Academic Apartheid: The Racialization of Precarious Faculty in Canadian Universities

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: Documenting Stories of Historical and Structural Disparities in Multiple Contexts

Abstract

Post-Secondary Education (PSE) in Canada has historically been and continues to operate on the narrative of White settler-colonial imperialism rooted in European Enlightenment traditions. Although the PSE student demographics and general population in general has become increasingly racialized and Indigenous, faculty members across Canadian universities have not reflected or kept pace with such demographic shifts (Henry et al, 2009). The vast majority of tenured faculty and leadership positions remain White and male, while the increasing trend of precarious faculty is racialized or Indigenous. The neoliberal context, which has seen significant government funding cuts to publicly funded PSE has left universities scrambling to cut costs by replacing tenure-track positions with contingent faculty thus leading to an academic underclass (Rajagopal, 2002). I

Author

• Zuhra Abawi, University of Toronto