Students are urging Carleton University to create an inclusive environment for its Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) community members through three Change.org petitions — which have collectively racked up almost ten thousand signatures in one week. 

BIPOC Carleton University journalism graduates and alumni released over 30 calls to action on Thursday, citing specific institutional changes — covering staffing, curriculum, accountability, and measures beyond the classroom — to create positive environments for budding BIPOC journalists. The group also released an accompanying petition. 

Jolson Lim, a 2017 Carleton journalism graduate, helped write the calls to action and signed along with 20 other BIPOC journalists. 

Lim said BIPOC students have been calling for systemic changes to occur at the school since the 1980s, but given the ongoing anti-racism conversation sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of police brutality, he is hoping serious action will be taken.

“This campaign itself is not new,” Lim said. “It is a new environment where there’s a lot of reckoning about the issue of race […] that kind of sparked a question of whether Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour fit in the school and are provided all the support that they need and are perhaps even entitled to by paying tuition.”

BIPOC journalists face additional barriers when speaking out about injustices within journalism due to the industry standard of objectivity, Lim said.

“We had a discussion about what the implications could be. In the past, people have spoken about issues in the newsroom and our industry and oftentimes it can lead to sanctions, and so that was on our minds,” he said.

Despite facing possible repercussions, Lim said he felt compelled to help create the calls to action so that others would not experience the systemic racism he and his colleagues did while in journalism school. 

“Oftentimes, the racism that working journalists currently in the field face, they first experienced at journalism schools,” Lim said. “That needs to change in every single institution.”

Two other student petitions, one urging for the Gandhi statue outside of Richcraft Hall to be removed and another urging both Carleton University and the University of Ottawa to make an anti-racism course a compulsory credit for all degrees — have also urged the university to take action against racism on campus.

When asked about the Ghandi statue outside of Richcraft Hall, Allan Thompson said he is committed to learning more about the controversy. [Photo from file]
In light of students’ calls to action, the university’s school of journalism penned an open letter on Thursday, listing changes it will take to address the systemic racism in the institution.

“We have a responsibility to acknowledge the role we have played in the perpetuation of systemic racism in the education of young journalists,” reads the introduction of the letter. “We have read — and endorse in principle — the Call to Action published on June 11 by a group of graduates and current students.”

The open letter lists five main steps the school plans to take. The new measures include: hiring a new chair of diversity by July 2021, redesigning a first-year course and launching a new master’s course to emphasize diversity, providing a checklist for instructors to promote diverse learning, a mandatory course in Indigenous history for all journalism students, and supporting the faculty’s year-old equity and inclusion committee.

While Lim said the letter is a welcome step forward, the school must follow through with anti-racist action and commitment.

“The school needs to provide a detailed plan about what they’re going to do next,” he said. “Specifically, address anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism in the school, in the curriculum, and the reporting, and faculty within the culture itself.”

Allan Thompson, the incoming head of the journalism department, said he agrees that anti-racist action must be continuous.

“It’s not a secret that this is a real concern within the journalism program,” Thompson said.

Thompson added the faculty began discussing ways to address negative BIPOC student experiences within the school about a year ago. He referenced a 2019 point of view CBC article detailing racism experienced in the school written by Carleton graduate Atong Ater — a member of the group who wrote the calls to action — as one of the first instances that lead the school to begin looking inward. 

“People have been sharing their experiences and their concerns, and that there hasn’t been enough action,” he said. “I’m not making excuses. I think there is a reality of how long it takes to bring about change in institutions with rules and regulations and ways of doing things.”

Although Thompson said listening to BIPOC voices is important to rebuild, he admitted the school has misstepped. When the first tweets regarding the school’s systemic racism surfaced about a week ago, Thompson said faculty had a discussion on how to respond.

“There was a bit of frustration and, one or two of the responses set the wrong tone, and we quickly realized we’ve got to be listening,” he said. “We’re not going to contest on social media the points that are being made — we’ve got to be respectful of the truth our students are sharing.” 

Thompson said the school’s open letter was penned so quickly in part due to the fact that the journalism faculty had a pre-scheduled meeting on Thursday, shortly after the calls to action were published on social media.

Despite the quick response, Thompson said the logistics of university planning mean the calls to action will not be implemented until the next academic year.

“This is one of the frustrating things about the way universities operate, it takes a long time to get a new course into a curriculum, it takes a long time to create a new position,” he said. “Making changes to our existing courses, and undertaking some unconscious bias training for our faculty members — those are things that we can do now.”

While the open letter does address Indigenous-related learning initiatives, no measures were announced for Black students or students of colour specifically.

“That’s part of the rationale for creating an academic chair that will be focused on issues of diversity and inclusion,” Thompson said. “That we are going to recognize some of this kind of material into the curriculum.”

Thompson also did not specify if or how BIPOC faculty members would be hired in addition to the new chair position, but said the school has received messages from BIPOC journalists in the field who offered to be available to mentor student journalists.

Since the journalism school was already undergoing major changes due to COVID-19, Thompson said now may be the perfect time to implement the calls to action.

“The time is now — it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “This is something that we can accomplish because we’re already making a lot of changes to the course content that’s going to be delivered starting in September.”

Although optimistic about the future, Thompson also acknowledged there is still a long way for the faculty to go.

“What we did decide today, coincidentally, is pretty substantive,” he said. “It’s not the answer, but I think it is a really good beginning at making some significant changes in our program and trying to foster more diversity and inclusion.”

Carleton’s journalism school, based out of Richcraft Hall, is being called to commit to anti-racist action. [Photo from file]
While Lim said he is glad faculty and alumni are supporting the calls to action, he is especially happy current journalism students are being vocal.

“[Current students] are the ones that are going to see the immediate impacts of whatever the school does, they’re the ones that are going to be able to have the best true account of whether the school is serious about this issue,” Lim said.

Devon Platana, a masters of journalism student who said he is one of four BIPOC students currently in the second year of the program, said he is ready to hold the school accountable.

“It did seem that they were genuinely apologetic for not really thinking about our needs and the kinds of things that we go through,” he said. “But at the end of the day, those are just words and we need to see the action actually happen.”

Platana said BIPOC community members are all-too-familiar with false promises.

“For people like me, whether they’re Black, Indigenous or a person of colour, we’re always told things are going to get better, and not even just in terms of Carleton, but like in terms of life in general,” Platana said. “That doesn’t always happen.”

Although Platana said he appreciated the faculty’s year-old equity and inclusion committee, it is the calls to action that make him feel like real change is coming.

“When I first heard about [the committee], I did feel some kind of a little bit of hope, and then it really felt like nothing changed at all because of it,” he said. “They have to listen to what we want directly, instead of saying, like, ‘Oh, this is what we think should happen.’”

Platana said the school must commit to truly listening to BIPOC students in order for inclusivity and equality to become a reality.

“We just want to feel like we’re held in the same light as white reporters,” he said. 

“There has been a history where journalism has been dominated by white people — I think everybody can agree on that — but just because that’s the past doesn’t mean the future has to be that way too.”

Carleton is not the only journalism institution where students are speaking out. Just one day before Carleton BIPOC students and graduates released their calls to action, journalism students at Ryerson University released a petition calling for a Black-Canadian reporting course to be implemented.

“If we’re the Toronto Raptors, this is game two in the Orlando series, and we still got a whole lot of playoff games to play,” Lim said of anti-racism work in Canadian newsrooms that still needs to be done. 

“There needs to be consistent commitments from the school if they seriously want to move forward,” he added. “I certainly hope that they will express that in the coming days, weeks, months, and I think years.”

In a previous version of this article, Allan Thompson was misquoted as saying “substandard” instead of “substantive.” The Charlatan regrets the error.

Featured image by Jillian Piper.

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