Project Context

Over the course of the last 15 years, there has been an increase in racial profiling on post-secondary campuses. One may ask, what is the cause of the sudden rise of racial profiling? Robyn Maynard’s research on policing in Canada has revealed that the national spending on police operations has increased steadily since the mid 1990s, reaching $15.1 billion from 2007 to 2017. While Maynard’s research focuses on policing nationally, there is great resonance between changes in this high amount of funding for police services within our country, the actions being conducted at a national level will be reflective of the actions happening at the institutional level, which can explain how we are looking at the increased number of instances of racial profiling in our society and understand how they are now happening in our universities frequently.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown of the 2020-2021 academic year, these issues have been brought to the fore of public and political discourse – with reports and videos of racial profiling, police brutality and harassment towards BIPOC communities, appearing daily on the news and on social media. Yet here we are today, still grappling with racism and how it is affecting the inner society in our campuses now. To learn more about how we got to this point at the University, I conducted research in news databases to piece together the history of racial profiling on campus. This project addresses this history, highlighting the relationship with campus security dating back to 1969, and highlights how the relationship of the student body and campus security intertwine.

At the end of the Fall 2020 semester, a group of BIPOC students that were part of the past anti-racism committee protested via a sit-in in Tabaret Hall. The students, known by their Instagram and Twitter profile uRacism.e, wanted to meet with President Jacques Frémont and Vice-Provost Jill Scott discuss their concerns with the University’s approach to addressing systemic racism on campus. On December 10, 2020, after a 123-hour sit-in, the President and Vice-Provost refused to meet with the students and instead indicated that they would carefully consider how best to address the recommendations from students, faculty and staff during the past year.

Racial profiling within the campus has become more and more prominent over the last few years. Not to mention that even when its own student organization was calling for structural changes of racism on campus by students performing a sit-in outside the president’s office, Jacques Frémont and Jill Scott (the President and Vice-President of the University) had paid no direct response to the matter and had ensured that they would “carefully consider how best to address the recommendations from students, faculty and staff during the past year.”