So many insights raised by Rinaldo Walcott ( @blacklikewho) and moderator Llana James ( @rede4blacklives)'s session today for #ScholarStrikeCanada on the neoliberal organization of academic labour. Below are a few. You can watch the whole exchange here: 1/10

The Americanization of Canadian Universities ramped up around 2000 with the creation of the Canada Research Chair (CRC) program, designed to stop the “brain drain” of (white) Canadians to the U.S.; criteria ensured that CRCs mainly went to white academics from the U.S. 2/10

The Americanization of Canadian universities involved creating chairs, a pecking order, a star system, a new ecology of how scholarship, departments, programs are evaluated…a model rooted in, among other things, anti-Blackness. 3/10

Departments became only as important to the university as they helped its metrics & ranking in the global capitalist order. Studying local issues/Canada, fell out of fashion. U.S.-centric issues and perspectives that would get published in U.S. presses became what mattered. 4/10

The university replicates white supremacy & violence, from the surveillance of our students (e.g., Proctorio) to policing on campus. Universities could question these things. Even faculty who specialize in areas like criminology and sociology may not push back on them. 5/10

Very seldom now do Canadian faculty do research on the cities and places they live in; instead, they validate themselves by not doing research on their local surroundings, by not implicating themselves in their own research. 6/10

Faculty who are typically labeled "activist scholars" aren’t the only activist faculty. There are activist faculty who aren’t called activists, but who consult for governments, for companies, who push agendas and thinking that affect policies that touch all of our lives. 7/10

According to Walcott, another move in the wrong direction is the creation of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) advisors to deans etc. Many of the people who hold these positions are POC. These positions are now being placed in between us in a form of silencing. 8/10

We often don’t critique the work of people in those positions because they were our colleagues before, we know they care, their hearts are in the right place. Unfortunately, these new positions are there to manage us, in some sense curtail our imaginations of what might be. 9/10

Our Faculty Associations function to run the university hand-in-hand with the administration. They are not necessarily opposing sides, they collaborate to define the institution. They have failed us miserably on the front of anti-Black racism and anti-Indigenous racism. 10/10