By Jane Doucet

This fall, several Black Acadia students will be recipients of the new Edwin Borden Awards. They are named in honour of Edwin Borden, an Acadia alumnus who was one of the first Black individuals in Canada to be granted a Bachelor’s degree in 1892, followed by a Master’s four years later. Ten renewable $3,500 awards totalling $14,000 each will recognize community engagement and leadership among Black Acadia students. The creation of the Edwin Borden Awards, funded by alumni donors, was one of the first tangible actions of the President’s Anti-Racism Task Force (PART), which held its inaugural meeting in November 2020. “We found we could act on this quite quickly,” says Acadia University President and Vice-Chancellor Dr. Peter Ricketts, providing financial support to students from marginalized backgrounds. “Diversity, equity and inclusion are the bedrock of Acadia’s core values and form an important part of our educational mission. We understand that systemic racism exists and have made a commitment to face it, define it, understand it and take action to eliminate it.” While the urgency for the establishment of PART was driven by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, the initiative has a deeper foundation in Acadia’s strategic plan, which is based on its values of being an inclusive and welcoming community for everyone on campus. “We know that some students experience racism – both individual acts of things that are said and done, as well as institutional barriers – during their time at Acadia,” Ricketts says. “And while there’s a natural tendency to focus on the student experience, PART is looking at the whole campus community to identify where racism exists.”

A Broad and Representative Approach

The task force’s goal is to be more than inward looking, however, as a result, it is partnering with external communities. PART’s members include internal co-chair Rev. Dr. Marjorie Lewis; vice-chair Zabrina Whitman; alumni board member Christine (Luckasavitch) McRae (’11); and external co-chair Patricia McCulloch. Rev. Dr. Lewis, who joined Acadia as chaplain in March 2020, has a wealth of international experience in university administration, ministry and working in marginalized communities to address the impacts of racism and discrimination. “I bring to PART’s mission and mandate the lived experience of being a Black woman who has worked in both Black majority and white majority countries,” she says. “My experience includes working to bring about transformation at all levels – from personal to organizational policy, notably in higher education.” As a member of the clergy, Rev. Dr. Lewis provides spiritual care and advocacy for diverse populations distinguished, for example, by ethnicity, gender, social class and sexual orientation. “Most importantly, I bring a passion for the valuing of all human beings and a commitment to seeing the implementation of measures to ensure equity, justice and opportunities for all to thrive.” Patricia McCulloch, who is from the African Nova Scotian community of Three Mile Plains, works with the Black Educators Association, where she leads the Regional Educators Program for the Valley Region. Zabrina Whitman, the President’s Advisor on Indigenous Affairs, and Christine Luckasavitch, who owns an Indigenous culture and heritage consulting company in Ontario, bring their Indigenous lenses and voices to PART. The task force’s full membership includes Board, Senate, student, faculty, staff, administration and external community members to ensure a broad and representative approach.

Timeline and Goals

PART aims to deliver a report to Dr. Ricketts in late spring or early summer. Then an action plan will be drafted, and it’s possible that another body will be established to carry on PART’s momentum. “We don’t want to just have a report in a binder that will gather dust on a shelf,” Ricketts says. “I want to show PART that they won’t have to sit around for years for changes to happen here. There will certainly be short-term recommendations that we can move forward on quickly, while others will take more time.” In the short term, for example, administrators are working on reconfiguring a Black Student Navigator’s role to make it more effective. The campus’s largest diversity group is currently its international students, who hail mainly from the Caribbean. “Their experience is very different from the African Nova Scotian experience, which leads to different views and dynamics,” Ricketts says. “We want to continue to grow our international student population to 20 per cent, up from the current 13 per cent, as per the strategic plan.” Bureaucratic barriers also need to be identified and addressed. For example, many Indigenous students receive funding from their home-community bands. Sometimes the bands are slow in flowing their funds to the University in time to meet payment deadlines because they’re waiting for the federal government to release the funds. If a student misses a payment deadline, they could be locked out of classes. The answer could be to have different deadlines for those students, or to appoint a representative in the student accounts office to liaise with the federal government. “What’s emerging is that we have a job to do around education and awareness,” Ricketts says. “While the task force has an end date, this work will never end. It will be a continual process of ensuring that Acadia is a more inclusive, diverse and welcoming community.”

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