The Mintz Report is wrong on EDI

This month, an expert panel convened by the Alberta government published a report and recommendations on post-secondary institutional funding. Disappointingly, the report strays from its original scope and assails both equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) and institutional autonomy. The report details 11 recommendations that, if implemented, will remake the province’s post-secondary education system in the image of the neoliberal aims of its current governing party. This risks derailment from the purpose of public universities: To improve our world.  

The report begins by examining Alberta’s current funding model for universities. It recommends giving universities more autonomy — but then contradicts this approach in its final recommendation. This recommendation advises the government to force all public post-secondary institutions to stop their EDI initiatives (except those that apply to Indigenous and rural learners) and to follow the principle of institutional neutrality. In requiring EDI initiatives to stop, the report-writers are asking the Alberta government to interfere with how universities operate.   

While seemingly benign, institutional neutrality is a contested principle: it argues that universities and their top administrators should avoid making public statements on political issues. The concept of institutional neutrality stems from the 1967 Kalven Report from the University of Chicago. Tellingly, the committee that authored the Kalven Report was convened in response to the 1967 “Summer of Love” and campus protests against systemic racism in the U.S.A., the Vietnam War, and South African apartheid. Institutional neutrality has, from its outset, been a political stance — one in favour of the status quo. 

While institutional neutrality may appear to be a safeguard against partisanship within academia, in practice it often serves to silence dissent and depoliticize the university’s public role. Academic freedom and free speech do not flourish in a vacuum of silence where the belonging of those traditionally pushed to the margins is not expressly stated and encouraged. Educational institutions have never been neutral: academe has always played a central role in the transformation of society.  This is why it is vitally important for government to stay out of the operations of the university. Neutrality, as framed in the Alberta report, risks transforming universities into echo chambers of dominant political narratives. It discourages critical pedagogy, stifles advocacy, and undermines the university’s capacity to take an active role in responding to pressing societal issues, from climate justice to Indigenous sovereignty to equitable access to education. When you’re arguing for institutional neutrality, you’re arguing for maintaining existing power structures, inequitable hierarchies, and an unjust status quo.  

The authors of the report claim on page 56 that “concerns have been raised” about freedom of inquiry and hiring and admissions practices based on “DEI criteria rather than merit,” but they fail to identify who specifically has raised these concerns or whether the concerns have any substance. They identify, without evidence, a decline in public support for universities that take positions on controversial social and political issues. These claims seem to act as a smokescreen, covering over conservative desires to roll the country back to a time of hetero-patriarchal, white hegemony.  

The report is cloaked in the language of competitiveness and efficiency and — while some of its recommendations have been well received — beneath the technical jargon hides a troubling shift toward far-right ideas about education, which we are seeing emerge in other countries like Belarus, India, and the United States. We see this report as part of a wider movement of politically motivated attacks on higher education. Progressive movements often start on university campuses, including the recent movement that toppled an autocratic leader in Bangladesh. Those seeking political power know this, fear it, and want to silence the democratizing influence that universities provide for students and professors. Like Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, the report’s authors seem to be following the lead of MAGA Republicans in the United States. They argue that all universities in the province should curb EDI initiatives and remain silent on pressing political issues. The report even uses the American phrase “DEI” instead of the Canadian “EDI” — another signal of this U.S. influence.  

The report’s framing of EDI as problematic and peripheral to the competitiveness of the university is not only short-sighted, it is regressive. By suggesting that EDI efforts in admissions and hiring practices contravene the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the panel echoes the far-right backlash against social progress and equity rights. This stance is anything but neutral. With the exception of acknowledging the practice of discrimination against Indigenous peoples, the report’s rhetoric conceals the structural barriers faced by students and faculty from equity-denied groups; it positions inclusion and equity as antithetical to excellence. Treating EDI as optional or undesirable abdicates the responsibility of both academia and wider society to redress the harms caused by ableism, racism and gendered inequities. In a historical moment in which truth itself is contested, neutrality is not a virtue — it’s a copout.  

Universities play a key role in truth-telling and fact-finding, as they are sites of uncomfortable debate about issues with real consequences for people’s lives — issues such as racism and genocide. They have a fundamental responsibility to teach people — regardless of their sex, gender, race or religion — how to be with one another in ways that are sustainable and inclusive. Post-secondary institutions ought not to remain silent on issues that threaten democracy. They have a responsibility to foster intercultural understanding and create inclusive environments free from discrimination and respectful of human rights — rights which are protected by law. Statements and actions that recognize human rights signal to all people, regardless of their identity, that they belong within the campus community and have a place in the pursuit of truth and knowledge. These responsibilities make it impossible for universities to be neutral or politically silent.  

In contrast, silence reinforces the status quo and enables inequity to persist unchallenged. “Institutional neutrality” is an illusion that benefits those who have long profited from a hierarchy of rights that delivers social and economic advantage to only a few. Calls for university neutrality are window dressing concealing a broader movement that is working against the democratization of knowledge and the extension of human rights.  

Alberta’s post-secondary institutions would do well to resist the narrowing of purpose proposed by this report. Institutional neutrality is not a safeguard against political partisanship: it is a silencing. As educators and researchers, we must demand a vision of higher education that is bold, inclusive and unapologetically engaged in the world that surrounds us. Anything less is a betrayal of the university’s public mission.