Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

Two general trends in North America have problematized Equity, Diversity and Inclusion: 1) Donald Trump has tried to scrap the language from all government communication and to excise it from all post-secondary education, and 2) Pierre Pollievre has added it as an agenda in his costed government platform in the lead-up to the Canadian election on April 28.

However, coming from a background that is strongly informed by a religious experiences makes one curious as to how inclusion came to be problematic. If one is a practicing Muslim, for example, Ramadan is a regular reminder to focus on the lives of the most excluded: fast so that you know what it means to be hungry. Another example: I come from a tightly-knit Mennonite Brethren community which thought of marginalized people as a failure of the church to bring in people for whom the gospel was intended. Marginalization, as a phenomena, was more a reminder to Mennonites of how our communities were “falling short of the glory of God” rather than as a consistent occasion of enforced charity. Unfortunately, the political movements to equity, diversity and inclusion have ceded the arguments toward inclusivity as existing on the latter characterization – namely, that including others is somehow virtuous in a way that runs up a moral score. This is a mistake. In the following, I would like to post a series of articles that challenge this notion while affirming the necessity toward openness.

1. INTRODUCTION

Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), in Canada at least, has become the language of advocacy for underrepresented and disadvantaged groups – particularly ethnic, linguistic, or gender-based and sexual orientation groups.  Not intended for the entire learner population, EDI was aiming at mitigating exceptional cases of under-represented groups so that post-secondary institutions reflected a broader range of viewpoints, and the demography of populations. Accessibility departments were the collective institutional effort meant to deal with these exceptional cases. What they uncovered stretched across population groups, no matter if they were marginalized like the ones above, or whether they were part of the majority population. Most of the people who needed accommodation and accessibility were not there because they were part of a marginalized group; instead, they were having problems in post-secondary because they were neurodiverse. (Lanthier, 2023)

In the advocacy for marginalized groups, EDI has both its boosters and its knockers. Knockers have articulated interesting arguments against widespread deployment of EDI principles. Some people understand EDI as going against the grain of merit-based criteria in business and education because, rather than focusing on excellence, a certain perception of justice is enforced. Extreme versions of this objection to EDI even claim that the traditional majority (Washington Post, August 9, 2024) in the population are being discriminated against. While there is no statistical evidence for discrimination, EDI policies have contributed to an increasingly equitable representation of traditional minorities (for example, women and persons of color) within business, educational, and governmental institutions. Rather than being evidence of discrimination as such, such a change is instead indicative of the demographic diversity of the populations in which these institutions operate. Opposition to EDI based on discrimination against the majority is uniformly suspect. (American Psychological Association, November 2024)

However, a more common (and more emotional) retort to aggressive and explicit EDI efforts is that forced inclusion and equity are a kind of obligatory charity. Some people think “we have to be kind.” Two problems have been identified by this line of argument. First, incentivizing the preference for a person who is a visible minority can be seen as coercive – to a degree at least. There is a strong instinct within countries typically called “Western” that good deeds must be done voluntarily, and thus, as an assertive policy, EDI is counter-productive to the virtue of an organization. Second, explicit EDI efforts are problematic because they are explicit, that is, the very effort to signal this so-called “good” behavior is indeed a special kind of inauthenticity; it is more performative than genuine.[1] Even the widespread use of “authentic assessment” brings with it the need for a more robust understanding of authenticity – and tends to this performative mode.[2] The inclusion of visible minorities as an operating principle gives access to, say, educational institutions, but it does so by stressing the capacities of these institutions, often to their detriment. Canadian post-secondary institutions are thus seen as minimizing their standards to accommodate an increasing number of “undeserving” faculty and students. This, of course, assumes that excellence and merit need no articulation.[3] Excellence, from a merit-based educational perspective, means greater revenue generation and market value. In these two regards, the knockers have points: EDI should neither signal virtue, nor should it be compulsory.

We need not take on the burden of the philosophical debate of what counts as excellence to admit a rather glaring demographic problem: that policies of inclusion, and the accessibility departments that do the including, in post-secondary, have had these very same departments bursting at the seams trying to cope with struggles ranging from physical capital capacity to issues of academic integrity, from English language abilities to the integration of learning tools and artificial intelligence. The State of Higher Education Report (2024) reports that in 2022, 44% of post-secondary enrollments in Canada are visible minorities, and 35% of attendees claim disability. It is a problem of scale. The compromise of education is not a philosophical conflict over excellence; any watering-down of educational practice that values diversity is an operational one. One can easily point to these practical problems as evidence of the mismatch between post-secondary institutions’ stated values of equity and inclusion and their abilities to operate based on principles. These departments cannot cope with the demand. Thus, the very agency of the learners at these institutions is jeopardized in such a setting.

The ability of faculty and students to foster and exercise agency gets to the heart of the problem, and in Western countries, this very misunderstanding of what it takes to be a person who is the author of their own work, who is the agent of their own teaching and learning, who gives to society as much as they take, is where the rubber hits the road, so to speak. The friction is that most people who access post-secondary environments are treated individually, i.e. as already possessing individual agency, from the moment they enter college or university. As a symptom of this, policies of inclusion exist to mitigate the many ways these individuals can fall through the cracks in the system. From the knocker’s perspective, if a college or university is meant to be a gatekeeper to professional expertise, a successful learner would need little or no mitigation whatsoever. It follows from this perspective that those who fall through the cracks shouldn’t drag the whole system down. Individual learners would need, from the knocker’s perspective, to be able to navigate the stresses and demands of post-secondary education independently. As an example, a person who could not navigate the highly technical and online sources of information because of computer literacy barriers would be rightly allowed to fall through the cracks from the knocker’s perspective.

Traditional post-secondary education in Canada has thus treated education as a contentious enterprise, and individual learners as competitors in the enterprise. The knockers thus believe that the language of “inclusion” was providing a false hope to those under its banner in post-secondary settings. There is no way a post-secondary institution has the resources or ability to scaffold the human agency of all those learners who need it… at least according to the knockers of EDI.  Therefore, to combat this onslaught of challenges to traditional education and to facilitate agency-building and University completion, we didn’t just need accessibility departments, but centers of teaching and learning. Thus, the rising numbers of such centers (almost 1,200 and rising in the US alone in 2019) is, at the very least, capital intensive.  (Wright, 2019) Moreover, the sheer volume of necessity for both accessibility departments and centers of teaching and learning can no longer be seen primarily through the lens of inclusion. It has spilled over into teaching pedagogy as well.

The boosters of inclusion, on the other hand, see the enterprise differently. They do not primarily depict accessibility departments as eroding a learner’s agency; instead, these departments eliminate barriers for individual learners by scaffolding students to the demands of education. Accessibility departments were created to deal with the demands of exceptional cases created by marginalized groups. Agency, from this perspective, needs to be built and not assumed. From the perspective of EDI, individual learners are not ready-made at admittance to reach the escalating demands of a post-secondary environment. Individual learners need to be supported and nurtured, and accessibility departments and centers of teaching and learning are an institutional effort to not only maximize the learner’s experience and learning, but also to work to eliminate barriers to an actualized agency.

While originally under the banner of inclusion, accessibility to education encountered a much more common friction point: neurodiverse learners were not being well-served by the educational practice of individualized assessment and pedagogy that delivered information and measured results by individual performance. Neurodiverse students were struggling in such an environment, and the isolated, online (at home) learning that was common during COVID lockdowns between 2020 and 2022 both revealed and exacerbated the occurrence of neurodiversity. It was discovered that the more learners were isolated, the greater they struggled. Neurodiverse individuals needed greater institutional help the more isolated they were, and they utilized accessibility resources with overwhelming numbers. Further, neurodiversity became evident across all demographic groups whether they were traditionally marginalized or not.[4]

While the instances of neurodiversity were magnified, another problem also emerged: neurodiverse individuals were in greater and greater jeopardy of losing the very things that provided them agency. In particular, the rise of medical intervention for neurodiverse individuals meant that essential executive functioning was medically induced, and independent agency was suppressed from the get-go. They became dependent on the drugs.[5]

The instinct of the boosters of equity and inclusion rightly understood that marginalized learners achieve success and attain individual agency through necessary scaffolding; however, they did not expect that such a truth was more than just a marginal phenomenon. The scale became overwhelming.

So, on the one hand, we could accept the knocker’s argument that nominally inclusive post-secondary institutions potentially produce a lot of harm. There is just too much scaffolding required for an institution through a department of accessibility to provide customized, individual agency at scale. On the other hand, we can accept the booster’s argument that if individual agency is the eventual goal of learning, then post-secondary environments must find a way to constitute it. But how? How can we aim at an individualized agency in education if we aim at accessibility through the motto of inclusion and through departments of accessibility?

It turns out that both the reality of neurodiversity and the striving for agency have an answer.

[1] https://idealsandidentities.com/2021/04/10/performative-authenticity-mass-society-in-real-time/

[2] Ajjawi, R., Tai, J., Dollinger, M., Dawson, P., Boud, D., & Bearman, M. (2023). From authentic assessment to authenticity in assessment: broadening perspectives. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(4), 499–510. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2023.2271193

[3] See Michael Sandel’s the Tyranny of Merit. Sandel argues that there are numerous examples of what counts as merit operating within the so-called “Western” tradition. These different examples reveal at least 3 self-consistent theories of merit – but they are not entirely overlapping.

[4] Lupton and Southerton (2024) state that TikTok creators and commentators on their content have frequently referred to the possibilities self-optimization diagnoses (whether self-applied or from professionals) can offer,

particularly the benefits of better self-knowledge, feelings of belonging and community, improved mental health and social relationships, and acceptance or celebration of the differences that are part of being an autistic person or a person with ADHD (or someone with both conditions, as they frequently coincide). (pg.190)

[5] Lupton and Southerton (2024) state that alongside the problems of misdiagnosis, lack of access to diagnosis, or under-diagnosis of illness or disability, the phenomenon of over-diagnosis, resulting in people receiving medication or invasive treatments that were never required, has emerged as a major issue in healthcare (Lane 2020) due to digitalization. Medical literature reveals a high degree of ambivalence among health practitioners concerning to what extent patients should be “empowered” with and through their access. to online health information. On the one hand, it is argued that such “empowerment” can be helpful for the doctor-patient relationship. On the other hand, however, many practitioners feel threatened if patients appear to be “too empowered” or seek medical knowledge elsewhere.” (Lupton, 2017, p.7)

Please see more in my part 2: “Neurodiversity and Expectations of Agency”