit |
| The importance of equity |
| Advancing equity |
| Case studies |
| Tools for change |
| Moving equity forward |
| Bargaining for equity |
| Take action |
| Strengthening the association |
| Equity data |
| Compensation |
| Appointments |
| Academic freedom and equity |
