The University of Alberta abandons its equity, diversity and inclusion policy

In this post I discuss the University of Alberta’s decision to abandon its equity, diversity and inclusion policy. I also refer to a definition of DEI at the Reuters website. As well, I describe At a Loss for Words (2024), a first-rate study in which Carol Off discusses the relationship between power and language. In addition, I mention several recently published books about Alberta history and share a link to a CNN article about demographics and DEI.

I was interested to read a Jan. 28, 2025 University Affairs article by Hannah Liddle entitled “Inside the University of Alberta’s move away from equity, diversity and inclusion: Motivations for the decision are being debated by members of the university community.”

An excerpt reads:

However, that same month, the U of A appeared strong in its commitment to EDI [“equity, diversity and inclusion”]. At a general faculties council meeting, the student union and graduate student association put forward a motion to have the university reaffirm its EDI commitments. (The council is responsible for academic and student affairs at the university and is chaired by the university president.) The motion passed.

Shortly after, on Dec. 13, the ACB [“access, community and belonging”] plan was presented to the U of A’s board of governors. According to two people who attended the meeting, board member Janice MacKinnon proposed that the EDI office at the U of A should be eliminated entirely. She also requested that a reference in the plan’s land acknowledgement to Canada as a “settler colonist society” be removed, arguing it presents only one side of Canadian history. The board approved the motion to amend the language.

To Laurie Adkin, a professor emerita of political science at U of A, these factors make the explanation that ACB was the outcome of internal consultation unconvincing. “When you look at the bigger picture, it seems quite clear that it came from pressures from the Alberta government and from people on the board of governors,” said Dr. Adkin. “That, to me, confirms that the autonomy of the university is under threat and has been for a long time, particularly under the UCP government.”

This view is shared by Amy Kaler, a sociology professor at the university, who said she has yet to hear a “coherent explanation” for the decision. “This is an attempt to appease our extremely polarizing and divisive premier who’s pretty vocal about this stuff. That’s not really what a university president ought to be doing,” she said.

The Alberta government, added Dr. Adkin, has also “used its power to completely stack our board of governors” with people sympathetic to the UCP or from the private sector who tend to see the university as a “branch of big business.”

Click here for previous post about settler colonialism and Canadian history >

The University Affairs website features additional articles about diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

What is DEI (or EDI: the U of A’s version of the acronym)?

A Jan. 30, 2025 Reuters article by Kanishka Singh is entitled “What is DEI, a practice Trump is trying to dismantle?”

An excerpt reads:

DEI [“diversity, equity and inclusion”] programs have been part of workplace diversity efforts to ensure fairer representation for groups seen as historically marginalized, such as African Americans, LGBTQ+ community members, women, disabled people and other ethnic minorities in the United States.

The efforts aim to remove systemic barriers for groups affected by a legacy of racism, sexism and xenophobia.

DEI practices include training on combating discrimination, addressing pay inequity along gender or racial lines and broadening recruitment and access for underrepresented ethnic groups.

DEI is a relatively new term but efforts to address inequities and structural racism go back centuries in the U.S.

At a Loss for Words: Conversations on an Age of Rage (2024)

I’ve recently been reading At a Loss for Words: Conversations on an Age of Rage (2024) by Carol Off. Chapter 4, entitled “Woke,” begins with a Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of the term:

WOKE

woke adjective

chiefly US slang

1 a: aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)

b: reflecting the attitudes of woke people

2 disapproving: politically liberal or progressive (as in matters of racial and social justice) especially in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme

An excerpt reads:

Take another step to the right in Canadian politics and you find Danielle Smith of Alberta, who, as premier, sat down in early January 2024 for a live one-on-one with Tucker Carlson. In the past, Carlson has called Canada the “retarded cousin” of the United States, and he declared that he had come to Alberta to “liberate Canada” from the tyranny of Justin Trudeau. Whatever vile remarks Carlson has made about Trudeau in the past, the former Fox News agitator is an unabashed racist, homophobe and antisemite with whom no self-respecting politi­cian should share space. But Smith not only chortled her way through their onstage conversation in Calgary, she called on Carlson to “put Steven Guilbeault in your crosshairs,” referring to Canada’s minister for the environment, a man she had previously called a zealot. Smith later said she wasn’t calling for his assassination, but Carlson frequently advocates violence and amplifies the messages of white nationalists who are actually inclined to kill people.

Of related interest is a Jan. 23, 2025 Tyee article by James Magnus-Johnston entitled “A US takeover is no longer unthinkable. Here’s why: Canada is changing in ways that erode the automatic rejection of America influence.”

An excerpt reads:

In fact, behind the United States president’s bullying lies a barely hidden fault line: Canada’s survival faces challenges not only from the U.S., but from within, due to fraying internal alliances and the detachment of the political ruling class from economic and demographic realities.

The language that power sometimes speaks

Recently I’ve been reading several contemporary books by CBC journalists. Among such recent books is At a Loss for Words (2024) which I’ve referred to above. Carol Off underlines in this book that there is, indeed, such a thing as truthfulness; such a thing as facts; and such a thing as trust.

The existence of such basic things in life warrants underlining.

We deal in this context – with regard to truthfulness, facts, and trust – with the distinction between rhetoric and reality.

Off speaks, in this context, (pp. 112-3) of a time in history when a definite switch, related to truthfulness in public life, had taken place.

This was the key transition point in history, she notes, “when up becomes down, in becomes out, right become wrong.”

The book’s reference to this formulation regarding language usage struck me. In years past, I’ve attended many committee of adjustment meetings, and other land use meetings in Toronto. I have a strong interest in the role which citizens are capable of playing, when conditions permit, when land use decisions are being made.

Given that interest, I have thought about the language that power sometimes speaks, regarding land use decision making.

Such a language, I came to realize years ago, sometimes asserts that up is down, big is small, and in is out.

Power, especially when there are no checks and balances on its operation, can readily twist language for its own purposes.

At a Loss for Words, by Carol Off, warrants a close read. Among other things, the book aptly highlights George Orwell’s widely read commentary on the relationship between political power and language usage.

Books about Alberta history in context of Canadian, American, and world history

I currently spend much of my time on a research project centred on a biography about a speech therapist in Alberta.

As part of my research I’ve been reading about the history of Alberta – with a focus on how such a regional history relates to the history of Canada and the world.

Resources I’ve been studying closely include, among others, God’s Province: Evangelical Christianity, Political Thought, and Conservatism in Alberta (2016), Orange Chinook: Politics in the New Alberta (2019), and Blue Storm: The Rise and Fall of Jason Kenney (2023).

The latter two texts are available online at the University of Calgary website.

The online versions are handy but the print versions are easier to read in my experience. Nonetheless the online versions offer a great way to get acquainted with Orange Chinook and Blue Storm – valuable resources featuring the work of many authors.

I became interested in reading God’s Province (2016) after reading an online article entitled “Ethnography and Political Opinion: Identity, Alienation and Anti-establishmentarianism in Rural Alberta” by Clark Banack.

Also of interest: First World Petro-Politics (2016), Fundamentalism and American Culture (2022), Rule of Darkness (1988), Dark Vanishings (2003), and Time’s Monster (2020).

Until I became involved with the successful effort to save Parkview School starting in 2011, I did not have much interest in history. However, since that local history project I’ve been reading widely – for example, about world military history and the history of the British empire. I’m interested not just in history but also in historiography – how history gets written, and whose needs – and purposes – are served by the writing of it.

Memory-holing of history

A Feb. 6, 2025 ProPublica article by Alec MacGillis is entitled “Memory-Holing Jan. 6: What Happens When You Try to Make History Vanish?”

An excerpt (I have omitted the embedded links: they are available in the article) reads:

The removal of the database happened more quietly, but it is worthy of notice in its own right. It signals the Trump administration’s intention to not only spare the president’s supporters any further consequences for their role in the riot, but to erase the event from the record — to cast it into the fog of confusion and forgetting in which the Greenwood massacre had existed for so long.

As some have noted, this push to whitewash recent history carries a disconcerting echo of countless autocratic regimes, from the Chinese Communist Party’s memory-holing of the Tiananmen Square massacre to the Argentine military junta’s “disappearing” of dissidents in the 1970s. It comes at the same time as the administration is also seeking to whitewash the teaching of American history, more generally: Trump issued an executive order on Jan. 29 titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” that threatens to withhold federal funds from schools that teach that the country is “fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory” and instructs the government to “prioritize federal resources, consistent with applicable law, to promote patriotic education.” One wonders: Would teaching the Tulsa massacre be allowed?

But the removal of the database is troubling for another reason, too: It undermines our ability to consider the events of Jan. 6 in all their complexity and particularity.

I was made aware of that complexity when I spent several days after the riot immersing myself in the more than 500 smartphone videos that participants had shared on the Parler social-media app, for an essay accompanying ProPublica’s compilation of the video trove. What struck me perhaps more than anything else about the videos was the sheer diversity of the motivations, profiles and actions that they put on display. Yes, seen from afar, the mob seemed to assume the unity of purpose of a single, organized mass bent on destruction.

But seen in the close-up of the videos, heterogeneity emerged. There were young women with puffy jackets and pompom hats, middle-aged women who could have been coming straight from a business lunch, young men furtively removing their black tactical gear under the cover of a tree to pull on red MAGA sweatshirts to pass as mere Trump supporters. There were people viciously attacking police officers and denigrating them (“You should be ashamed, fucking pansies”), others pleading with them not to (“Do not throw shit at the police!” “Do not hurt the cops!”) and still others thanking the cops who were arriving on the scene (“Back the blue! We love you!”). There were people smashing in windows and others decrying them for doing so (“Oh, God no. Stop! Stop!” “What the fuck is wrong with him?” “He’s Antifa!”) There were people who, in a matter of moments, swung from being pitchfork-carrying marauders to wide-eyed tourists, as they deferentially asked a Capitol police officer for directions or swung their cameras up to capture the inside of the dome. (“This is the state Capitol,” an awestruck man says to his young female companion.)

Demography and DEI

A Feb. 14, 2025 CNN article is entitled: “The real obstacle for Trump’s campaign against DEI isn’t Democrats. It’s demography.”

An excerpt reads:

Abandoning diversity programs even as the nation continues to grow more diverse could expose US society to two distinct risks. One is that as minorities make up a growing share of the future workforce, failing to equip more of them with advanced academic and technical skills could leave the nation short of the highly trained workers it will need as it transitions further into the information-age economy.

“The future of the nation’s labor force productivity and economic well-being will rely heavily on the success and integration of today’s and tomorrow’s increasingly multiracial younger population,” William Frey, a demographer at the center-left Brookings Metro think tank, wrote recently.

The other big risk is that under current trends the US could harden into a more overtly two-tier society, with a widening gap between the growing overall presence of minorities in the population and their limited representation in the most prestigious educational and employment opportunities. That could be a formula for even more social turbulence and alienation than the US has already experienced around current racial disparities.

The pushback against diversity programs “is an attempt to entrench racial discrimination and disparities at every level of society and to horde power and influence among what will soon be a minority population of White people and the wealthy,” said Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, a leading civil rights organization.