Carleton’s diversity report was the big topic of discussion at the Board of Governors public forum Jan. 30, with speakers both praising and criticizing the report.
Members of the university community could apply in advance and got 10 minutes to make a presentation to the university’s board members.
Emile Scheffel, an Israel Awareness Committee member, said a few faculty members and Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) were dragging out the Israel-Palestine conflict on campus.
“Let’s say [Jewish students] sign up for a human rights class . . . they will find a syllabus that is biased against Israel systematically,” Scheffel said. Scheffel, who said he is not Jewish, added that students who wrote against professors’ narratives got lower grades.
This sense of marginalization has been reduced to an extent through recommendations of the university’s Commission on Inter-Cultural, Inter-Religious and Inter-Racial Relations, Scheffel said.
The report, for example, suggested mandatory “cultural competency training” for new faculty, teaching assistants, staff, and certain students like fall orientation facilitators.
“Is the report comprehensive? No,” Scheffel said. This is because groups other than the Jewish and aboriginal communities could have been included in the report, Scheffel said.
“People who respond often respond because it has some meaning to them,” said Hymie Anisman, a professor at the department of neuroscience, speaking to the fact that the response rate of the commission’s online questionnaire was 11.6 per cent for students.
Anisman said this means students who did not respond don’t feel discriminated against, adding “that’s good news.”
Scheffel said he supports the commission’s methodology. However, some SAIA members like Erika Munoz do not.
Munoz, who was speaking as an individual and not on behalf of SAIA, said the report doesn’t mention many relevant groups, and “there’s a lot of anti-Muslim sentiments that were not acknowledged in the report.”
“I think it should be shocking that despite being in an era of heightened anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiments the report does not even remotely acknowledge that this is also an issue on our campus,” she said.
“[The report] fails to pick up on any other forms of discrimination on our campus not because they are not present but because it chose not to see them.”
Remaining speakers, the Graduate Students’ Association (GSA), Student Support Services and Carleton’s workplace improvement groups, were more positive.
GSA vice-president (finance) Elizabeth Whyte celebrated the fact that graduate students will remain eligible for the city’s child care subsidies.
The City of Ottawa recently decided to exclude graduate students from this, but overturned that after the GSA and related groups opposed.
“We’re not being exclusively excluded anymore,” Whyte said.
