NOTES ON AN ACADEMIC SCANDAL

Pamela Sugiman, a former arts dean at TMU, was a key player in the school's push for diversity, equity and inclusion. When the backlash against DEI arrived, she was demoted. THE UNIVERSITY SAYS IT WAS A COINCIDENCE. SHE DISAGREES

- BY MADDY MAHONEY

PAMELA SUGIMAN was raised with the knowledge that, in life, some people get a raw deal. Her father hadn't committed any crime when he was sent to an internment camp for Japanese Canadians during the Second World War; he was just the wrong ethnicity. Interested in the nuances of injustice, she studied sociology and later entered academia, where she found that focusing on inequality could be her strength. In 2006, largely on the merit of her work on the wartime experiences of Japanese women, she became an associate professor at what was then Ryerson University. When she was named dean of the faculty of arts 10 years later, at the age of 58, she set herself an ambitious goal: to lead a faculty where all students and professors could learn without obstacles, freely voice their ideas and challenge the status quo.

She had reason to be optimistic. Conversations about entrenched inequalities that had been percolating for decades were finally entering the mainstream. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report on the impact of residential schools had landed on the desk of the federal government, an indictment for failing to right historical wrongs. The month before Sugiman took on the deanship, Black Lives Matter Toronto had staged a sit-in during the Pride parade. The organization was protesting the participation of uniformed police in the march and demanding greater inclusion of trans, Black and Indigenous people. Reactions to both events were far from unanimous, but there was momentum. The question for Sugiman was how to leverage that momentum at the university.