On race, ableism, and what a union praised without reading
On September 24, 2026, the UPEI Faculty Association appeared before the Standing Committee on Education and Economic Growth of the PEI Legislature to discuss the Rubin Thomlinson report on harassment and discrimination at UPEI. The union’s executive director, Margot Rejskind, told the committee that “really nothing has changed” on harassment and discrimination policies, and that UPEI “was able to blow by” the hard deadline in the action plan. The Faculty Association was critical of the administration on almost everything: slow progress, lack of transparency, unmet deadlines.
The one thing they praised was the restructuring of the Department of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Human Rights. The restructuring that removed me.
They said the university had responded to a workplace assessment by restructuring the department. That, they said, was a good thing.
A union praising an employer for a firing is unusual. A union praising an employer for a firing that skipped every fair labour practice is something else entirely. And a union praising a firing on the basis of a workplace assessment it has never read, a document it does not have, cannot access, and has no way of knowing the contents of, is a particular kind of endorsement. They praised the outcome. They did not know what it was built on.
I do. I was the subject of it. And I want to explain what that assessment could not see.
What the assessment was
In April 2025, UPEI commissioned a third-party workplace assessment of the department I had been hired to lead eleven months earlier. The assessment ran for about three months. It involved roughly one-hour interviews with staff, a short interview with administrative support, a document review, and interviews with leadership, including me.
On July 10, the assessor presented an executive summary and recommendations to the department. Four days later, I was terminated. The university said the decision was connected to the assessment’s findings. No implementation period. No performance plan. No opportunity to respond to whatever had been found.
I want to be careful and clear about what I’m arguing here. I am not blaming the consultant who conducted the assessment. She did the work she was contracted to do, in the way she knew how to do it. My argument is with the institution that commissioned it, an institution that should have known what expertise this particular situation required, and either didn’t know or didn’t care.
Because the assessment had no anti-racist lens and no anti-ableist lens. And this was a department where both were essential.
What the unit actually was
The department I led had nine staff. Four of them made up the EDI unit and reported directly to me: three were racialized, younger staff; one was white and autistic. A fifth staff member led a separate unit with three staff of their own reporting to them, and an administrative assistant supported the department as a whole. I am a racialized Muslim woman.
The department as a whole was mostly white, but the EDI unit itself was not. The conflict I’m describing here happened inside that four-person unit, and its composition is the context without which nothing that happened makes sense. It is also precisely the context a workplace assessment is supposed to surface.
An assessment with an anti-oppression lens would have asked questions about how race, disability, age, and religious identity were shaping the team’s dynamics. It would have asked who was being accommodated and who wasn’t. It would have asked whether the accessibility infrastructure the unit relied on was itself neutral. It would have asked how a racialized Muslim director was positioned in relation to a mostly younger racialized staff and one white disabled staff member, and what pressures that positioning created.
The assessment asked none of those questions. Not because the consultant was negligent, but because she was not an equity practitioner. She was not an EDI practitioner. She did not have the framework to know that those questions needed asking. And the university did not require her to.
What I saw, and what I was told
What I witnessed in that unit was a dynamic I have written about before: three staff who had formed a close clique, and a fourth staff member, autistic, direct, blunt in ways that neurotypical workplaces punish, who was slowly excluded from the life of the unit. The eye rolls. The tone. The conversations that stopped when they walked in. The way information started bypassing them. None of it looks like much from the outside. Together, it is a pattern.
The autistic staff member eventually came to me and said they felt bullied. That matched what I had been seeing. So I did what a supervisor is supposed to do. I went to the institution’s accessibility and accommodation expert, the person whose role was to know how to support disabled and neurodivergent people.
I asked how to accommodate them.
What I got back was a lecture about how autistic people need to make their needs known. How autistic people are also capable of causing harm. How they shouldn’t be dealt with using kid gloves. How there are ways to teach autistic people not to cause harm.
I want to sit with that for a moment, because it matters. The workplace is built around neurotypical communication. Neurotypical social norms are the default. Nobody asks neurotypical staff to explain themselves. Nobody asks them to make their needs known, because their needs are assumed. And the autistic staff member, who was not rude, not disrespectful, just different, was being asked to perform a kind of self-advocacy that no one else in that building was ever asked to perform.
I knew, before I went to them, that the person I was asking for help was embedded in the same social circle as the three staff members. I went anyway. Their role was student-facing, accessibility and accommodation for students, not staff support. But they were the only person in the institution I knew of with the expertise I needed, and I assumed that expertise, and the professional obligation that comes with it, would hold. It didn’t.
That is what makes the infrastructure failure so complete. It isn’t that there was no one to go to. It’s that the person in the institution who had the knowledge was already inside the dynamic, and I had no one else. The institution had built no staff-facing accessibility expertise, no neutral party, nothing. So the only place I could go for advice on supporting a neurodivergent staff member was someone whose social loyalties ran the other way.
What I tried
I brought in an HR facilitator to run a restorative process. Not punitive, not disciplinary, just a structured attempt to repair the team. I communicated that intent to everyone. One of the three staff objected, insisting I should handle it myself. I explained that the complexity, the identity dimensions, and the level of mistrust required neutral facilitation. That objection was the first of many refusals to engage.
The facilitator spent months trying to build enough trust to get people in a room together. It didn’t work. The three staff declined to participate in any meaningful way. The institution let them decline. There were no consequences, no accountability, no follow-through.
I brought in an external facilitator for a team session. It didn’t produce sustained change either.
I was assigned an executive coach, funded by the university, to help me address the team dynamics and implement the assessment recommendations once they came. She was, by her own account, shocked by what happened next.
The racial frame that was placed on me
Here is the part that is hardest to write, and the part the assessment could not possibly have held.
The three staff who were excluding the autistic staff member were racialized. When I tried to hold them accountable, they read my accountability through a racial lens. In their reading, I, a racialized person myself, was siding with a white person against my own community. I was abandoning my values. I was turning my back on them.
I understand why that reading was available to them. I understand the history it comes from. And I want to be clear about what I believe: accountability is not a racial loyalty test. The person being harmed was autistic. That was the axis of harm. Race and disability were both operating in that room, and the institution had set up conditions where marginalized people were being pitted against each other, fighting over scraps of safety and belonging, while the institution itself did nothing to change the culture that produced the conflict.
That is what an intersectional analysis would have named. That is what the assessment, without an anti-racist or anti-ableist lens, could not see. It read the conflict as generic workplace friction and then assigned responsibility in generic workplace terms, which, in practice, meant leadership. Which meant me.
The meeting where we were asked to agree
On July 10, 2025, the assessor presented the executive summary and recommendations to the department. The VPPC was in the room. So was the Associate Vice-President of Human Resources. Seven of us were there: myself, the administrative assistant, the white autistic staff member from the EDI unit, the lead of the other unit, and their three staff. The three racialized EDI staff members were not present. My understanding is that the consultant met with them separately, one on one.
It was, without exaggeration, the most trauma-infused meeting I have ever attended. I mean that literally. Trauma-infused is the opposite of trauma-informed. Where a trauma-informed process is built to avoid causing harm, a trauma-infused one actively causes it. Everyone left feeling worse than when they walked in. One team member was visibly distressed. Seasoned colleagues were shaken. This was not a difficult conversation handled poorly. It was a meeting that should never have been run the way it was.
We were handed the findings and recommendations in the room. We were given some time to read them, enough to skim, enough to get through them quickly. But reading something quickly and actually processing it are two different things. Sitting with a document like that, thinking about it, letting it settle, working out what you actually think, takes time. Days, not minutes. We were not given days.
I want to be clear about why this matters, because it isn’t just about comfort. Almost everyone in that room was neurodivergent. ADHD, autism, or both. I am neurodivergent. Several of my colleagues were. This was, in effect, a neurodivergent-majority department. And the way neurodivergent people process information like that, the way we need to read, sit with, revisit, and only then respond, is not the same as the neurotypical default. We needed time. Real time. We should have been given the report days before that meeting, with space to read it, digest it, and prepare a considered response.
Instead, in an hour-long meeting, we were asked whether we agreed with findings we had just received.
I tried to answer honestly. I said that the summary didn’t reflect the depth of the work we had done or the relationships in the department. I tried to express, while being very aware of the power dynamics, that a yes-or-no answer wasn’t possible, that we would need to go through each item and respond to it properly. But the question was framed as agreement or disagreement, and we were in no position to say no.
I want to be honest about something else. I was scared to say anything critical. Actually scared. And I said it anyway, because I wanted to defend our department. The power dynamics in that room were screaming at me, and I spoke over them because staying silent felt like agreeing to something that wasn’t true.
I was scared for a specific reason. By July 10, I had already sat through a meeting with the same VPPC about my social media posts on anti-Zionism, a meeting that was so trauma-infused that the two support people I brought with me noticed it too. I left that meeting with the clear sense that this was a person who wanted me gone. So when she asked whether I agreed with findings I had just been handed, I understood what the question was really asking. Not whether I agreed. Whether I would make it easy.
I answered honestly anyway.
Think about what that process asked of us. A neurodivergent-majority team, handed a heavy, consequential report in the room, expected to process it in real time, and then give a binary answer about whether we agreed with it. That is not a trauma-informed process. It is not a neurodivergent-affirming process. It is a process designed around how neurotypical people are imagined to work, and it excluded the way everyone in that room actually does.
And I want to name the power in that room, because nobody else did. The VPPC was in the room. So was the Associate Vice-President of Human Resources. The VPPC was the one who set the terms of the conversation. She asked us whether we agreed with the findings. She introduced the allegation of racism. She told us it had to be taken seriously. The Associate Vice-President was present, though I do not know what she made of any of it, and I have no reason to believe she had any real say in how that meeting was run. Between the two of them, the most senior people in the room held more institutional power than everyone else present combined.
Of the seven people in that room, the administrative assistant and I were the only two who were racialized. There was no facilitator. There was no one whose job it was to hold the process itself. There was no acknowledgment that the people asking the questions held power over the people answering them, and that this shapes what anyone is able to say.
That is what I mean when I say the meeting was trauma-infused. Trauma-informed practice begins with an understanding of power: who holds it, who doesn’t, and what that does to a room. Without that understanding, you can follow every procedural step and still create a process where no one can speak honestly. We were asked for our agreement by people with the power to end our careers, and we were asked in a way that made disagreement nearly impossible.
And in that same meeting, the VPPC told us there were allegations of racism, and that these had to be taken seriously. I want to be precise about this, because it mattered. There was nothing about racism in the recommendations or the report as it was presented to us. Not a word.
I pushed back in the moment. I said, more or less: hold on, what allegation of racism? What is this about? And I got no answer. The assessor said only that someone had said they experienced it, and that it was something that had to be taken seriously. No detail. No name. No context. Nothing I could act on, and nothing that told anyone in that room what we were actually being asked to respond to.
What I can tell you is what that sentence did to the room.
Neither the administrative assistant nor I had said anything to the consultant about experiencing racism. Neither of us had raised it in the department. And yet, in one sentence, an allegation of racism had been introduced into a room where the only two racialized people present knew it had not come from them.
We left that meeting not knowing who had said what, or about whom. Nobody knew. All of us were sitting there asking ourselves the same question: who said they experienced racism? And there was no answer available, because none was given, and we had no way to find out.
The white members of the team were devastated. Many of them had been going above and beyond to be inclusive, to be anti-racist, to get it right. And now they were sitting with the possibility that one of them had caused harm, and no way of knowing who, or how, or when. The discomfort in that room was real and it was universal.
What happened next tells you everything about what that sentence actually did. After the meeting, our department went back to our offices and gathered in our common area. And the administrative assistant, who had done nothing, who had said nothing, who had no complaint to make about anyone, told us she felt awful. She said she was sure everyone in that room had been looking at her, assuming she was the one who had complained about racism. She felt guilty for something she had not done and had not experienced.
And then the rest of us spent that time reassuring her. Telling her no, no one thought that, no one was looking at her, that no one suspected her of anything. The white members of the team told her that if she ever did experience racism from any of them, she should tell them, and they would commit to doing better. That she should never be afraid of them. It was a kind thing to say, and they meant it.
And that is exactly what made it so painful. This was a young racialized woman whom everyone in that department loved. She got along with everyone. The white members of the team adored her, and she adored them. The department worked, in no small part, because of how she held it together. Now she was being promised a trust she had never lost. She was being told she could come to them, in a department where she had never had any reason to think she couldn’t. A sentence had taken something that was never in question and turned it into something that had to be repaired.
And it wasn’t only her. The sentence left the rest of us wondering too. We knew the allegation could just as easily have come from the three racialized EDI staff who were not in the room. They had met with the consultant separately. They were the ones the report was largely about. And none of us had any way to know what had been said in those conversations.
So the suspicion didn’t stay in the room. It reached out to people who weren’t there to defend themselves, who had no idea an allegation had been raised in their absence, and who would have had no opportunity to explain or contextualize it even if they had known. Three people who had already left the department, two on leave and one resigned, now carried a question they never knew had been attached to them.
We trusted our colleagues. They trusted us. But a single sentence had put a question into the room that none of us had asked, none of us could answer, and none of the people it most likely pointed to would ever get the chance to address.
I have thought a great deal about where that allegation came from, and I want to be honest about what I know and what I don’t. I have a strong suspicion about who raised it and who it was about. If I am right, the incident in question did not happen in our department at all. It happened outside the department, before the white staff member in question had even started working there. That would mean the allegation was not about the workplace culture we had been building, or the team I was leading, or anything the assessment was commissioned to examine. It would have been about something that predated us all.
But I cannot confirm any of this. I was never told who raised the allegation or who it concerned. I never saw it in the report. I have no documentation, no name, and no way to check whether my suspicion is correct.
And here is where the missing lens matters most. A consultant with an equity background would have known how to handle an allegation like that. They would have known to probe it, to ask when it happened, where it happened, whether it involved the department at all, and whether it belonged in a report about the department’s current functioning. They would have known that an unexamined allegation of racism can do enormous damage in a small team, and that it has to be handled with care, context, and precision.
An assessor without that background would not necessarily know any of this. She would take the allegation at face value, include it or raise it as though it were relevant, and have no framework for asking the questions that would have located it. That is not a criticism of her. It is a description of what happens when a process that requires an equity lens is run without one.
So the department was left with an allegation no one could identify, about an incident no one could place, presented to us as something we had to take seriously. And the person running the process did not have the tools to help us understand what we were being asked to take seriously, or why.
And it leaves a question I was never able to ask. If an allegation of racism was serious enough to raise in that room, and serious enough to insist we take it seriously, why was it not in the report? Why was it not in the recommendations we were being asked to endorse? Why were we told it mattered and then given no way to see it, respond to it, or even understand it?
Whatever the truth of it, the process failed at the most basic level. A serious allegation was raised, and no one in the room could locate it. Not the people it was supposedly about. Not the rest of us. Not even, as far as I could tell, the report itself.
If it was serious, it belonged in the document. If it did not belong in the document, it should not have been given that weight in the room.
Either way, the assessment does not hold.
That is what a trauma-infused process does. It doesn’t just fail to support people. It creates harm where there was none.
I have thought about that moment a great deal since. My reading of it, and I want to be clear that this is my reading, not something I can prove, is that the VPPC was setting the stage. She wanted the situation to appear more serious and more harmful than it was. She wanted the department to look like a place where something grave had happened. And she wanted that impression in the room before any of us had a chance to properly process the document we were being asked to endorse.
I cannot prove intent. What I can say is what I observed: a serious allegation was introduced without detail, without documentation, and without any route to follow up; a neurodivergent-majority team was asked to agree to findings it had not been given time to process; and I was terminated four days later.
My plan was to ask the VPPC these questions directly. I had a meeting scheduled with her, in person. That meeting was the day I was terminated.
So the questions I most needed to ask about the process that ended my career are questions I never got to ask. I am asking them here instead.
How the Faculty Association built its case against me
The assessment did not appear in a vacuum. There were other efforts to build a case against me, and the Faculty Association was involved in assembling them.
In my role as Director, a Muslim staff member came to me with a concern. The new medical school had a doctor on its admissions committee who was openly Islamophobic on his public Twitter account, making hateful insinuations about Muslims’ supposed allegiance to Canada, the kind of dog whistle that is deniable but unmistakable to those of us who have experienced it.
I wrote to the medical school. I said simply that this person was Islamophobic and that we wanted to make sure processes were in place to mitigate bias against Muslim applicants. The medical school responded well and removed him from the committee. I cannot confirm why they made that decision. It may have been the Islamophobic tweets, or it may have been that he had also tweeted criticism of the EDI training the medical school requires for its admissions committee. Either way, they listened, and I am not complaining about the medical school.
But this doctor then came after me. He filed a FOIP request demanding access to all of my emails, texts, and communications that mentioned him. There was nothing there, because I had done nothing wrong. The request went nowhere, but that was not the point. It was intimidation, a message that if you speak up about Islamophobia, you will be targeted.
He also insinuated that I was being racist against him. And when the Faculty Association filed its informal complaints about my anti-Zionist posts, they included his complaint about my posts on casteism. This doctor is Indian, and the claim was that I was being anti-Hindu.
Being anti-caste is not being anti-Hindu. Casteism is a South Asia-wide problem that exists across religious lines, including among South Asian Muslims. I am South Asian myself. I have the right to criticize systems of oppression that are relevant to my people. Critiquing casteism is not an attack on any religion. It is an opposition to oppression.
What matters here is that the Faculty Association chose to include his complaint at all. This doctor is not faculty. His relationship with UPEI is contractual. It is his medical business that contracts with the university, not him as an individual faculty member. He was not their member. He was not their concern. And he was the subject of a good-faith concern I had raised about bias against Muslim applicants.
They took his complaint anyway. They folded it in with the complaints about my anti-Zionist posts. They used it to build their case against me.
So when the Faculty Association stood before a legislative committee a year later and praised the restructuring that removed me, this was the record behind that praise. A complaint from a non-member. A FOIP request meant to intimidate. An allegation of anti-Hindu bias that was really an attack on my criticism of caste. All of it assembled into a case, and all of it praised when it succeeded.
They did not have to read the assessment to know what they were endorsing. They built the case themselves.
What the assessment was used for
I want to be precise about my argument here, because it’s easy to misread.
I am not saying the assessment was worthless. I am not saying the consultant did anything wrong. I am saying the university gave a lens-less assessment the weight of a definitive finding, and then used it to do something it had already decided to do, which was remove me, without any of the procedural steps that exist precisely to prevent that kind of shortcut.
I have been given consistent advice about this by HR professionals throughout my career. Two pieces of that advice stand out now.
The first: don’t put more weight on a workplace assessment than it deserves. I was told this before the results even came in. A workplace assessment is one piece of the puzzle, one source of information, a document meant to help an organization navigate forward. It is not a verdict. It is not a final judgment. It is not meant to be the sole basis for a decision about a person’s career. I was told to keep it in perspective, and not to let it become, in my own head, more than it was.
The second: don’t fire someone out of the blue. Give them a work plan. Give them a performance plan. Work with them. Give them multiple chances to succeed before making that decision. And when someone is fired, it should never be a surprise to them, because there should have been multiple conversations before that point.
That is the standard I was taught. That is the standard I tried to apply to my own staff, even when they were refusing to engage in any reconciliation process and letting people go was on the table. And that is the standard the university did not apply to me.
There was no progressive discipline. No warning. No work plan. No performance plan. No conversation about expectations. No chance to respond to what had been alleged. No opportunity to change. One contested assessment, produced by someone without the framework for this situation, became the whole basis for ending a career, and the decision was a complete surprise to me and to the team.
I have written about this elsewhere as one strike and you’re out. It is a familiar pattern for racialized women in leadership, and it was familiar here.
The recommendations were never implemented. They couldn’t be, because I was gone before implementation began. Two workdays after the team received them, I was terminated. That timing tells you what the assessment was actually for.
What I have heard since
Since I left, I have heard from a current staff member in the department that the culture now is one where you either “fall in line” or else. That is not a culture of accountability. It is a culture of fear. And it is consistent with what I saw before I left.
I have also heard from a colleague who has been at UPEI for nearly a decade. Before I left, they told me things were getting worse. Since then, they have told me the culture under the new administration is worse than it was under the previous one. The previous one being the environment that necessitated the Rubin Thomlinson investigation in the first place.
I am also aware of three staff members in the president’s office who went on stress leave and never returned. Their departures followed the same pattern: the culture changed, what they started in was very different from what it became, and they described being told, in effect, that there was only one way of doing things, and if you did not comply, you were out. Two of the leaves turned into resignations after a few months. People are leaving because they cannot stay. That is the culture now.
Why this matters beyond me
I have said before that I don’t believe the workplace assessment was the real reason I was fired. I believe the real reason was that I was openly, unapologetically pro-Palestinian, and that made me a liability. The assessment was the instrument. It was available because the institution had spent months building the conditions for it: a Faculty Association complaint about my social media, a legal review of my posts by unnamed counsel, a framing of my anti-Zionism as bias, a meeting that was trauma-infused in every sense of the word.
But even setting that aside, even accepting the university’s own account of why I was fired, the process was indefensible. A racialized Muslim woman in an EDI leadership role was removed on the basis of an assessment that did not have the expertise to understand the department it was assessing. That is not a failure of one consultant. It is a failure of an institution that did not know, or did not care, what it was asking for.
And it is a failure that will repeat. The pattern is well-documented: racialized equity practitioners are hired into structurally impossible roles, given inadequate support, and then blamed for the dysfunction they inherited. When the reckoning comes, it comes in the language of “workplace culture” and “leadership concerns,” language that sounds neutral and isn’t. It erases race. It erases disability. It erases the specific vulnerabilities of the person being removed.
The department I led needed an assessment with an anti-racist lens and an anti-ableist lens. It got neither. And the institution treated what it got as though it were complete.
The last word
On September 24, 2026, the Faculty Association stood before a legislative committee and praised the restructuring of my department. They were right about almost everything else they said that day: the slow progress, the unmet deadlines, the administration’s failures. But on this one thing, they praised an outcome they did not understand, built on an assessment they never read, produced by someone without the lens to see what was actually happening, to justify the removal of a racialized Muslim woman from the job she was hired to do using a termination process they would vehemently oppose if it happened to a unionized employee.
They did not have to read the assessment to know that praising a firing is not what a union does. They chose to praise it anyway.
I have written about this enough now. This is the last time I will write about it directly. What I want on the record is this. The tools institutions reach for when they want to appear neutral are not neutral. An assessment without a lens is not an objective document. It is a document that has decided, in advance, what it will not see. And when that document is given the weight of a finding, the people it cannot see are the people who pay for it.
I was one of them. I am not the only one. And until institutions, and the unions that are supposed to hold them accountable, learn to ask who a process was built to see and who it was built to miss, there will be more.
I said what I needed to say. The rest is on the record.
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