The Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence Task Force released 54 recommendations aimed at addressing systemic and institutionalised racism at UBC.
President Santa Ono formed the Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence (ARIE) Task Force — which included 34 students, faculty and staff — in December 2020 as part of the university’s efforts to address systemic racism. The task force convened in March 2021.
On April 22, 2022, the task force published its 296-page final report which included 54 recommendations from its six committees representing equity-deserving groups (Indigenous people, Black people and people of colour) and work and study constituencies (students, faculty and staff).
Some of the key recommendations include implementing anti-racism training and education, increasing the recruitment of IBPOC faculty, increasing the number of mental health supports for students from marginalized groups and creating an Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence Office at UBC.
At an event to launch the report on April 22, Dr. Handel Kashope Wright, one of the co-chairs of the task force, said the task force used integrative anti-racism when developing its recommendations.
“The work that we did didn’t look at racism as something that happened in isolation, because racism usually works also with other forms of discrimination,” he said.
He added that the task force relied on materials that already existed at UBC and listening sessions with equity-deserving groups in its work.
Both Wright and fellow co-chair Dr. Shirley Chau noted that some of the task force’s recommendations had already, or are in the process of, being implemented, including the Beyond Tomorrow Scholars program to recruit more Black students at UBC and the collection of race-based data to improve UBC’s reporting and accountability mechanisms.
The rest of the implementation of the recommendations is being led by UBC Vancouver VP Students Dr. Ainsley Carry and UBC Okanagan Provost and VP Academic pro tem Dr. Rehan Sadiq, who both serve as UBC’s co-executive leads for anti-racism.
At the launch event, Carry said the university is working on prioritizing which recommendations to accomplish first, along with funding these initiatives. “We have 54 recommendations. We cannot do them all in one year.”
“The entire executive team of the university … is committed to this work and the labour of this task force,” he added.
In a statement sent to The Ubyssey, Dr. Eduardo Jovel, the interim director of the First Nations House of Learning, congratulated the task force for its work and voiced his support for the implementation of its recommendations.
“I further want to acknowledge the complementarity of the Task Force's report with the Indigenous Strategic Plan, noting their mutual strengthening, as well as the necessary urgency for UBC to realize its vision and commitment to social justice, reconciliation, and global leadership,” he wrote.