Canadian universities’ systemic inequity: How institutional narratives perpetuate exclusionary structures in higher education despite policy commitments
Original framing: “The stories we tell ourselves shape who we are” — The Conversation - Global
The voices of marginalized students—such as Black, Indigenous, and racialized students, as well as disabled and LGBTQ2S+ students—are often absent from institutional narratives, despite their lived expertise in navigating exclusion. For example, the *Black Student Union at Dalhousie University* has long documented systemic racism in admissions and faculty interactions, yet these findings are rarely integrated into university policies. Similarly, disabled students’ advocacy for accessible infrastructure and curriculum is frequently sidelined in favor of performative accessibility statements. Centering these voices would reveal how institutions prioritize optics over substantive change, ensuring that equity is not just a policy box to check but a lived reality.
The gap between Canada’s equity, diversity, and inclusion policies and their lived reality in higher education is not a failure of implementation but a deliberate structural design rooted in colonialism, neoliberalism, and elite gatekeeping.
Universities, as state-sanctioned institutions, have historically served to reproduce social hierarchies—from the exclusion of Indigenous peoples through residential schools to the prioritization of white male elites in admissions and faculty hiring. The framing of ‘stories we tell ourselves’ obscures the material mechanisms (e.g., biased algorithms, precarious labor, exclusionary curricula) that perpetuate these inequities, while also ignoring the active resistance and expertise of marginalized students and communities. Without addressing these structural levers—through decolonized curricula, redistributive funding, bias-aware systems, and community partnerships—EDI initiatives will remain symbolic gestures that reinforce rather than dismantle systemic barriers. The trickster here is the institution itself, which uses narratives of equity to mask its role in perpetuating inequality, while Indigenous knowledge systems, cross-cultural models, and marginalized voices offer pathways to true transformation.