Published by BIPOC students and alumni, the letter documents specific instances of racism they had experienced at the school and outlines 30 calls to action. Chief among these calls was one to diversify faculty. In the first call to action, students and alumni said the school must hire more BIPOC faculty, specifically Black and Indigenous faculty, as well as collect and release demographic data, with a distinction between tenured and contract staff. Students and alumni said they created the calls to action, because, while consulted in the past through the school’s Equity and Inclusion committee, created in 2019, “serious steps toward reform have not been shared with us or made public.”

“Hiring practices have also not reflected changes that the school has expressed interest in making,” they added. In one section of the letter, BIPOC students and alumni also anonymously shared anecdotal experiences within the program. It reflected the significance of having racialized faculty in the program, especially in permanent positions: for most racialized students and alumni, it was a matter of better education through greater representation.

“Before joining Carleton’s journalism school, I asked a recently graduated white student about the racial makeup of the program’s faculty,” one of them recalled in the letter. “They asked me why on earth that mattered. This is why it matters.” Students and alumni also shared the harm some of them experienced at the hands of existing faculty in the program, much of which was white until the calls to action were released. “A professor shouted a religious slur at me in an attempt to make a joke,” one of them wrote in the letter. “Once, in a fourth-year Indigenous reporting class, the professor told me racism is simply not real and an excuse,” another shared. “If you thought you saw something as racism or a source said something was due to racism, you’re just not doing a good job as a journalist.”

In the two years since the calls to action were released, the program has brought in almost a dozen sessional instructors of colour and three tenure-track faculty, including high-profile Black journalists Nana aba Duncan and Adrian Harewood. Tobin Ng, a Carleton journalism student entering their third year at the time, says the calls to action were created “out of that frustration.” They elaborated that there “was this desire to just create a really comprehensive document that would basically outline all the things that students had been calling for again and again. There’s the emotional labour of having to repeat [ourselves], and just demand the same things without seeing concrete results,” they said.

Two years since they helped write the calls to action, Ng says the school’s response to the letter, especially through the steps it has taken to diversify faculty in the program, has finally made them hopeful. “I think that the hiring of new faculty is a step towards allowing for things that will last long beyond my time or the time of the students who are involved in this work right now.” Yet, much work remains. While the school has hired professors and instructors of colour, more change is needed to ensure that diverse faculty continue to join the program moving forward, and feel supported enough to stay and grow within it. Some steps the school is taking, in particular, involve rethinking the job of a journalism professor, creating opportunities for research and growth, and recognizing the contributions of both the students and alumni, as well as the new faculty of colour, through allyship and support.

RETHINKING THE JOB
Nana aba Duncan was sharing the job posting for a new chair at Carleton’s journalism school when a colleague suggested she apply for it. Duncan, who had spent much of her career at the CBC and had been actively involved in various diversity efforts at the public broadcaster, was completing the William Southam Journalism Fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Massey College at the time. Her research at Massey involved looking at the experiences of leaders of colour. She was interested in this topic in part because she’d never had the opportunity to work under a Black or racialized leader, and because she was looking to take on a leadership role herself.

“I was in this place of thinking about race and leadership and a move in my own career,” Duncan recalls. “I was [also] in this place of making a change and thinking about journalism in a way that could just be better for those of us who come from underrepresented communities or misrepresented communities.” After that nudge to apply for the Carty Chair in Diversity and Inclusion Studies, Duncan took a moment to pause. Then, she superimposed her personal mission “to help change the industry so that racialized journalists can feel like their perspectives and expertise are just as worthy and legitimate as the expertise and experiences of white journalists” onto the job posting from Carleton. “I realized [it all] aligns … so I applied.” The Carty Chair is the first of its kind at Carleton and across Canada. No other journalism program has a chair permanently committed to diversity and inclusion studies.

Until the summer of 2020, Carleton’s journalism school didn’t either. Allan Thompson, a professor and now the program head, insists the school had made the decision to convert its permanent chair in business and financial journalism into one that focuses on diversity and inclusion even before the calls to action were released. The decision was part of other strategic steps the school was taking since 2019, when Atong Ater, a former student in the program, shared her experiences as a journalism student at Carleton in a personal essay published by the CBC that May. A job posting for the position from September 2019, however, continued to advertise the Carty Chair as one specifically geared toward business and financial journalism, as it had been in previous years. While unclear about when the decision to change the focus of the job was actually made, Thompson says the new direction for the Carty Chair as one geared toward equity and inclusion gave the school a unique opportunity to maneuver around challenges that come with the hiring process, such as budget constraints from the university and the ability to hire new permanent faculty only when existing full-time professors retire from their positions.

It also meant the school would have a permanent member committed to spearheading equity, diversity, and inclusion, and that no budget cuts or hiring changes would affect this work. “[Endowed chairs] exist in perpetuity … and the Carty Chair had been empty for a couple of years because the occupant retired and the position hadn’t been filled,” Thompson says of the decision. “Strategically and ethically, I think it was a really wise choice to use that opportunity to create the first chair of its kind in a Canadian journalism school, where that person would have a priority to look at a whole range of equity, diversity, and inclusion issues in journalism,” he adds. “To conduct research, to create new courses, to be available to students and faculty as a resource and to be a champion, but also just to be another faculty member.”

Outside of budget constraints though, Thompson says he recognizes other challenges exist when it comes to hiring diverse faculty too. Perhaps rethinking the job also means rethinking the job requirements, especially the fact you need to have a master’s degree in order to apply for a faculty position. “Are we missing out on some really good journalists out there who have solid careers behind them, who might be interested in teaching, but don’t have a master’s degree?” he says. The conversation, however, goes beyond the school’s decision-making capacity. It continues with the university, which is ultimately responsible for changing job requirements, Thompson adds.

CREATING OPPORTUNITIES FOR GROWTH
Duncan completed her first year as the Carty Chair this July, having designed a course on journalism and belonging and begun working on a podcasting course for the upcoming year. She says the big difference between her job now and those in the past is that at Carleton, Duncan is “simultaneously a professor and the person who cares about diversity.” At the CBC, where she was the founding co-chair for Diversify CBC, a resource group for employees of colour, Duncan remembers the work being unpaid and something she did after hours, often on top of everything else. “I was doing [diversity work] at the side of my desk while also being the host of the weekend morning show, while also having a three- and five-year-old at home,” she says. “The difference between my work here at Carleton and my work at CBC is that I had two sides to myself at CBC,” Duncan adds, “and as strange as it sounds, in this position [of the Carty Chair], I feel freer to express how much I care about inclusion and diversity.”

The work has in no way been easy, especially with working during a pandemic—often remotely or online—working from home while being a mother, and especially working to implement change that can often be emotionally draining too. It has, however, also been immensely fulfilling. “What has been rewarding is how students have responded to my course,” Duncan says, recalling the last day of class for her course on journalism and belonging. Students in the course shared with her a Kudoboard they had made. In it, they wrote their experiences in the class, thanking her for giving them the space to talk about complex issues so openly. Knowing it was her course that made these students feel that sense of gratitude filled Duncan with gratitude herself. “I just want us to continue to be fearless and curious and to do the work with respect.”

CBC journalist Adrian Harewood also joined Carleton’s journalism program following the calls to action released by students and alumni in 2020. An associate professor at Carleton, Harewood says the position has given him the opportunity and space to conduct research and create courses that illuminate Canada’s Black history. An example of this is a course that focuses specifically on the history of Black journalism in Canada. “I’m really enjoying the process of creating the course and of creating curriculum and of identifying figures and media outlets that might be unfamiliar to people,” Harewood says. “I’m also working on a longer-term project looking at the history of a very prominent Black newspaper in Canada called Contrast that was active in the late 1960s and 1970s and really was part and parcel or a product of the civil rights movement.” Harewood’s parents wrote for Contrast, and he says the research process has been interesting, given that one of the most important interviews for the project was with his 85-year-old father. These opportunities—to research and to build a more inclusive curriculum—are giving Harewood the chance to help reduce the disconnect “between the academy and the community.” He sees his work as a way to “get busy outside of our comfortable spaces.”

“Carleton is not this rarefied place, which only exists for members of the social, economic, and political elite. It is an institution that we own, too,” Harewood says. “I see that as being part of my own job and practice of trying to make space for more people but also to harness the resources of the university and share those resources with the community that we’re a part of.” His goals are varied, but being part of the faculty at Carleton
and having opportunities for research, has magnified them. “I want Carleton to be a leader when it comes to all aspects of journalism education,” Harewood says of his plans. “I want us to be a space where we are comfortable taking risks […] where we embrace discomfort.” Ultimately, Harewood says he wants the program “always to be ahead of the curve. Looking back always, and appreciating history, but also looking forward in a very kind of bold way.”

A FAR-FROM-PERFECT PROCESS
Many of the students and alumni who worked on releasing the calls to action in 2020 have also been working with the school to implement them. The process is far from perfect. Much like Duncan’s experience doing diversity and inclusion work at the CBC, students and alumni involved in addressing the calls to action are not paid for this labour, and many of them do it outside of their full-time jobs.

“We’re all working reporters with many other responsibilities on top of this,” Olivia Rania Bowden, a reporter with the Toronto Star and an alumnus from the program, says. “When we decided to [publish] these calls to action, we were like, where do we have a voice? And what can we push?” For Duncan, the work of diversifying the oldest journalism program in Canada has been a rigorous process on the faculty level too. Whether through diversifying the curriculum and the courses, the guest speakers who engage with students, or the research projects she takes on, Duncan says the work of pushing for equity and inclusion both within the classroom and outside of it is “emotionally draining and sometimes, there are the surprise moments of harm.”

An example of this, Duncan says, is when in some situations, she has heard a person say something racist or offensive or ignorant “and you either don’t know what to say, or you have to do the calculus.” For Duncan, the calculus involves deciding “whether or not I’m going to say something. And then if I decided I am going to say something, what am I going to say? And that calculus also includes: how is this person going to take it? How is my relationship going to change with this person?” According to Duncan, institutions like Carleton need to recognize “there is a burden that they don’t understand and it’s a burden they don’t know. Just as in the same way if my position was held by an Indigenous journalist or a person who went through a lot of trauma as a young person or a trans professor—there’s going to be a burden that they have that I wouldn’t know.”

The nature of the work, according to both the students and alumni involved, as well as the faculty, requires recognition from the school that goes beyond engaging with them. “What really bothers me is when [the school has] made changes, they don’t credit us publicly,” says Bowden. “I know they’ve said they were thinking about this or working on [certain changes] prior to our calls, but the thing is we did it really quickly and really well around our extremely demanding jobs because we don’t have a choice but to make it happen. As people of colour, we don’t have a choice.” It also means recognizing the push for equity, diversity, and inclusion may have begun with students and alumni of colour, but that white students and faculty within the program are equally responsible for solutions and change moving forward.

“Feeling bad or guilty is useful only as much as it is a natural feeling, and if it propels you to action, then that’s good,” says Duncan. “But I think allyship also means not performing your sadness or your guilt about the fact that systemic racism exists. And knowing that the performance of those feelings—it comes across as looking for absolution from BIPOC students or faculty. As we always say, it’s really about doing the work,” she adds. “Do the work with your colleagues, maybe with your other fellow white students, do the work within yourself.”

THE CHALLENGES THAT REMAIN
While Carleton’s journalism program has taken steps to address the calls to action released in 2020, especially when it comes to diversifying faculty and sessional instructors within the program, leaders at the university continue to remain white. The Racialized Leaders Leading Canadian Universities research published in Educational Management Administration & Leadership Journal last year found that “universities in Canada are overwhelmingly top-down institutions.”

“Even with an executive-level diversity advocate, there can be issues with diversity at the organizational level,” the research says. “Scholars have warned that these positions have the potential for tokenism, ‘whereby Chief Diversity Officers [and similar positions] may be seen as the face of diversity, but lack the formidable authority and support to create real and lasting change.’” Data from 2020 used in the research shows that 80 percent of Carleton University’s leadership is white, with 60 percent of leadership positions being held by white men, and another 20 percent held by white women. There are no Black or Indigenous men or women in leadership roles at the university.

Mohamed Elmi, the acting executive director at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Diversity Institute and a co-author of the paper, says barriers at three levels—societal, organizational, and individual—determine how many people of colour seek leadership positions in academia. One of the biggest barriers, however, is that longer career trajectories within post-secondary institutions mean those leadership positions are much slower to change.

“Even though from the outside, they [post-secondary institutions] are viewed as progressive, they are relatively bureaucratic and very slow,” Elmi says. At the same time, Elmi says the responsibility for better diversity and inclusion within the university must not fall on leaders alone. Instead, organizations and individuals that support a university, whether through funding or strategic partnerships, must also call on institutions to address diversity. “You don’t want to put the onus on the individuals, especially in a system that is not responsive,” he says.

A BLUEPRINT FOR THE FUTURE
More than two years since the calls to action were first published by students and alumni, Carleton’s journalism school has taken significant steps to address the first: hiring diverse faculty. At the same time, conversations about other calls to action listed in the document are still taking place between the journalism school at Carleton and the university at large. Among these is the call to collect race-based student data and abolish unpaid internships. It is unclear how the diversity of Carleton as a university—or lack thereof—is affecting these conversations. Thompson does say they are ongoing. For students and alumni involved, the unmet calls to action remain front and centre. For Bowden, it’s important the school now goes from addressing the calls to action to defining its mission over the next couple years. It’s a way of ensuring accountability, especially since she feels “a lot of these issues in the industry, I think can be tackled by j-schools.”

“I’m happy to see [changes] but I don’t want blog posts on our website being like, ‘Oh, we randomly did this and we randomly did this,’” Bowden says. “I want to see that in six months, [the school has] committed to [particular changes], and are they going to happen? And if it doesn’t, somebody is going to face consequences for that.”

“That’s how any planning is done,” she says, adding, “When I do see it, that’s when I’m going to feel more confident about this process.” For Ng, who graduated just this summer, the changes that Carleton’s journalism program has made so far, as well as the ones they hope the school commits to making in the future, could ensure that equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives implemented in the classroom have a positive impact on newsrooms across the country as well. “I think that conversations about accountability and transparency, and bringing that respect and care to our reporting, is something that can start at journalism schools and should continue to flow into the industry,” they say. “[It all] links back to journalism school because I think this is the place where a lot of journalists are shaped and where we first begin to understand journalistic values and the history of our role as reporters.”

“The conversation on the picket line was frankly, ‘what the fuck?’” recalls Jason Laurendeau, a sociology professor who was among the strikers. It seemed surreal that relations between faculty and the university had deteriorated to this point, but Lethbridge isn’t an anomaly. Over the past year, Canada has seen a wave of post-secondary faculty strikes amid rising tensions.

From Acadia University to Ontario Tech, to the University of Manitoba and the University of Lethbridge, and even smaller universities like Concordia University of Edmonton and Université Sainte-Anne, strikes broke out. The wave began on November 2 with the University of Manitoba strike and dwindled by April 25 with the end of the strike at Université Sainte-Anne.

In Canada, tenured university faculty have a reputation for rarely striking. But harsh austerity measures and the COVID-19 pandemic have been exacerbating the existing workplace injustices they faced. “We haven’t seen any type of strike activity at this kind of intensity in the past—it’s just never happened,” says Peter McInnis, president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, an association of faculty unions. McInnis notes that the significance of this wave goes beyond the number of strikes; it is also that they are nationwide.

Before the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour v. Saskatchewan, which made the right to strike a Charter right, the ability for faculty to strike varied from province to province—and sometimes even university to university. In Alberta, there had been no faculty strikes, legal or otherwise, until faculty at Concordia University of Edmonton went on strike for 11 days in January for better working conditions, pay, and job security.

SLASHED BUDGETS
Since the 1990s, the funding provincial and federal governments have invested into post-secondary education has dwindled. Ontario Progressive Conservative Mike Harris’s government slashed operating grants and deregulated tuition fees as part of his “Common Sense Revolution.” Today, Alberta’s United Conservatives are following in a similar neoliberal mould. With these cuts, post-secondary institutions are under pressure to do more with less. Instead of hiring tenure-track faculty, many are relying on precariously employed contract faculty and graduate students to teach. This scenario comes with a lack of job security, reduced academic freedom, and lower wages.

A study conducted by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that in the 2016/2017 year, 53.6 percent of all faculty positions in the country were contract instructors, versus tenure-track positions.
Before the 1990s, contract appointments were comparatively rare, though it’s hard to quantify exactly how big this shift is, due to the lack of data and comprehensive study. Nevertheless, the current moment of precarity and austerity has implications for any sort of labour action.

“The trend that we’re concerned with is that because they are precarious workers, they are hard to mobilize and organize,” says Orvie Dingwall, president of the University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA), which went on strike in late 2021. For example, many contract instructors commute from university to university, teaching classes here and there to eke out a living. As more academic positions shift from well-paid tenure-track to poorly compensated instructors, the landscape of faculty associations changes and the needs of staff are fragmented.

“There’s a clear hierarchy within [the University of Lethbridge Faculty Association] … that can manifest as this sort of deep-seated solidarity … But it also can result in this kind of tension,” says Tanner Layton, a sociology instructor at the University of Lethbridge. He recalls a professor telling him that they were not striking for their own job, but rather his, because he and other contract workers are “exploited and exploitable.”

COVID AND CONTRACTS
In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into collective bargaining. The very nature of higher education changed, as classes went online. Faculty and students had to figure out how to teach and learn in a completely new setting. In many cases, the pandemic exacerbated existing issues. While the specific issues being negotiated varied from university to university, there are clear throughlines in terms of pay, job security, equity measures for marginalized workers, and working conditions.

Going into a strike or lockout during the grievous early stages of the pandemic was not an attractive prospect to the UMFA. Instead, in October 2020, UMFA negotiated a onetime payment from the university for overwork brought on by COVID-19, and renewed the existing contract from the past round of bargaining until March 2021. Dingwall believes reluctance to strike during the early months of the pandemic ultimately created the strike wave, with multiple unions moving into protest mode, when the pandemic seemed less chaotic. “I think us going on strike when we did demonstrated to others that ‘Yes, you can go on strike in a pandemic. If you need to, then you can.’”

BARGAINING INTERFERENCE
In Canada, workers have a constitutional right to free and fair collective bargaining with their employer. This means it is illegal for governments to interfere in the process of collective bargaining in ways that significantly override the relationship between employer and employee.

With universities, what constitutes interference can be complicated. Universities are largely publicly funded, so governments have a stake in their finances and operations. But legally speaking, universities are separate entities from the government, to ensure academic freedom and independence—cornerstone principles of academia. So what happens when provincial governments attempt to interfere in the collective bargaining process to keep wages down? And what happens when university administrations go along with it?

In the case of the University of Manitoba, a $19.3 million settlement happened. After a protracted legal battle, in 2022 the court found the Manitoba government had interfered illegally in the 2016 round of collective bargaining between the university and the UMFA. It had set hard limits on what could be offered and compromised upon, including a one-year wage freeze, rather than letting the university bargain independently. The provincial government is in the process of appealing this judgement. Some faculty members at the University of Lethbridge, like Laurendeau, fear something similar happened there. “We knew that there was this secret directive,” said Laurendeau. “We didn’t know what it was, but when you look at the opening offers of institutions throughout the province, it was pretty clear what it was because there’s an extraordinary degree of consistency.”

The United Conservative Party government elected in 2019 took an austerity approach to higher education. They lifted the tuition freeze instated by the NDP government and cut operating grants, and they intend to impose a performance-based-funding framework. This would tie government funding to certain metrics, such as how quickly a student was employed after graduation, what their salary was, and how many work-integrated learning opportunities were offered.

Critics argue that tying funding to these metrics will force universities to direct more funding towards programs offering immediate returns in the workforce, like business and engineering, and perhaps take away funding from programs in fields such as the humanities or social sciences. Laurendeau believes the provincial government mandated what universities could offer on monetary issues, but that does not explain the university’s reticence to bargain on other issues.

TAKING TO THE PICKET LINES
Strikes are often referred to as the muscle of the labour movement. Like muscles, strikes are more effective the longer you use and develop them. They can mobilize workers in ways that might have been impossible before, and rally workers behind the union flag.

“There was an excitement—not an excitement to go on strike, I want to be clear about that, but an excitement that we were finally doing something,” says Laurendeau. The University of Lethbridge Faculty Association (ULFA) had been without a contract for 629 days by the end of the 40-day strike in March 2021. For ULFA, this was a big moment. It was not just the first strike that ULFA had ever undertaken, but also the second faculty strike in Alberta. In a previous round of bargaining in 2013, ULFA took a one-percent pay cut to help with the university’s budget deficit, which makes this push for better pay, among other things, even
more significant.

The fact these strikes happened in close proximity to one another gave faculty associations some advantages.
Dingwall noted how faculty associations were able to share information, everything from strategic advice to
simple logistical things—like making sure to have a COVID-19 plan and washrooms near the picket lines.

STUDENTS CHOOSING SIDES
The point of a strike is to be disruptive. That’s what makes strikes effective. This disruption of students’ routine was met with conflicting information from the university and the union, leaving some students at the University of Lethbridge in the lurch. For example, the university’s FAQ for students stated that ending the strike was at the sole discretion of ULFA, neglecting to mention that the university had locked out faculty simultaneously. “It almost felt as if we were with divorced parents and we were being forced to pick a side,” says Lauryn Evans, an Addictions Counselling student at the University of Lethbridge.

In some cases, neither union nor university communication made its way effectively to students. Evans found out about the impending strike from the ULethwildin Instagram account, which posts mainly memes and videos of student parties. Angie Nikoleychuk, a fourth-year psychology and computer science student at U of L, is a member of the Student Solidarity and Action Council, which worked to help students sort out conflicting communication through posting on social media. Professors like Jason Laurendeau set up Discord channels of their own for students to ask questions about the strike.

The council worked with another student group, the Student Action Assembly, to stand in solidarity with faculty, organizing a sit-in protest by administration offices. For Nikoleychuk, working to make sure students were informed and walking the picket line with her professors was a balm. To her, walking the line was “a way to see each other [students and faculty] as human.”

Similar student activist groups emerged at other universities, like Students Supporting UMFA at the University of Manitoba and Students Supporting the CUE Faculty Association at Concordia University of Edmonton. Students Supporting UMFA took action by blocking doors to the administration building, in an attempt to pressure the Board of Governors into settling. Strikes can be moments of politicization; they can forge new connections for social movements. “As academics we can be kind of isolated, and as students we can be isolated. And this [strike] was a moment of inspiration, to put it kind of cheesily,” says Layton.

WHAT NOW?
While the strike wave has subsided, many of the issues that precipitated it remain, from COVID-19 to the shift to precarious academic labour. While faculty unions across the country have won victories large and small, much remains to be done for justice in the academic workplace. However, the key problem of structural precarity remains not fully addressed. Student groups like the Student Solidarity and Action Council and Students Supporting UMFA (renamed Student Solidarity Collective) still remain post-strike, only they are refocused to different causes. McInnis points out these strikes are another “warning that governments have a role to play and that you can’t sustain the system with private donors or really high tuition rates.”

If ongoing labour strife is to be avoided, governments and universities must address the underlying injustices. This begins with provincial governments letting universities bargain freely with unions, and investing in well-paid and secure jobs in the academy. Then, unions and universities can exercise their rights to bargain in good faith and get back to the essential work of teaching and research. Until then, the signs indicate that unions will keep returning to the front lines in a long battle for justice in the workplace.

It’s not the first time Stewart has interacted with paramedics this year and it won’t be the last. But she can’t stop replaying the image of the student being dragged limp across the floor. She lies awake in bed, thinking about her resident in the hospital. Worrying. She gets up the next day at 5 a.m. to walk them home.

Now, five years later, as Alanna Stewart talks about her experience as a resident assistant (RA) at Mount Allison University (Mt. A), she keeps coming back to that night, even though it was just one tough night in a year of tough nights. She also remembers things like sleeping on a resident’s floor to monitor them after recurring medical episodes and breaking up physical fights. Dealing regularly with drunk, disorderly, or angry students, and with toxic roommate drama, eventually took its toll.

RAs at post-secondary institutions are expected to take on the roles of caregiver, rule-enforcer, and counsellor for other students. They are overworked, underpaid, and always on the clock. Although they are the first line of defence against the mental-health crisis affecting students, their stories of shouldering the trauma of their peers are rarely told.

RAs are live-in “paraprofessionals.” They are usually in their second year of university or beyond and, in most cases, in their late teens or early 20s. While small differences exist in their role from school to school, their job typically involves doing rounds on weekends, keeping residents safe, enforcing rules, and making new students comfortable in their transition away from home.

“I WANT TO BE YOU NEXT YEAR”
Mt. A is a university in Sackville, New Brunswick, with a student population of approximately 2,300 and eight on campus residences. When Stewart and I attended, the smaller residences had four RAs each, and five other student leaders, all of whom were tasked with helping first-year students adapt to their new homes.

“On my very first day as a first year at Mount Allison, I remember saying to [the head RA], ‘I want to be you next year,’” Stewart says. She started Mt. A at 21 years old, a little older than most first-year students coming fresh out of high school. “I felt like if I had to live with younger people, I wanted to have a purpose.”

Stewart was my first-year roommate. From the get-go she was deeply attuned to people’s feelings. A natural helper and fierce advocate for mental health, she spoke openly about her own experiences with bipolar disorder. Stewart was the model candidate for a Mt. A Resident Assistant, which the school website describes as someone who is “caring, has a desire to help others and an interest in building strong residence communities.”

In her first year, Stewart successfully intervened in a fellow student’s crisis, making her the top choice for assistant don (senior RA) in her second year. But she and the RA team that ended up being hired could’ve had no idea just how challenging and exhausting the year ahead would be. For many people with serious mental-health conditions, between the ages of 18 and 21 is when symptoms first appear. It’s a phase when the brain is developing rapidly. Combined with the massive transition of moving away from home, exposure to alcohol for the first time (for some), culture clashes, and even just learning to live with a roommate, it’s generally a chaotic time.

In recent years, directors of university counselling services have seen higher numbers of students seeking help with more severe concerns. A 2019 survey of over 55,000 students at 58 campuses across Canada found nearly a quarter of students surveyed were diagnosed with anxiety and nearly one-fifth with depression that year. Approximately 11 percent of students reported intentional self-harm and 16.4 percent considered suicide, while 2.8 percent attempted it at some point that year.

Meanwhile, studies of RAs found those with residents who disclose self-harm experience higher levels of burnout and compassion fatigue. The mental-health crisis is escalating at post-secondary institutions, with added stressors and isolation resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic being linked to poorer mental-health outcomes for students, including higher levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness among students, with potential long-term effects. This means more high-stakes responsibility is being laid at the feet of young-adult RAs, who may be just as vulnerable to stress-related mental-health disorders as the peers in their charge.

ALWAYS ON
Back in 2017, burnout on the RA team at our residence was already prevalent. By the end of the first semester, one RA had stepped back because of the pressure. Another, who remained on the team, needed regular breaks from the role to keep up with school work and protect their mental health. The remaining team members became overextended, and many seemed close to breaking point.

Morgan Kelter was hired to fill in for the second semester. She went into the role with enthusiasm, “I got a fanny pack and painted it with sparkles … and I remember I got a T-shirt.” It meant a lot to her to be making a difference for younger students as part of the residence team.

During her first week on the job, there were three campus parties, which meant three consecutive late nights and dozens of intoxicated residents. “I had done all three because everyone else was burnt out,” Kelter explains. By the end of that week, she, too, already felt worn down. It was obvious her colleagues were struggling. “People that I had known for two years that I had never seen cry, I saw cry for the first time. [There were] trips to the hospital for mental health reasons. Therapy,” says Kelter.

Kelter recalls one instance clearly. “There was drama going on in residence that we were dealing with that we probably shouldn’t have been dealing with. It probably should have been in someone else’s hands instead of some 19-year-old,” she says. Her colleague became overwhelmed and didn’t shower for days. There wasn’t time to shower, they argued, teary-eyed. The former RA says it wasn’t the volume of hours, but the hypervigilance, that made the role exhausting. “When you’re needed, you’re needed. And you have to make yourself available all the time.”

The school administration would tell them they were students first, RAs second, but if someone was hurting themselves, in danger, or suicidal, it wasn’t something you could ignore just because you had an assignment due the next day. And students develop a special relationship of trust with their RA, which adds to the weight of the responsibilities of the role. “We do find that for some of the most traumatic or difficult issues our students are dealing with, it is peers that they are most likely to go to,” explains Chad Johnstone, director of Residence and Student Life at Acadia University in Nova Scotia.

Kelter’s mental, academic, and emotional life were ultimately affected by the job. “I was just like ‘I need to stay in my bed, where I’m not accessible to anyone.’” Kelter says she had to go into counselling after her first week on the job. She started missing classes for the first time. She stocked her room with granola bars to avoid sitting with friends at the meal hall, just to get a break from other people’s problems.

One weekend, when Stewart’s stress levels approached crisis point, she booked a hotel in town just to get away. “You’re so immersed in it…. It’s definitely a mind-blowing experience. You can never escape … you never really truly get a full break.”

COMPENSATION GAPS
The number of hours on paper does not adequately reflect the time and emotional investment required of RAs. It makes fair compensation hard to calculate. On top of that, there’s a lack of standardization in RA pay, even in geographically close schools of comparable size.

At Acadia, RAs get a deluxe single room covered, as well as $1,500 toward their meal plan, compensation in kind of an approximate $10,000 value. At St. Francis Xavier (St. FX), community assistants (their title for RAs) receive a salary of approximately $8,800. Mt. A does not publish RA compensation rates, but administration shared that compensation has increased 36 percent in the last five years, though they also reduced the number of RAs, which consequently increased the workload. Based on Stewart’s stipend in 2016 to 2017, compensation for senior RAs today is likely around $4,800, with non-senior RAs making less. RAs’ room fees at Mt. A and St. FX are not covered, despite the fact students in these roles need a more expensive single room to carry out their duties.

Such significant disparities across schools for the same work reflect the different value institutions place on the contributions of their student leaders. It was the student union at Mt. A that was instrumental in bringing attention to the pay disparities between RAs at Atlantic universities, pushing administration to increase pay. Being transparent about RA compensation across schools gives students the power to recognize when they’re being underpaid, so they can organize to have their invaluable contributions better compensated.

IN MISERY TOGETHER
Stewart says that while she had some supportive conversations with supervisors and school administrators about the overwhelming pressures she was experiencing, the RA team was her biggest support. “We went through so many intense moments together, and we collaborated and pulled together when we were all burnt out,” she says. “We were in misery together. I don’t know if we helped each other, but we always had each other,” Kelter adds.

While RAs had priority access to counselling at the school wellness centre, which many members of the team used, both Kelter and Stewart felt largely unsupported in the role. Having more RAs to share the workload, and opportunities to debrief more regularly with a professional facilitator, would have been helpful, Stewart says. Instead, the RAs had informal offloading sessions, “hanging out in my room all laying in bed, talking and venting.” Kelter suggested RAs could live in different residences from where they work, while still being accessible if needed, though she recognizes the drawbacks of that approach.

Mt. A has made changes since Kelter and Stewart were RAs. Residence Life has added a coordinator position, dealing specifically with student health and wellness. They say they’ve also expanded counselling services, adding mental-health, harm-reduction education, and social worker positions at the school for all students. RA training continues to evolve, too, and now includes crisis intervention and self-care programming. But, in the smaller residences there are now fewer RAs, and the ratio of RAs to students has gone from one RA for every 14 to 20 residents, to one for every 24, meaning RAs are taking on a higher workload in exchange.

Acadia now has a team of residence life coordinators on call to support RAs in crisis 24/7. They also run debriefs to help prevent overwhelm. There are more counselling services available now than there were five years ago, and there are programs specific to RAs from marginalized backgrounds to address additional stressors that they may be experiencing, says Johnstone.

But in light of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, which has amplified stress in students’ lives, it’s still not enough to ensure a new generation of RAs can fare better than their predecessors, the likes of Alanna Stewart and her fellow RAs. Jennifer Hamilton, executive director of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services says, “When it comes to health and mental health, this is not a university and college issue. The increase in mental-health issues is a societal concern.” She acknowledges that while schools are stepping up their efforts to support students, without a coordinated approach addressing the gaps in mental health care outside of the post-secondary environment, not much will change.

Ultimately, addressing poor mental health at universities means addressing it in all areas of life, through government policy that prioritizes mental health. The unmanageable load for RAs won’t stop until we tackle the mental-health crisis among young Canadians on all fronts.

Illustration by Michelle Simpson

I’ve been a high school teacher for 16 years now. That means I’ve spent roughly half my life in high school something I’d never have predicted as a teenager. All I wanted then was to get the hell out. I was a fat teen in the 1990s, when “heroin chic” was a fashion trend and when fat jokes were so common in pop culture that I didn’t even question how messed up that was until years later, rewatching Friends as an adult.

As a student, I learned firsthand school was a place where fat kids got bullied. I was called “Whale” and “Fatty,” and once I overheard a friend of my sister’s tell her she’d kill herself if she ever got as fat as me. I was maybe a size 12 or 14 at the time. As a teacher, I learned that fatphobia, whether institutionalized or personal, is baked into the school experience.

I hear my students in larger bodies make jokes at their own expense. It’s an old tactic: get to the punchline before a bully can. When I was in their shoes, I accepted bullying as just part of being fat—a consequence of sorts. I did it to myself too. I accepted the “wisdom” that I didn’t have enough self-control to lose weight, even though nothing could have been further from the truth: in high school I controlled food and exercise to an unhealthy degree. I remember “rewarding” myself with a single Fig Newton for swallowing a diet concoction my mother’s friend swore by. Let me tell you, the diet did not work, and in no world is a Fig Newton a treat.

I spent my formative years learning to hate my body. Is it any surprise I didn’t date? That I was suspicious of anyone who liked me? That I walked into a room and scanned to see if I was the biggest person there? I wish I could say I set out to change the narrative when I became a teacher, but the best I could muster in my first eight years of teaching was working hard to prove that I was a “good” fat person.

I’d casually mention in class how often I exercised. I ate “right” in the cafeteria: salads, low-carb meals, small portions. When my students wrote papers about the “obesity epidemic,” I cringe to think about how many times I said something like, “Not all people who are fat are unhealthy. I have perfect blood work.” I didn’t stop to question why healthiness should make someone like me more deserving of respect than a human who was not in good health; my internalized fatphobia remained completely unexamined.

I’m fatter than ever these days and things that didn’t affect me when I was what’s known in the fat community as “a small fat” are problematic now. Office chairs pinch my hips, and student classroom chairs are torture. I dread bus trips where I have to share a bench seat, knowing I’ll be hanging off the edge of the bench, half a butt cheek in the aisle. Professional clothing is hard to find, especially if I want to shop in a physical store. I miss the questionable privilege of my high school days, even as I recognize the things making me uncomfortable can and should be fixed.

Accessibility should be a priority in educational settings, though I rarely hear anyone talk about how accessibility includes bodies of all sizes. These discomforts, these small indignities, could be fixed by better design, by thinking about more than the “average” student or faculty member, whoever those people are supposed to be.

About 10 years ago, something shifted for me. I stumbled upon posts some friends had shared on Facebook about body positivity. I was suspicious at first: I should love my body, not hate it? This was the antithesis of everything I had learned.

Then, as my friends started having children, I thought of the things we hear our parents say that we internalize. I remembered my mother saying negative things about her body. I didn’t want these tiny humans to inherit our mess. So I dug deeper. I learned about body neutrality, and thanks to the work of fat activists, most of whom have been Black women, I worked on dismantling my own fatphobia and speaking up for myself and others. Today, I’m a better teacher for it.

I have asked for extended sizing in gym uniforms. I have set boundaries for myself around diet talk, asking colleagues not to talk about how great they feel thanks to intermittent fasting, or walking away when it doesn’t feel safe to speak up. I try to challenge student assumptions about fatness whenever they come up in class. I love to simply state “I am fat” whenever I hear a student make a fat joke. When they try to reassure me I am not, I tell them that I am, that it’s just a descriptor like “tall” or “skinny,” and I leave them to ponder this possibility, just as I once did.

However, fatphobia is institutionalized, and my small acts of resistance are not enough to make the system better in any significant way for all teachers and students. According to the Quebec Education Program, “Adopting a healthy, active lifestyle means seeking a quality of life characterized by an overall well-being and autonomously identifying the many factors that influence health.”

This definition doesn’t acknowledge the many factors that prevent individuals from attaining “overall well-being,” poverty, racism, and transphobia, to name just a few. Yes, I raise questions about how the education system shames fat people, with sympathetic colleagues and with my students, in spaces where I feel safe. But even with all my privilege as an educator, a white cis woman, and a midsize fat, I find myself staying silent more often than I’m proud to admit. Dismantling fatphobia is no small task.

I’ll keep taking up space in classrooms because I love teaching, but I do it knowing my body doesn’t fit. Changing this takes collective efforts. If we want to confront fatphobia in schools, we can start by advocating for policies that embrace a health-at-every-size approach, especially in physical education classes. We can acknowledge the variety of bodies in our classrooms and provide better furniture. We can teach allies to call out fat jokes, so their fat peers, or teachers, don’t have to. School shouldn’t be about learning to hate yourself—or others. It should be a place to grow into the best version of yourself.

I have always found myself in close proximity to teachers, first as a student then later in my personal and professional circles. As a figure skating coach, I felt a kinship with teachers, even if I didn’t always understand the weight of what was being asked of them. This past year, I began watching Abbott Elementary, a workplace mockumentary set in a fictional school of the same name. It is, in a word, delightful. And to me it’s the first show to successfully capture what makes teachers tick—and how they cope in a world that consistently under-rewards their contributions.

Created by and starring Quinta Brunson, the ABC series has earned the kind of critical acclaim elusive to network sitcoms today, including garnering seven Emmy nominations this year. Abbott’s most effusive praise has come from teachers, for its compassionate yet unflinching representation of what they do. Teaching has long been positioned as noble work, an idea Abbott both celebrates and complicates, exposing the structural and institutional challenges typically obscured by this one-dimensional perception of educators—especially in underfunded and understaffed schools.

The demands placed on teachers are unlike those of nearly any other profession. Teachers stand in as social workers, therapists, and even parents. And due to the ongoing impacts of COVID-19, those demands have been ramping up. In Alberta, the place I call home, the United Conservative Party’s (UCP) significant funding cuts to K-12 education and inadequate COVID-19 policy have only increased said demands. Between the UCP’s abrupt pivots to online learning, elimination of contact tracing and testing, and inconsistent messaging on masking and isolation requirements, Alberta’s teachers have gone on record as feeling abandoned—and that abandonment is taking its toll.

In November 2021, the Alberta Teachers’ Association published a survey of more than 1,300 active Alberta teachers and school leaders. A staggering 94 percent of respondents reported feeling fatigue and 95 percent reported feeling stress. That’s an untenable reality even the leader of Alberta’s New Democratic Party, Rachel Notley, seemed to brush aside in a tone-deaf tweet issued from her Twitter account this past May. In it, Notley commended a teacher for working a second job at a restaurant, noting she didn’t know where she found the energy.

As an outsider to teaching, what I love most about Abbott is its affirmation of an oft-repeated adage: it is community care— not self-care and not state-sponsored care—that repairs harm and facilitates change. In “Light Bulb,” veteran teacher Barbara Howard (Sheryl Lee Ralph) advises substitute Gregory Eddie (Tyler James Williams) on how to communicate effectively and compassionately with a parent. In “Art Teacher,” newbie Janine Teagues (Brunson) finds an inventive way to replace the damaged books of the hardened Melissa Schemmenti (Lisa Ann Walter). In “Ava vs. Superintendent,” lazy but loveable principal, Ava Coleman (Janelle James), stands up for her students and staff during a school board meeting.

The teachers in my life have much in common with Abbott’s cast of characters, pouring their time, energy, and resources into one another whenever they can. It brings comfort to know they are looking out for each other, but we should not let that comfort lull us into complacency. Those in power routinely expect teachers to make a way out of no way, and without complaint. It is up to us, as allies, to challenge this assumption and to mirror the solidarity modelled for us by the teachers on our screens. The fictional world of Abbott Elementary offers critical lessons for our real world, so read up. Take notes. This is one test we must not fail.

Photo courtesy Police Free Schools Winnipeg

In the summer of 2020, the group Justice 4 Black Lives Winnipeg (J4BLW) sparked a wave of abolitionist organizing in the city after collecting over 120,000 signatures on a petition calling for the defunding and eventual end to the Winnipeg Police Service. Inspired and called to action by the demands of J4BLW, a group of parents, teachers, and students came together to form Police-Free Schools Winnipeg (PFSW). Their goal is to get school resource officers (SROs) out of schools and transform the resources available at schools so that no student ever has a cop called on them.

In Canada, the first SRO program was implemented in 1979, without prior consultation with students or parents. SRO programs were soon being implemented across the country and expanded significantly in the following decades. PFSW’s first campaign extensively documented the negative effects of SROs, which are particularly egregious for racialized and disabled students. The group collected and shared anonymous stories of student experiences with SROs, and the data gathered is harrowing.

According to Irene Bindi, a parent and organizer with PFSW, instances of “outright violence and arrests; entry into the school-to-prison pipeline; monitoring and surveillance; and school absenteeism, via the pushing out of school of students who are afraid to encounter police [due to] sexual harassment” were all reported by students.

PFSW has also organized phone zaps, email campaigns, and a public discussion featuring Toronto-based scholar and author of Policing Black Lives, Robyn Maynard. Since the group was formed, half a million dollars have been cut from the Winnipeg School Division’s annual SRO budget, and Louis Riel School Division (LRSD) has terminated their one SRO position. In a statement made October 2021, LRSD superintendent Christian Michalik said, “Feedback from our community, specifically those who are Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC), illuminated issues of ongoing inequity and systemic racism in LRSD.”

The problem of policing in schools goes deeper than SROs. Bindi explains, “The protocols in place for staff to pick up the phone and call police [on students] are very lax in all provinces.” This results in police being called on students rather than connecting students with community support and resources.

While a number of SRO programs across Canada have been ended after facing pushback from community groups, some school districts have tried to improve their optics rather than address fundamental issues. “What we’ve noticed as programs are cut is that police departments and school divisions will look for ways to rename those programs or reinvolve police under different guises, and the end result is the same,” Bindi explains.

Bindi emphasizes the need to view abolition work in schools within a broader context, saying, “I feel that it’s also very important to look at this as a local, national, and international movement.” PFSW emphasizes the need for non-carceral community support to replace policing. “There’s [a] high risk of negative outcomes due to police offering the wrong advice to kids on a variety of issues that should instead be handled by counsellors, teachers, nurses, and […] more integrated community supports, including Indigenous Elders, and trusted community organizations.”