Degrees of Alienation: This Paper Is Definitely Not a HEQCO Funded Policy Report

Walter Benn Michaels has argued that higher education policies have been fashioned through a diversity fetish, rather than grappling with class inequities produced through neoliberal restructuring. When the author was asked the question of whether Benn Michael's analysis pertained to Canadian higher education, she found herself writing the present article within which she argues that pitting class against race is a liberalizing strategy that obfuscates how each ruling relation is interlocking and mutually constitutive. She then goes on to show how such interlocking dynamics productive of racialized and gendered class relations currently function within the Ontario postsecondary system through the production of "tieredness", otherwise termed "system differentiation" in policy papers published by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO). Because the paper grew out of her response to Benn Michael's analysis, the author will summarize her take on his book, "How to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality," in order to illustrate certain dynamics affecting equity politics within the Canadian, and in particular, the Ontario higher education landscape. These dynamics do not concern the college sector unto itself, nor the university sector unto itself, but rather spans the entirety of the system. (Contains 3 endnotes.)