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
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.
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An opportunity arose almost immediately. The faculty of arts was preparing to host the week-long Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, the largest annual academic event in the country. The theme of 2017’s iteration was to be “From Far and Wide: The Next 150,” a nod to the sesquicentennial of Canada’s federation. When Sugiman heard about it, she recoiled. How could Ryerson celebrate federation without acknowledging the violence underpinning it? She proposed a tweak: “The Next 150 on Indigenous Land,” with an explicit focus on equity. She and her staff recruited an impressive lineup of presenters, including American philosopher Cornel West, Indigenous scholar Niigaan Sinclair, journalist Desmond Cole and Olivia Chow. Public events included an on-campus concert by Indigenous hip-hop group A Tribe Called Red (now the Halluci Nation).
The congress’s theme attracted enormous interest, and not just from scholars. For West’s talk, the line outside the Ted Rogers School of Management snaked around the block. Sugiman’s team set up livestreams to allow more people to tune in. The Tribe Called Red concert, which was held outdoors on Gould Street, packed the sidewalks. When the congress opened, it already had 9,600 registrants, an all-time record. It was great publicity for Ryerson, and the takeaway seemed clear: it was possible to commit to equity and reap knock-on benefits such as increased interest from students, top-tier faculty and major donors. Provincial funding for universities was stagnating, but if Ryerson could keep enrolment high and net significant gifts, the outlook was bright. Soon, other universities followed Ryerson’s lead. Four months after the congress, Universities Canada, which represents most of the country’s universities, made an announcement. The presidents of their member schools had agreed to formally commit to diversity, equity and inclusion, known as DEI.
Those presidents couldn’t have known that, a handful of years later, DEI would become a profoundly polarizing issue, a lightning rod for both scathing criticism and ardent defence. A person’s opinion of DEI would broadcast their political leanings as clearly as their stance on the carbon tax or pronouns. In the eyes of the left, Sugiman was a champion of equality, an outlier willing to act when most people were content to just talk. To the right, she was a woke nightmare, a social justice warrior who cared more about skin colour than merit and would spend recklessly to reach her goals. When TMU dismissed Sugiman from her position as dean in 2024, she became the main player in an academic scandal that ricocheted across the country—and the personification of a campus divided.
Faculty deans have a sprawling list of duties, yet there are limits to their authority. A university is not a monarchy—everything requires extensive consultation. Without absolute decision-making power, the most successful deans learn to rule not by handing down edicts but by building consensus. Sugiman excelled at this. As dean, she packed her schedule full of one-on-one meetings with faculty, administrators and potential donors. It was gruelling—she would often start her day by answering emails from bed, then spend 10-plus hours on campus. In the evenings, she attended events or went home to continue working. On many nights, if her 21-year-old daughter, Tamura, hadn’t started coming over regularly to cook meals, Sugiman would have skipped dinner altogether.
Part of her time was spent strategizing how to hire and retain more racialized faculty members. When Sugiman became dean, the faculty of arts had 194 faculty members, seven of whom were Black tenure-track faculty and one of whom was Indigenous and tenure-track. She went on to hire 11 Black professors and 13 Indigenous professors, plus two personal advisers (one on Indigenous education and one on Blackness and Black diasporic education). During her tenure, she created minors in Black studies, Middle East and North Africa studies, and LGBTQ2S+ studies. When a Black professor and an Indigenous professor co-teaching a class on colonialism received a sudden barrage of hateful messages, Sugiman swooped in, finding them a secure location for lectures.
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In some circles, these moves earned Sugiman admiration and respect. I reached out to more than 80 professors from her faculty, 15 of whom agreed to be interviewed. Almost all spoke glowingly of her. “I haven’t met a university administrator more committed to supporting Indigenous education than Pamela,” said Hayden King, an Anishinaabe professor Sugiman hired. He’s now the executive director of the Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous-led research and education centre opened within the faculty of arts in 2018. Sugiman made sure Yellowhead had office space and assistance with fundraising. Without her support, King said, the institute would not exist. And she wasn’t interested in equity solely on the hiring front, said Craig Jennex, an English professor. “Pamela saw that we needed to radically change how we think about scholarship. She was concerned with how the university could become a better place.”
Other opinions were more tempered. “Pamela tried to make sure every committee had a visible minority on it. I thought that was great,” said Ronald Stagg, a history professor who retired in 2024. Less celebrated, according to Stagg, was Sugiman’s tendency to emphasize candidates’ views on DEI when hiring chairs. And certain faculty members disapproved of her push to hire racialized professors. “Pamela squandered money on her personal pet projects,” said one professor who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. “Why did we need a dozen Indigenous hires? The university hardly has that many Indigenous students. And I wasn’t the only person pissed off by the amount of funding that went to the Yellowhead Institute.”
Broadly speaking, however, public opinion was on Sugiman’s side. DEI, sometimes called EDI, was continuing to gain traction. After George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis in 2020, calls for its widespread adoption grew louder. Soon, corporations were scrambling to address inequities in hiring and promotion practices—or risk customer boycotts and a drop in profits. Universities had their own financial reasons to get on board. Some federal funding bodies, including the Canada Council for Research Chairs, require schools to have DEI policies in place to qualify. But universities also tend to be progressive spaces, full of young, idealistic students who still have the nerve to speak out and don’t yet have to worry about losing their jobs over it. These schools are exactly the type of place where DEI initiatives can thrive—though not without detractors.
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The classic argument against DEI in academia goes something like this: if university admission, hiring and promotion processes should reward the most deserving candidates, then isn’t it wrong to give someone a leg up because they’re Black or Indigenous or a woman? And doesn’t that put highly qualified candidates who happen to be white men at a disadvantage? It’s the same criticism launched at affirmative action initiatives dating back to the 1960s, and it has the same flaw: it assumes that DEI is the only “bias” in the mix. Multiple studies have shown that job candidates who are white and male consistently fare better than their Black or female counterparts even when all parties have the same qualifications. The point is not to hire someone unqualified but to stop letting well-documented unconscious biases screen out people who are eminently qualified.
Even steadfast supporters of DEI know it’s an imperfect framework, a blunt instrument for a complex problem. Some studies have shown that DEI-related training sessions don’t necessarily change people’s minds and can even harden racist or sexist beliefs. DEI statements can also be largely for show, a way for employers to appear to care while sidestepping any real commitment to change. Despite DEI’s flaws, Ryerson in 2020 was largely supportive of it, according to Sugiman. “My first term felt like a time of renewal,” she says. “We didn’t get every hire we asked for, but the administration always seemed to have an open mind.”
Several professors I spoke with said the university encouraged deans to spend money in those days, using up surplus dollars by meeting budget targets, launching new projects or hiring new faculty. TMU has denied this last point, telling me that, while the surplus funds were available for projects and one-time purchases, they were not intended to be used for hiring. Sugiman began her deanship with a $17-million surplus and chipped away at it over the years. It helped pay for things like the Yellowhead Institute and a partnership with St. Michael’s Hospital.
When Sugiman’s first term was set to end, in 2021, she asked to be reappointed for a second. A committee was struck to pore over documentation provided by the university. There were minor criticisms: one chair said Sugiman didn’t respond to emails quickly enough, and a review member wished she were more involved in program development. But Sugiman’s successes were impressive. There was her sterling record on DEI; she had more than tripled the faculty’s annual fundraising, from $107,000 in 2016 to an average of $327,000 between then and 2020; and she had secured a $2-million donation to establish the Jarislowsky Democracy Chair, part of the new school of public policy. The final vote was unanimous: Sugiman would remain dean until 2025.
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A few months later, Ryerson announced another committee’s final decision. The Yellowhead Institute had recently published an open letter from a group of Indigenous students demanding that the university erase the name of Egerton Ryerson—who was a central figure in the development of the residential school system—from its halls. Galvanized, hundreds of faculty and students started to use the moniker “X University” instead. In response, a professor from the faculty of arts penned an op-ed in the National Post claiming that a name change would be a bridge too far. Donors made it known that their gifts hung in the balance. As the administration waffled, tensions mounted and protesters toppled the statue of Egerton Ryerson on Gould Street. In April of 2022, the school finally made an announcement: it would be changing its name to Toronto Metropolitan University.
TMU’s decision to take on a new name fit neatly within a broader ethos. As the city’s third university, it faced the unique challenge of having to compete with U of T and York. How could it distinguish itself? DEI had emerged as one solution, pulling double duty as a marketing strategy. When TMU launched its law school, it was facing off against Jackman Law and Osgoode Hall. It couldn’t outshine them in prestige or success rates, but it did stand a chance with regards to DEI. So TMU billed the Lincoln Alexander School of Law as a place that shaped “a new kind of lawyer,” one who prioritized social justice.
That sort of distinction was valuable, especially as funding for universities and colleges was drying up. In 2019, the provincial government cut domestic tuition by 10 per cent and froze it there. The cost of everything—labour, operations, research materials—was rising, and provincial funding was going in the opposite direction. By 2021, Ontario’s per-student funding sat just above half of the national average. Unable to charge Canadian students more, colleges and universities filled the gap with international students, whose tuition could be raised with abandon. Soon, undergraduates from abroad were shelling out a provincial average of $44,000 per year, almost five times what domestic undergraduates were paying.
But, even with that financial stopgap, schools were feeling the crunch. In early 2023, an edict came down from TMU’s new provost, Roberta Iannacito-Provenzano: every dean would need to cut their operating budget that year by 3.5 per cent. For the faculty of arts, that meant shaving $1.8 million, and there wasn’t enough left in the surplus funds to make up the difference. Sugiman and her staff scrambled to find costs to slash, a monumental task. In the faculty of arts, 95 per cent of the budget went to wages and benefits for tenured professors, sessional instructors and staff. Sessional instructors and staff could be laid off, but almost all of them were unionized or belonged to a faculty association, making the process next to impossible in the short term.
Sugiman went digging for incidentals. She calculated how much could be saved by turning off the lights in unused rooms and inquired about disconnecting the landline. What if they moved everyone into a centralized office space to reduce heating and electricity costs? Ultimately, these types of changes would have little impact, so Sugiman turned to two of the levers deans usually pull when tweaking budgets: fundraising and class sizes. Outright gifts were a godsend, and Sugiman had been working to increase donations to her faculty. Between 2021 and 2023, it had received an average of $1.3 million annually, far more than the $100,000 gifted in her first year on the job. But the schmoozing and hobnobbing required to secure those donors took time, and the budget cuts needed to happen immediately.
That left Sugiman with class sizes. The main cost of any course is the wages paid to the person teaching it, and the more paying students there are to offset the cost of the professor, the better. Sugiman decided to cut several low-enrolment courses. For other classes, she combined multiple sections or raised the maximum enrolment. But she didn’t take a hard line. “Finances weren’t the only consideration,” she says. “There’s also the discipline and the teaching style.” For example, a French class, where students expect direct feedback on their vocabulary and pronunciation, couldn’t realistically accommodate hundreds of students. Neither could a writing workshop where participants read their work aloud. “I wasn’t prepared to abandon a certain standard of education,” says Sugiman. “We owe that to our students.”
Sugiman’s dismissal took all of 15 minutes. She emerged into the hallway, stunned
A handful of courses on the chopping block fell under the DEI umbrella, including Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, Blackness and Freedom, Kanyen’kéha (Mohawk) Language, and Haudenosaunee Culture. Enrolment for some of those was critically low—the Kanyen’kéha course had just three students. The classes weren’t profitable, but they were innovative and relatively new, which meant they could grow in popularity. Plus, they fit into the university’s mandate to diversify its offerings. Not every DEI initiative was going to turn a profit, nor should they—these classes were about underrepresented points of view. Instead of cutting the courses, Sugiman proposed a compromise. The faculty would keep offering them but would increase marketing efforts and, in the case of the Kanyen’kéha class, boost enrolment by allowing non-students to sign up. After a year, they would be reassessed.
Throughout 2023, finances were at the centre of nearly every discussion. In meetings with deans and chairs, TMU’s administration went over budget guidelines and cost-reduction tactics. Between April and August of 2023, Sugiman and her staff put forward two proposals that didn’t meet the full $1.8 million in requested cuts. (The second, higher one topped out at $1.1 million.) So she kept searching for savings: decreasing staff salaries, putting a pause on hiring. Shortly before the fall semester started up, Sugiman received a performance evaluation from the provost’s office. Of the five available options, the provost had ticked “fully meeting expectations”—two boxes down from “exceptional performance.” The attached note contained only praise. “Your commitment to academic and research excellence has played a pivotal role in enhancing the reputation and standing of the Faculty of Arts within the university community,” it read.
The job had its challenging moments, but things were manageable—until Sugiman’s life outside the university shattered. In October, her daughter, Tamura, collapsed in a shopping mall. She was rushed to the emergency department at Mount Sinai, where a doctor ordered a series of tests and sent her home. Days later, she had a serious lung infection diagnosed and was admitted to hospital. On October 17, Tamura began to have difficulty breathing and had to be moved to the ICU and intubated. She was Sugiman’s only child, and the two were exceptionally close. The dean got permission from Iannacito-Provenzano to do most of her work remotely, reading reports and tenure applications at her daughter’s bedside. One day, when Tamura’s condition seemed under control, Sugiman rushed to campus, threw on a robe and hosted a convocation. Through it all, she was distraught but optimistic, mapping out how they were going to spend the Christmas holidays. She was expecting Tamura to have a drawn-out hospital stay, nothing more.
But, on October 28, 2023, Tamura developed an alarming rash across her body and began to exhibit signs of sepsis. Test results would later confirm that she had Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a rare and often deadly reaction to medication. The doctor urged Sugiman to prepare for the worst. She was approved to take a 15-day compassionate care leave from her duties at TMU but still held out hope that her daughter would come home. Then, on the evening of November 1, Tamura died. Sugiman managed to drive herself back to her condo before she broke down.
When she heard about Tamura’s death, Iannacito-Provenazno sent Sugiman flowers and suggested that she extend her leave until the new year. In January, after some back and forth, they mutually decided that Sugiman would take half of the year-long paid administrative leave to which she was entitled as dean. Her associate dean, Amy Peng, would fill in until her return in August of 2024.
Sugiman wasn’t on campus, then, when the pillar shoring up Ontario’s universities and colleges came crashing down. In late January, the federal government, under pressure to address the housing crisis and tackle predatory diploma mills, announced that it was instituting a hard cap on the number of international students entering the country. For 2024, it would issue 360,000 permits—a 35 per cent reduction from the previous year. It was a calamitous blow to Ontario’s universities, which were carrying a deficit of more than $175 million and expecting an additional $100-million loss within the next year. International students—whose tuition fees accounted for a third of the province’s post-secondary operating budgets—had been the sector’s breakwall against financial ruin.
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Overnight, anything that was deemed remotely frivolous or a liability was put under a microscope. Programs and classes associated with DEI were at risk, their survival made all the more precarious by shifting public perception. Anti-DEI politicians now had legions of voters willing to back them. A conservative-stacked Supreme Court had reversed race-based admissions to universities and colleges in the US, and by mid-2024, Donald Trump was barrelling toward re-election. On this side of the border, Pierre Poilievre was riding a wave of anti-Trudeau sentiment. His party was ramping up its criticism of the Liberals’ DEI policies, claiming that they had put an end to meritocracy.
Meanwhile, TMU’s law school was embroiled in a crisis of its own. Seventy-two of its students had sent their dean a letter demanding that the faculty declare its support of Palestine. To do otherwise, they argued, would go against the school’s stated commitment to equity and inclusivity. The backlash was intense. Several of Toronto’s law firms called the letter antisemitic and vowed to turn down internship requests from any student who had signed it. Outraged donors followed suit, with at least four of them cancelling or suspending scholarship dollars.
By late October, the law school’s administration had issued its own statement claiming that the students’ letter contained elements of “antisemitism and intolerance.” In the eyes of the pro-Palestine contingent, the school had caved to pressure from donors in the name of its bottom line, casting aside its students and DEI. The university said financial pressures had nothing to do with the decision. An external review conducted by retired chief justice J. Michael MacDonald eventually concluded that the school had unfairly censured its students for exercising their right to freedom of expression.
At the beginning of her leave, says Sugiman, Peng was often in touch, texting questions or asking for advice. The messages abruptly stopped in mid-February. Then Sugiman received an email from Iannacito-Provenzano. “My expectation is that you have a clear break from TMU and any of your duties as Dean,” she wrote. “I hope that the time away will help you focus on things that are important to you.” The few times Sugiman visited campus after that, for retirement parties or faculty functions, she says that Peng and Iannacito-Provenzano either ignored her or were curt. She grew anxious about her return, but friends and colleagues all told her the same thing: Your job will be fine—who would dismiss someone after the death of their child?
Spring and early summer crept by without further word from TMU. When Sugiman emailed about coming back to work, Iannacito-Provenzano asked to talk in person. On the day of their meeting, July 31, Sugiman ascended to the provost’s office, on the 13th floor of Jorgensen Hall. She did her best to talk herself down: this was a casual catch-up, nothing more. The moment she stepped into the provost’s window-lined corner office, she knew she was mistaken. Iannacito-Provenzano was seated formally at a meeting table opposite a member of her staff. This was anything but a friendly check-in.
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According to Sugiman, Iannacito-Provenzano got directly to the point. That month, serious concerns about Sugiman’s ability to manage the faculty budget had emerged. The provost said Sugiman had led the faculty irresponsibly—she hadn’t taken budget cuts seriously enough, nor had she done what was necessary to eliminate small classes and raise class sizes overall. She was, as of this moment, dismissed from her position as dean, and she would return to being a full-time tenured faculty member of the sociology department. Iannacito-Provenzano then handed Sugiman a letter outlining the fact of her demotion and moved to leave the room. When Sugiman asked if the dismissal had anything to do with her eight-month leave, she says, Iannacito-Provenzano insisted that it was a separate issue. Their exchange took all of 15 minutes. Sugiman was left alone with Iannacito-Provenzano’s staffer to go over logistics, after which she emerged into the hallway, stunned.
The next day, the provost’s office sent out a memo to the entire faculty of arts stating that Sugiman would not be returning as dean. Some faculty members assumed that Sugiman, still in mourning, had chosen to give up the dean’s office and all of its administrative burdens. Then the fact that Sugiman hadn’t left willingly began to circulate, prompting one professor to send a message to the provost. They’d heard a pernicious rumour, they wrote, and urged the administration to correct it immediately lest anyone think of TMU as cruel. The professor was shocked to find out that the gossip was, in fact, true.
This isn’t how deans are usually dismissed. Traditionally, unless there has been criminal misconduct, they’re permitted to finish out their terms and step down quietly. What, then, could have justified the way Sugiman was ousted? And what could have been so urgent to warrant the outcry that would come with dismissing an equity advocate who also happened to be a visible minority and a grieving mother? When faculty inquired with the provost and the university’s president, Mohamed Lachemi, the university told them the matter was strictly confidential.
Alarmed, a few professors drafted an open letter to TMU’s administration challenging Sugiman’s removal. They wrote that they were appalled by the “serious attack on due process and fairness.” They also claimed that Sugiman’s “removal further speaks to TMU’s priorities (or lack thereof) and reflects an institution with pretensions of diversity but, in practice, an intolerance of it.” Within three weeks of Sugiman’s demotion, the letter had been signed by 180 people, mainly professors and staff from different TMU faculties, including arts, engineering, law and community services, plus the creative school and the libraries. Eventually, the signatories would include 337 academics, students and alumni from across the country.
TMU was under increasing pressure to explain itself: in addition to the open letter, the school had received a complaint from the equity chair of the faculty association, as well as letters from members of Sugiman’s re-appointment committee, the Canadian Committee on Women’s and Gender History, and the National Association of Japanese Canadians. By mid-September, the university started to show its hand. In a Globe and Mail article about Sugiman’s dismissal, TMU’s assistant vice-president of university relations, Michael Forbes, was quoted as saying, “The decision was made for a number of reasons. For all deans, as with all academic administrators at any university, there are obligations to manage within the budget.”
Several professors have speculated that Sugiman’s dismissal was less about being over budget and more about her initiatives. “It set off alarm bells for me,” says Alan Sears, a professor emeritus. “Was this meant to get rid of a strong leader so the administration could make decisions about austerity without interference from below? Were they saying equity is expensive and not a priority at this point?” Others saw the move as an outright punishment for putting DEI above budget priorities. To Anne-Marie Singh, a criminology professor who served on Sugiman’s reappointment committee, it was a shocking choice for a university that markets itself as a leader in DEI. “This was a wake-up call for any equity-seeking group: you need to know your place,” she says. “If you dare to question, you will be suppressed, pushed down and excluded.” During the heyday of DEI, Sugiman’s initiatives had garnered praise and institutional support; now that times were bad, she seemed to be disposable.
Not everyone agrees with that assessment. “Some people have contended that Pamela’s dismissal was a political witch hunt,” says Bryan Evans, a professor in the politics and public administration department. “I don’t think there’s backlash against DEI at TMU.” Whatever the rationale for her dismissal, it has eroded trust within the faculty. Half a dozen professors told me they were being more careful when choosing their words at work—if TMU could demote a dean in this way, then everyone should watch their backs. Another five were afraid that weighing in publicly could result in reprisals from the university and jeopardize their careers.
In the flurry of executive orders that followed Trump’s inauguration in January of 2025, the US president included a moratorium on what he called “radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing.” DEI advocates had already been losing ground, but now the leader of the world’s biggest financial power was making it official. Businesses—including Google, Target, PayPal and Disney—started to panic, afraid of how Trump’s pronouncement could impact their bottom lines. In other words, DEI was no longer good for business.
Traditionally, universities strive to be insulated from trends in politics and the private sector. They employ various measures—tenure, collective governance, institutional neutrality—to ensure that academics can pursue pretty much whatever lines of thinking they see fit, without pressure from donors, corporations or government. But, as universities and colleges contend with free-falling budgets, staying out of the fray has become more difficult. In the US, for example, Columbia, Cornell and Northwestern have all folded to demands from the Trump administration in exchange for continued financial support.
In Canada, the external pressures aren’t as blatant, but there have been accusations that schools are bending to the cultural moment. Last summer, faced with a multimillion-dollar deficit, York University suspended admissions to 18 programs. These included biomedical physics and language courses, but a good portion of them—South Asian studies, Jewish studies, Indigenous studies and more—had a DEI bent. Frances Latchford, the chair of the department of gender, sexuality and women’s studies, blamed anti-DEI fervour. While York has maintained that programs were chosen due to lack of enrolment, one professor in the Indigenous studies program told the CBC that some of his classes were full, with students lining up for extra spots.
Navigating this new landscape has proven tricky for TMU as well. When the university announced that it was launching a new medical school in Brampton in 2025, it leaned into DEI as part of its marketing campaign, just as the law school had done. The medical school would have a set of admissions guidelines specifically for Indigenous, Black, disabled, LGBTQ2S+ and low-income students. The decision was based on research showing that these students are often highly qualified but face barriers to securing the same GPAs or test scores as their white, straight or financially privileged counterparts. At first, TMU declared that the school was aiming to admit 75 per cent of its students through equity pathways, and with more than 6,400 students vying for just 94 spots, they had their pick of qualified candidates. But critics, including Doug Ford, were appalled. The premier arranged a private meeting with TMU to demand that the school prioritize the best candidates. A week later, the university backtracked: the equity admissions pathway would remain, it announced, but the percentage would not.
The financial crisis facing post-secondary institutions is existential. Over the past three years, Ontario universities have cut nearly $1.28 billion in spending. Since 2024, more than 10,000 staff at the province’s colleges have been laid off and 600 programs have been axed or suspended. In February, the provincial government announced that it would give universities and colleges an additional $6.4 billion in funding over the next four years to help relieve some of the pressure, and it would allow them to raise domestic tuition rates by two per cent a year for the next three years. It also said that the grant-to-loan ratio in OSAP funding for students would shift dramatically, with grants dropping from 85 per cent to 25 per cent—a move that will disproportionately affect the historically disadvantaged students DEI initiatives are meant to help.
Even with these measures in place, the cuts are unlikely to stop. There are some legitimate, even overdue, trims to make. On the whole, universities and colleges tend to have bloated administrations, and some have taken on large, ambitious projects, such as new campuses, that they simply can’t sustain. Other choices will be more controversial. Forced to think more like businesses, schools will have to examine supply and demand. If only a handful of students are interested in a class, it is likely to get shut down in favour of a lecture that makes more money. And if an issue is angering donors or the politicians who sign public-funding cheques, schools may have little leverage. Financial precarity poses a threat to the core principles underlying university education: vigorous dissent and open discussion. If a faculty member believes that DEI or anything else is worth the occasional financial sacrifice, their opinion may no longer be welcome.
But DEI courses weren’t created to be blockbusters, and DEI was never meant to drive profits. Its policies weren’t designed to meet with universal approval. Equality was enshrined in Canadian law, and in the administrative fabric of schools and businesses, precisely because many people wouldn’t bother with it if they didn’t have to. A cursory look at our history shows that the equal rights and protections now considered common sense—women’s suffrage, desegregation, the abolition of residential schools—were once deeply unpopular. People didn’t fight for them because they were economical. They fought for them because they were worth defending.
After her dismissal, Sugiman dreaded making the trip to campus. She felt humiliated, worried that people would think she had done something unethical or corrupt. Some people close to her suggested hiring a lawyer. Others warned that taking legal action could close doors to her in the future. No one wanted to work with someone who would sue, they said. For months, Sugiman weighed her options until she finally came to a decision. On September 2, 2025, she filed a $2.15-million wrongful dismissal suit against TMU, alleging breach of contract, defamation, breaches of the human rights code, and aggravated and moral damages. “If I lose, I lose,” she says, “but there has to be some accountability. I know Tamura would not want me to take this lying down.” In her statement of claim, she alleges that TMU never indicated she wasn’t doing her job adequately and challenges the assertion that she acted irresponsibly. Central to her suit is DEI and the fallout from raising concerns about how TMU’s cuts disproportionately affected equity-seeking groups. “Because it was a period of economic uncertainty,” the statement of claim reads, “TMU treated these considerations—and ultimately Dr. Sugiman—as expendable.”
TMU responded with a statement of defence, doubling down on its claim that Sugiman had been fiscally irresponsible and that her decision to repeatedly run under-enrolled courses was an unjustified financial drain. On its face, the most damning allegation is that the $17-million surplus Sugiman had started with in 2016 had turned into a $8.5-million deficit by the time she took her leave in 2023. The school’s statement of defence claims that this was the most significant decline of any faculty, though it doesn’t offer figures for other faculties. Nor does the filing mention the years when spending surplus funds was allegedly encouraged. But Daphne Taras, who was the dean of TMU’s business school from 2018 to 2023, says the faculty of arts numbers are similar to her own. “I suspect all of TMU’s deans had to wipe out their surpluses just to keep the quality of faculties as high as we could manage,” she says. “I sure did. And we had the full knowledge and consent of the administration to use our surpluses to achieve budget targets during difficult years.”
Michael Forbes, who spoke to me on behalf of TMU, said that serious concerns about Sugiman’s financial management were raised in July of 2024, the month she was dismissed. TMU claims that Sugiman was frequently reminded of the need for budget cuts prior to that but admits that no midterm assessment of Sugiman’s work was held during her second term, as was stipulated in her contract, because she was on leave. In its filing, the university doesn’t address the fact that Iannacito-Provenzano, as the provost, would have had access to the faculty of arts budget at all times. Which raises the question: why, after Sugiman had been away for eight months, would TMU not give her a chance to rectify matters? When I requested interviews with Lachemi, Iannacito-Provenzano and Peng, they declined. “Decisions like this are very difficult,” said Forbes. “It’s not something that we would take lightly or without due consideration, and it had nothing to do with DEI. I’d like to think the university was compassionate and accommodating toward Professor Sugiman while her daughter was ill. We allowed her to work remotely and extended her leave. But there was financial mismanagement, and the university felt it had to act.”
If a settlement isn’t reached, it may be a couple of years before the case goes to trial. In the meantime, the debate around DEI at universities is intensifying. A group of professors is currently suing the University of British Columbia over its hiring practices. They say that its policy—which requires candidates to declare their support for DEI initiatives—violates the University Act by taking an overtly political stance. (UBC has yet to file its response.) Last year, the University of Alberta announced that it was abandoning diversity, equity and inclusion in favour of new, less polarizing terminology: access, community and belonging. The move initially seemed like a simple rebrand. Then, this past February, the university put forward a proposal to remove DEI considerations from its hiring policies altogether, a decision lauded by the Alberta government. Amir Attara, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, has pointed out that U of A hosts Canada Council research chairs. According to a federal court order from 2021, the hiring process for those positions must employ DEI criteria.
Unlike U of A, TMU hasn’t backed away from its stated commitment to DEI. The school’s first university-wide EDI Strategy and Action Plan—scheduled to start rolling out later this year—will lay out a master plan for addressing inequity. New courses and initiatives have also been put in place, including nearly $600,000 invested in new offices for the Yellowhead Institute and an update to the DEI plan for TMU’s research chairs. “I have a hard time believing that the removal of a single person would change an institution’s value system,” says Forbes. “DEI is one of the pillars of our law school, for example. Financially, we’re in better shape than a lot of our peers. When we think about our budget, we fence off the core academic experience and our values, and we look to make limited cuts elsewhere.”
There have been changes, however, to some of the DEI initiatives Sugiman set up during her time as dean. There is no one currently serving as adviser on Indigenous or Black education, and what role those positions will play going forward is under review. Professors who teach some of the faculty’s classes on the history of racialized groups have been told that their courses may not run every year because they aren’t economically viable. “What’s diabolical is that they’re claiming these moves are economic,” says Nicole Neverson, a Black professor in the sociology department. “But, when you see decisions that only seem to affect certain types of pedagogy, certain types of scholarship, a pattern starts to emerge. And I think when EDI is tied to what is fiscally viable, then EDI is dead.”
Sugiman’s demotion has sown uncertainty and discord in her faculty. The vast majority of the people I spoke to, regardless of their opinions of Sugiman, said the timing was brutal and unnecessary. And for some, it is impossible to separate her dismissal as dean from the fact that DEI initiatives are being rolled back across North America. The lack of a satisfactory explanation from the people who made the call has opened up a void of doubt and suspicion that isn’t likely to close anytime soon.
In the meantime, Sugiman has returned to teaching. This semester, she’s giving a course on advanced qualitative research methods and a course on immigration, settlement and diaspora policies. She kicked off her first class with a discussion of how power—or the lack of it—affects academia. Throughout the course, she’ll pose questions designed to hold up a mirror. How does settler colonialism shape research? How can we decolonize our understanding of knowledge and truth? Even though she’s now leading a classroom instead of a faculty, she believes she has a responsibility to keep talking about equity. It’s simply the right thing to do.
This story appears in the April 2026 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.
