Accountability and Transparency

OCAD University acknowledges the ancestral and traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe and the Huron-Wendat, who are the original owners and custodians of the land on which we live, work and create.

OCAD U recognizes that we are bound together in the struggle to create a more just world. OCAD U understands that, after the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, transformative education requires that we critically transform the settler social relations that underpin knowledge production and what constitutes knowledge within the University context and beyond. We are committed to ensuring that the multiplicity of histories and perspectives of racialized and Indigenous students, faculty and staff are recognized and affirmed in their experiences at the institution. Through a process of ongoing reflexivity, we will more prominently include social justice, critical methodologies and Indigenous knowledges in our relations, curricula, pedagogy, research practices, policies and processes.

As an institution committed to the production, stewardship and interrogation of expressive culture, OCAD U recognizes the profound and essential value that diversity brings to the creation, reception and circulation of creative practices and discourse. Valuing diverse creative practices, forms of knowledge and methods of making, enriches and is essential to our core mission and vision as an art and design university with a local and global scope, and that provides students with the capabilities to be successful global citizens and creative participants in a complex world. We acknowledge that a commitment to the principles of equity requires engagement with and response to the complex, systemic and often deeply embedded ways that systems and practices exclude disproportionately under-represented communities, and that advancing equity extends beyond the numerical representation of under-represented communities or the inclusion of under-represented groups in order to achieve diversity. Equity requires the implementation and evaluation of specific measures or policies that recognize, address and remediate the exclusion of under-represented groups from institutions of higher learning specifically, and from the larger art, craft and design sectors generally.

OCAD U is continually working to identify and eliminate structural barriers in recruitment, hiring, and retention policies and practices. As a part of this process, in 2020 OCAD U launched a newly developed Employment Equity Workforce Survey to ensure updated data on current staff demographics. The University is activity working to evaluate strategies to address gaps in hiring and retention and to put supports in place to allocate resources that will support OCAD U’s equity, diversity and inclusivity policies and practices.