In but Not at Home: Women of Colour in the Academy

Twelve years ago, in 1990, I published a short story called Summer Job. In it, the narrator, a contract faculty member hired at the last moment to teach a summer course, sends out job applications and papers to refereed journals on university letterhead while she has access to it. That act of the narrator was drawn straight from my experience as contract faculty. Despite the fact that I became a tenured faculty member in 1994 (joining the tenure stream in 1991), and got access to the coveted letterhead 24 hours of the day, 365 days a year, I continue to feel unhappy, troubled, frustrated, and estranged, the feelings my contract faculty narrator documented. I am aware of my privileged position as tenured faculty. I never forget the remarks of a white male colleague, now a senior administrator, who told me during a conversation a few years ago as we walked towards the department that he and I should be thankful for the wonderful jobs we have: jobs with lifetime security and a decent salary. He was expressing these opinions at a time when our union was on the verge of a strike. I did not remind him that I had only managed to secure this wonderful job at 44 years of age. Nor did I remind him about the disparity in our salaries because of the gender gap. In order to gain this belated entry, I had to break down the door since those inside did not want to let me in. And entering uninvited and unwelcomed has left permanent scars. But besides these, there are other reasons why it feels that there is always something out of whack about my life as a university professor in Canada. To be brutally honest, these reasons have to do with being a woman of colour in a workplace beset by systemic racism. Canadian universities are no alma maters to women of colour like myself, despite their highsounding mission statements and loud proclamations about equity and diversity. I have paid for their racism many times over, starting from the date when I first arrived in Canada in 1971 to do graduate work as a Commonwealth Scholar from India. While Commonwealth Scholars from the old Commonwealth, i.e., Britain, Australia and New Zealand, were admitted to a one-year Master's program, I, from the new Commonwealth, was asked to do a two-year M.A. The first year was to be spent doing make up undergraduate courses. It did not matter that I already had a Master's degree, and the students from the old Commonwealth didn't. Nor did it matter that I had already been teaching at the university level in India and had three years of research experience to boot. The graduate program officers had not arrived at their decision by interviewing me or administering a test. This was how they routinely evaluated applicants from India and other Third World countries. Perhaps things are not as racist as they were in 1971. In fact, now the same universities that treated me like dirt are vying for international students because they bring so much more money to the university in the form of a fee differential. And then there is what is known as the changing face of Canada or the demographic shift. When I was a graduate student, the student body was predominantly white. Now it is far more diverse, to use the official word. Off and on in union or senate meetings, and in professional organizations and publications, I hear or read anxious remarks about a diverse student body and a professoriat that is not. I see document upon document about equity and diversity. And yet, when it comes to the representation of racial minority faculty and women of colour faculty in particular, the numbers remain pathetically small. So what is happening? They are looking for us and we can't be found? During the media publicity about the case of Dr. Kin-Yip Chun against the University of Toronto, President Robert Prichard denied that the low numbers of racial minority faculty were caused by systemic racism. He, like many other administrators and white faculty members in Canadian universities, talked about the lack of qualified applicants in the pool and the need for the university to attract graduate students of colour to increase the pool for the future. …

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