Big Thinking Podcast · Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the Post-Secondary Research System

·32 min·2 clips

Diverse leadership is not enough unless leaders actually widen the perspectives they bring into decisions.

Big Thinking Podcast opens with a wide institutional question. It asks what equity, diversity and inclusion mean in the post-secondary research system. Karine Morin introduces the Council of Canadian Academies report and frames the conversation around measures, benefits, challenges, and impacts. Dr. Wendy Rogers joins as the president and vice-chancellor of the University of Prince Edward Island and the chair of the expert panel behind the report. The conversation starts by looking back. Rogers explains that her interest in research ethics has shaped how she thinks about inclusion and institutional responsibility. She connects that background to the broader challenge of balancing complicated and overlapping considerations. The exchange then moves from principle to practice. Morin asks what seems to make EDI measures effective when they do work. Rogers points to the Canada Research Chairs Program as a useful example. She describes how human rights requirements pushed the program toward a more equitable distribution of chairs. She notes that power and money were both part of that change. She also emphasizes that institutions were required to set targets. Each institution had to build its own EDI action plan for how it would achieve and maintain that greater equity of distribution. Those plans were not treated as optional gestures. They came with consequences if targets were missed or the action plan itself fell short. The episode keeps returning to that point because it matters. Targets give institutions a concrete destination. Action plans push ideas and activities to be integrated across the organization. Year-on-year implementation makes the work harder to postpone and starts to build the cultural change the report is after. Rogers argues that this is how institutional change begins to take hold. The conversation also sharpens a central distinction. Diversity alone is insufficient. Inclusion is what broadens the work and gives the acronym its force. That distinction keeps the discussion from drifting into abstraction. It moves the listener toward the practical realities of governance, accountability, and institutional design. The show stays focused on explanation, qualification, and example. Its strength is that it treats EDI as a system-level question rather than a slogan. By the close, the report reads as both a policy document and a roadmap for sustained institutional effort. The episode ends by returning to solidarity and shared work. It leaves the listener with a clear sense that meaningful change depends on persistence, structure, and follow-through.

As heard by us

A policy-minded conversation about how EDI turns into institutional change, not just intention.

The episode looks at equity, diversity, and inclusion in Canada's post-secondary research system with a steady, policy-first eye. Karine Morin speaks with Wendy Rogers, whose research ethics background helps keep the focus on a practical question: what actually moves…

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You want a clear read on how EDI moves from policy to practice.

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