You Must Be a Basketball Player: Rethinking Integration in the University

Documenting a black professor’s account of his own professional experience, this study describes what it feels like to be a nonwhite academic in one of the big three” disciplines in the humanitiesEnglish, history, and philosophy. Challenging the notion that today’s Canadian universities have successfully addressed the issues of diversity, this argument warns that if professors of color cannot see academia as a liberal bastion, it can only be even more forbidding for students of color. Demonstrating how integration policies are manipulated when it comes to hiring visible minorities in the university, this reference highlights aspects such as merit that are commonly used to deny employment. Positing that institutions should deliver on their stated policies instead of hiding behind formalities, this emboldened examination will surprise those inside and outside of the academic field.