From the first meeting of the University of Toronto Homophile Association in 1969 to the unique opportunity today for indigenous Black Nova Scotia students to meet with Dalhousie University’s Black Student Advisor, the ways that post-secondary institutions promote and provide support services for diverse and often under-represented student populations indicate Canada’s social commitment to the value of higher learning for its citizens, regardless of age, race, ability, size, gender, ethnic background, religious experience, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Much has transpired since those early stirrings of student voices caused post-secondary educators to reconsider the manner in which those under-represented, and sometimes invisible, students on campus were being served in their pursuit of success. This chapter examines more closely how educational issues and social attitudes have naturally pushed Canadian colleges and universities to become more actively and often broadly engaged in equity issues, and to establish innovative ways to overcome challenges and barriers to providing support for students and their diverse range of experiences.
Since 2000, numerous forces of change have influenced Canadian post-secondary education, not the least of which has been a growing, more dynamic, and more diverse student population. As well, colleges and universities face increasing pressure to expand a broadly accessible education to as many qualified students as possible. The complexity of student needs in combination with other pressures, including increased accountability and shifting perspectives on the institution’s role in the student experience, has shed light on identifiable gaps in institutional support for diverse students. Consequently, many colleges and universities have begun to carve out programs and mechanisms that provide direct service to students from under-represented backgrounds and diverse experiences. While the human diversity of the student community is often a hallmark and source of institutional pride, the existence of human diversity alone on campuses is not enough to ensure that students from a range of under-represented populations have equal and inclusive access to all facets of post-secondary life. Designed to help facilitate access and inclusion for students from under-represented groups, the range of services available is as diverse as students themselves. However, the existence of the services is not intended to functionally reinforce the problematic binary of under-represented students being “diverse” and students from dominant cultures or minority groups being “not diverse.” The exploration of this topic articulates how, in spite of often being one of the first functional areas to bear the pressures of political, financial, and resource constraints, these services have helped to ensure that the Canadian post-secondary environment has always been a place for students, staff, and faculty to explore and understand the diverse dimensions of their own personal identity and sense of otherness.
Anderssen and Valpy (2003, A8) concluded that,
although the 3.9 million Canadians today in their 20s defy a label … There is one label they do carry: they are the most deeply tolerant generation of adults produced in a nation known for tolerance. They were babies when the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was signed … and now, as adults, they rank that piece of paper higher than their parents do as a source of pride in their country. They are a reflection of the Canada their parents began constructing half a century ago.
Canadian college and university campuses are home to a “millennial generation” (Howe and Strauss 2000) of youth for whom diversity, in all of its forms, is seemingly a more common and broadly accepted dimension of everyday life. A survey by the Centre for Research and Information on Canada (Parkin and Mendelsohn 2003) painted a vivid portrait in its observation that “acceptance of diversity is the norm in the new Canada.” Highlights of the Centre’s findings that illustrate very low levels of opposition to the diverse character of Canadian society include:
• Only 10 per cent of Canadians agree that “It is a bad idea for people of different races to marry one another.”
• Eighty-three per cent of Canadians report that they feel comfortable hearing languages other than English and French spoken on the street.
• Fifty-seven per cent of Canadians in major centres report that multi-culturalism is a source of pride in their nation.
• Only 18 per cent say that immigrants have a “bad influence” on the nation, as compared to 43 per cent of Americans and 50 per cent of those in the United Kingdom.
Students on college and university campuses are the children of baby boomer parents who voted for governments that established critical policies related to diversity and immigration in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Significant legislation and policies were crafted in support of immigration, in an attempt to diversify the Canadian social landscape. For example, the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ensures “the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.” Furthermore, in a nation that does not have as lengthy a history of oppression as some of its neighbours and trading partners, it is not surprising that there seem to be fewer barriers to equity nationwide. This is not to say that oppression does not exist in Canada and that barriers to ensure free access to social institutions, like education, are not prevalent. One need look no further, for example, than the legacies of residential schools on Aboriginal people and of Chinese head taxes, and of Japanese internment during the Second World War on people of Asian descent to understand the socio-political history and context for racial, ethnic, and cultural exploitation and oppression in Canada. However, while some under-represented populations, particularly Aboriginal people and those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer, still struggle to feel welcomed and included on college and university campuses, the recent emergence of specialized access programs and services has occurred with relatively minimal controversy and discord, indicating that post-secondary education is moving in a positive direction.
Since Canadian colleges and universities do not formally collect data relative to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion, limited public data on the enrolment, attrition, engagement, and graduation rates of students from traditionally under-represented populations makes it challenging to assess the state of diversity at Canadian colleges and universities. However, Statistics Canada does track the post-secondary participation and attainment of men and women and, in some cases, individuals of Aboriginal descent. The Report of the Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Program (Statistics Canada 2005) highlights that:
• Diversity among the [Canadian] school-age population generally increased between 1991 and 2001.
• In Toronto and Vancouver, over 25 per cent of the school-age population in 2001 came from immigrant families, and approximately 20 per cent had a home language other than English or French.
• The proportion of the school-age population with Aboriginal identity is significant and growing in metropolitan centres and in areas outside major centres in certain provinces and territories.
Furthermore, a paper by Looker and Lowe (2001, 6) explored the gaps in access to post-secondary education, particularly those that stem from limitations in financial aid. Their findings illustrated that:
• Women have made considerable progress in their participation in and completion of post-secondary studies, now representing nearly 60 per cent of undergraduate degrees conferred.
• Concern about achievement among young men is growing because of lower literacy and high school completion rates.
• Speaking a first language other than English is less likely to be a barrier to attainment, yet young adults for whom French is the first language were less likely to participate in post-secondary education.
• Aboriginal persons have generally lower post-secondary completion rates than do people from non-Aboriginal backgrounds.
The lack of available specific data limits any comprehensive statement on diversity or the engagement of students from under-represented communities in Canadian colleges and universities. However, in a keynote address to faculty at the University of Toronto, Mary Gentile (2005), a consultant and former senior research fellow at the Harvard Business School, noted that,
by defining diversity as a problem we predetermine and constrain the structure our response [to diversity] can take. But when we can frame diversity as a resource and process for growth and new learning, we begin to see why the educational environment can be a particularly fruitful context for attending to diversity.
No doubt, in the current context of Canadian post-secondary education, this statement makes logical sense. However, colleges and universities have not always viewed the diversity of its community members as either a valued resource or an asset for enhancing the climate of the campus. Only within the past few decades have Canadian institutions demonstrated a growing commitment to understanding diversity and working toward equity and inclusion on campus, although it has not always been an easy or smooth journey. This commitment is illustrated in the range of offices and programs that comprise diversity services on many campuses today.
Many of today’s campus diversity initiatives find their origins in the work of student activists during the 1960s. During that era, college and university student governments first gave birth to the movement toward greater equity in Canadian post-secondary education. Students on many campuses organized themselves as smaller communities in order to establish a stronger presence of historically under-represented groups. In 1969, for example, fifteen men and one woman gathered to form the University of Toronto Homophile Association, now recognized as one of the nation’s oldest organizations focused on advancing the interests of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer students. Since then, the organization has evolved to openly embrace all dimensions of sexual orientation and gender identity and has become a driving force behind the creation of the nation’s first university office supporting the needs of queer students, staff, and faculty. Additionally, the organization, now known as LGBTOUT (Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and Trans People of the University of Toronto), helped establish the nation’s largest campus-based safe space ally program in 1996. The group also helped energize the formation of the university’s undergraduate major program in sexual diversity studies in 2004 and the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. With membership in the hundreds and a history that has been celebrated across the country, this association evolved from its activist roots to embrace opportunities to partner with administrative advocates and positively effect social change at the University of Toronto.
The preceding example is not unlike the experiences of other post-secondary campuses, where issues of diversity and equity were rooted in the activism of organizations that, over time, found an administrative home and support in various institutional departments. Campus responses to these issues have come in the form of institutional policies, educational initiatives, and programmatic interventions focused on assuring basic rights, educating various constituents, providing service to specific populations, and sometimes most significantly, ensuring institutional compliance with statutes and directives established by municipal, provincial, and federal governments.
A number of institution-specific policies have emerged over the years in support of broader national mandates to ensure equity for all Canadian citizens. For example, McGill University’s Handbook on Student Rights and Responsibilities (McGill University 2003) clearly outlines a range of student fundamental rights and freedoms, the foremost of which is:
a right to equal treatment by the University; this right must not be impaired by discrimination based on race, colour, ethnic or national origin, civil status, religion, creed, political convictions, language, sex, sexual orientation, social condition, age, personal handicap or the use of any means to palliate such a handicap.
Approved by McGill’s Senate in 1984 and amended in 1988 and 2001, this statement of human rights and freedoms came into existence only two short years following Canada’s adoption of the Constitution Act, 1982, which includes the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Such a policy statement is common at Canadian institutions, as they, along with most other social structures, were quick to embrace the fundamental principles of the Charter and explore ways to ensure its application in all facets of student learning and student life. However, meaningful implementation of such policies does not always occur as swiftly. Statements like these are beneficial in articulating an institutional position on issues associated with diversity and equity, a position that is often prompted by changes to legislation and governmental policy. Translating statements into practice (e.g., curriculum development, pedagogy, or administrative procedure) can be a more tenuous and difficult exercise. While some institutions are less public about the ways in which they address the challenges presented by inequities on campus, others are far more forthright in identifying inherent institutional barriers and the ways their commitment to the principles of the Charter help to overcome these challenges.
The existence of human rights policies alone, however, cannot fully accomplish the change necessitated by the goals of diversity and equity on Canadian campuses. Policies serve administrative roles functionally, in that they state the rules and articulate the expected outcomes of policy implementation and infractions. As a framework for understanding and measuring institutional legal obligations to address issues of diversity and equity, statements of policy are sufficient: they ensure that colleges and universities fulfill their obligations under provincial and federal statutes. However, most institutional policies fall short, in that they neglect to address the ways in which an institution holds a goodwill obligation to educate the community on issues of diversity and strategically overcome attitudinal barriers that are most often the source of tension and discord. Furthermore, policies rarely hold institutions to a higher standard than that prescribed by the law, and shy away from moving beyond the limitations of statutes to articulate a leadership position on societal diversity, equity, and inclusion such as one would hope to see coming from a post-secondary institution. As a result, policy alone is destined to fail in the same ways as do provincial and federal laws – subsequently doing very little to advance the access and inclusion of students from under-represented groups in the academy.
Astin and Astin (2000, 88) proposed that many institutions believe that availing themselves of greater financial resources alone would help to overcome the challenges of creating a diverse and equitable campus community. They suggested further that,
resources … most vital for transformative change are readily available both within and around us [including] our individual personal ‘resources’ of academic freedom, autonomy, critical thinking and a willingness to challenge, and our institutional ‘resources’ of new starts, celebrations and mission.
By identifying the importance of personal resources, and exploring the role of institutional resources beyond the traditional concepts of time, money, and human resources, Astin and Astin (2000) encouraged leaders in higher education – students, staff, faculty, and administrators – to explore ways in which they can exercise transformative leadership toward creating an inclusive campus community. Their research on transformative leadership and engaging institutions in social change addresses the personal dimension of leadership that is often the source of attitudinal hurdles in moving toward an inclusive and equitable campus. By recognizing human rights legislation as a foundation for and building up of the personal resources of academic inquiry, autonomy, critical thinking, and an ability to challenge individual ideas and practices, campus communities can more readily break down inherent attitudinal barriers to diversity that often appear to be the most insurmountable of roadblocks along the road to equity and access for all.
Numerous campuses have negotiated attitudinal roadblocks and successfully activated their policy commitment to diversity by establishing various program initiatives, ranging from community centres focusing on the identification and support of specific student groups (e.g., Aboriginal and First Nations) to comprehensive offices committed to monitoring and intervening across a wide scope of campus inequalities related to many different identifiers (e.g., ethnicity, gender, and disability). Current exemplars of such initiatives include:
• The Access and Diversity Office at the University of British Columbia, whose mandate is to provide “leadership in identifying and eliminating systemic barriers to full participation in university life, that students experience, arising from race, ethnicity, disability, gender and sexual diversity, and intersecting inequalities” (University of British Columbia).
• The Aboriginal Student Centre at the University of Manitoba, which promotes an “educational environment that include[s] the affirmation of Aboriginal cultures, values, languages, history, and way of life by virtue of increasing the knowledge foundation offered at the University of Manitoba” (University of Manitoba).
• The Black Student Advising Centre at Dalhousie University, which “provides programs, individual and/or group assistance, mediation and advocacy services, relevant resource materials and a referral service which may benefit [the] personal and social development on and off campus, [of students of the African Diaspora]” (Dalhousie University).
In order to effect social change and ensure the establishment of equity among students from all backgrounds and experiences, it is critical to work within the existing systems and structures of post-secondary education. Characterists common to the internal services of successful institutions are: (a) a commitment to promoting the various aspects of any given group’s identity, (b) efforts to minimize institutional and attitudinal barriers for students from their respective diverse populations, and (c) programs to provide ongoing support and intervention for students as they work toward achieving their academic goals. Furthermore, services with legacies and reputations of resiliency and impact share a common commitment to working in partnership with students to address issues associated with equity and diversity, as opposed to solving problems for them and alienating the students who are central to the issues the institution’s services are endeavouring to advance. Many students who work from an activist perspective to effect community change struggle to navigate the internal channels of the institution, while also experiencing inconsistency in leadership due to student transition, burnout, and resource limitations. In contrast, a shift from student organization–based activism to institution-based advocacy can facilitate greater access to institutional resources and support, stable and often broad-based leadership on equity, and an advocacy function that becomes integrated within the institution’s mission, systems, structures, and organizational policies.
As a case in point, offices that support students with disabilities have quickly emerged as leaders in their commitment and ability to address issues of diversity and equity in its many dimensions. For example, a partnership between the Equity Office and the Office of Access and Diversity at the University of British Columbia (UBC) has effectively implemented an Equity Ambassador program whereby student leaders from across campus engage members of the community in activities and programs to heighten students’ awareness of issues of diversity and to broadly address attitudinal barriers to equity. This team of volunteer ambassadors, through outreach workshops, a campus-wide newsletter called Think Equity, and other initiatives, seeks ways to develop partnerships with faculty, staff, and peers who want to expand their capacity to effect social change at UBC.
The administrative reporting structures of these centres and offices are varied. However, the most common administrative accountability for offices that provide direct service to diverse students rests with the senior student affairs officer. Such reporting relationships give the diversity office or program a direct connection to the network of other support services and programs focused on supporting student learning and development. When the diversity office has responsibility for overseeing policy development and implementation, it may report to a senior vice-president, in some cases, with a connection to human resources and employment equity; in other arrangements, it may report directly to a vice-president whose portfolio team is completely equity-based. In a limited number of other instances, an equity officer might also serve as a special advisor with direct accountability to the college or university president. This could ensure greater visibility and access to resources that focus on core institutional functions and mission.
Staffing and resource support for diversity services areas vary tremendously from one campus to the next. Institutions that have a broad-reaching commitment to diversity and equity are often characterized not only by the existence of a senior administrative position focused on these issues but also by the appropriate financial and human resources necessary to enact this broad commitment. As colleges and universities face increasing financial pressures and are subject to changes in government leadership, the funding equation for diversity services is not always stable. In situations where a college or university is subject to legislative accountability for equity (e.g., in dealing with persons with disabilities), external funding can be available, yet unreliable, since changes in government priorities are common. In a few best-case scenarios, colleges and universities commit institutional funding to ensure that diversity and equity issues are addressed broadly and consistently across campus. It is in these situations that students are likely to experience their greatest opportunities for success and achievement during their post-secondary years.
Diversity services is an important means to enhancing student learning and success. Chickering and Reisser (1993) proposed that helping students to develop an overall personal identity, integrity, and purpose is essential to supporting overall student growth and development. Central to the development of a strong sense of personal identity – the foundation for establishing subsequent levels of integrity and purpose in their model – is ensuring that students have the opportunity to explore and reconcile the many dimensions of their identity (e.g., comfort with body and appearance; gender and sexual orientation; ethnicity; sense of self in social, historical, and cultural contexts; lifestyle; and self esteem). At the same time, Jones and McEwen (2000) proposed that such exploration and identification involves not only an understanding of the many dimensions of identity (e.g., gender, sexuality, ethnicity, socio-economic status, ability, religion, and race), but also how these dimensions conflict with and complement one another. For example, Jones and McEwen’s research illustrates this dynamic in the case of a young lesbian woman of colour, who needs to explore how individual dimensions of her identity (i.e., sexual orientation, gender, and race) intersect in order to achieve a greater understanding of self and the world around her.
Additional research on the various dimensions of identity (e.g., Cass 1979; Cross 1971; Josselson 1973) (See chapter 2) underpins our knowledge of student development and reinforces the importance of how developing an understanding of one’s own diversity and its many facets positively enhances overall personal development and success. This is certainly the case for students and may well apply to institutions as a whole. Pascarella and Terenzini (2005, 130) challenged the assumption that diversity is “good” for a college or university campus by critically examining research that measured the influence diversity had on the student experience. Their findings illustrated consistently that,
diversity experiences such as attending a racial-cultural awareness workshop, discussing racial or ethnic issues, and socializing with someone from another racial-ethnic group had modest, but statistically significant, positive effects on specific self-reported gains in knowledge and skill acquisition.
Diversity, then, is essentially “good” for the well-being of the campus community at large. However, extant research on the achievement and retention of minority students at post-secondary institutions (Allen 1992; Bennett 1995; Feagin, Vera, and Imani 1996) demonstrates that students who come from traditionally under-represented populations encounter barriers to success and educational attainment, and are often less likely to persist and graduate from college or university altogether. These barriers often manifest as social isolation and alienation; racial, sexual or other discrimination; and active or passive curricular limitations. This alone underscores the need for institutional responses to inequity and for colleges and universities to more broadly embrace diversity and difference on campus.
The creation of specific offices and services oriented toward the support and retention of under-represented students indicates a significant shift in the role institutions play in forming inclusive communities. While originally conceptualized as a mechanism to comply with legislation and implement equity policies, such offices have the potential to become clearinghouses and contact points for all things diverse on campus. That is, colleges and universities that support equity offices and other similar administrative departments now have an institutional resource to help address broad-based issues relating to student diversity in general. While the experience of many is that such offices do indeed effectively advance the interests of specific target populations, a significant risk exists in providing such a service. With a “one-stop diversity shop” for students, staff, and faculty, other administrative and academic departments can all too easily defer individual cases, responsibility for policy administration, and by consequence, any responsibility for creating an inclusive learning environment to one office alone. The problem becomes that – whether due to fear of the consequences, unfamiliarity with specific concerns, or a lack of the skill and competence required to deal with the needs of these under-represented populations – other academic and administrative departments might deflect addressing issues of diversity. In some cases, even the bare minimum expectations, as outlined by institutional policies, can be challenge enough for individual departments to accomplish. Consequently, they turn too quickly to the campus diversity or equity officer to address and take responsibility for the issue at hand.
In order to overcome or avoid this centralizing of diversity issues within a single equity office, it is critical for campuses to infuse the concepts of equity and inclusion at every possible opportunity. Colleges and universities must move beyond simply articulating equity policy and toward identifying specific responsibilities, expectations, and outcomes for all campus constituencies with regard to these concerns. Responsibility for equity and diversity must be shared by all members of the campus community, and all departments should develop a capacity to adequately respond to and address the needs of students from diverse and under-represented backgrounds. For example, the Department of Student Housing and Residence Life at the University of Toronto Mississauga took a number of fundamental steps to embrace its responsibility for creating an inclusive community. Some of these basic practices include:
• Articulation of active commitment to the principles of inclusion and equity in the departmental statement of mission and objectives
• Provision of an average of ten hours of training for professional and paraprofessional staff and student leaders on understanding the many dimensions of diversity and basic competency building on how to advocate for under-represented student rights and responsibilities
• Establishment of explicit statements of student behavioural expectations in the residential code, including expectations around common respect and openness to difference
• Creation and broad distribution of diversity awareness campaigns on an annual basis, including the provision of resources to students-at-large on how to develop a lexicon of inclusive language and practice
• Allocation of financial resources on an annual basis to renovate and retrofit residence rooms to respond to the individual needs of students with disabilities
• Internal administration and screening of requests for special consideration for students with disabilities and transgender/gender variant students, to reinforce the relationship between the student and the residence as primary service provider and the equity officer as resource and support personnel
• Implementation of institutional programs encouraging students to become allies for social justice issues and provision of opportunities to discuss the responsibility associated therein
These examples illustrate how a series of small and relatively inexpensive steps can contribute to the creation of a departmental culture that embraces its responsibility to its student population for equity and inclusion. While not made overnight, these subtle changes and evolution of professional practices have the potential to reach much further in realizing equity on campus than any simple policy can achieve alone. All offices engaged in direct service to students might benefit from an audit of current practices to evaluate where changes are warranted. Regardless, the goals for every office committed to equity remain to raise consciousness of group identities, minimize institutional and attitudinal barriers, and provide ongoing support and intervention for students who seek their services. Individually, diversity offices can begin to help institutions accomplish these goals; however, it is the responsibility of the entire campus community – faculty, staff, students, and administrators – to ensure that members from all backgrounds and experiences can find a sense of place and achieve success at college and university.