This Committee provides advice on all matters pertaining to equity, diversity, and inclusion and assists UTFA in developing approaches to pay equity, employment and compensation equity, harassment, personal safety, and accommodation.

by Arjumand Siddiqi

It has been a pleasure to work with UTFA’s Equity Committee this year, as it always is. This year, the Equity committee has focused on two main issues.

1. Development of community-specific caucuses (e.g., Black UTFA caucus, LGBTQ2S+ caucus). In line with UTFA’s overall efforts to increase member engagement and the responsiveness of UTFA’s efforts to member needs and concerns, this year’s focus of the equity committee is to create comfortable spaces for communities who experience particular oppressions to be able to communicate and be heard, amongst each other and with UTFA leadership, in order to make progress on the challenges they are facing in the workplace. UTFA also routinely hears very upsetting accounts from our members about the discriminatory conditions they face, and we are hoping that, in addition to supporting individuals with the particulars of their cases, we can make more sense of the systematic and structural issues that are often common across individual experiences, and are often their root causes. In the coming months, we will be developing ideas for how to form these caucuses in the most inclusive and productive ways possible. 

2. More generally, the Committee has shared a lot of experiences from their respective units about equity-related issues, including workload, workplace treatment, and differential constraints on academic freedom. Most pressingly, in the midst of war and what appears to be on the scale of genocide in Gaza, according to accounts from the International Court of Justice, and reputable aid organizations such as Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, signs of solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians have resulted in several disturbing instances where academic freedom may have been, or is in danger of, being breached. 

As always, we very much welcome your feedback and engagement on these and any other equity matters you would like to bring to UTFA’s attention.