Art History Professor Dr. Charmaine Nelson cites racism for quitting tenured position in Nova Scotia
December 14, 2022
In welcoming Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson as a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair at NSCAD University in Nova Scotia in 2020, Member of Parliament Andy Fillmore said ‘the impact of her work to uncover, preserve and share the difficult history of Transatlantic Slavery will start here in Halifax’.
The federal Minister also noted that Atlantic Canada’s largest municipality is a city that continues to confront systemic racism built on generations of discrimination and promised that Nelson’s work will ripple across the country and around the world.
Sadly, that did not happen as it took the experienced educator just a few months to recognize NSCAD was not fully ready to embrace change.
Canada’s first Black Art History Professor tendered her resignation last April and joined the University of Massachusetts Amherst as a Provost Professor of Art History.
When Nelson joined NSCAD as Canada’s new Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art & Community Engagement, she planned to use the 14-year funded position to work with the university to develop the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery envisioned to be the first research hub focusing entirely on the history of Canada’s participation in Transatlantic Slavery’s history.
Although she has suffered racism and sexism in her two decades teaching in Canadian universities in Ontario and Quebec, Nelson said she was never exposed to the level of workplace disorganization and lack of professionalism she encountered while at the 135-year-old Nova Scotia College of Art & Design University.
“I have never seen racism or racial segregation in Canada like what I experienced in Nova Scotia,” she said. “That place is 50 years behind Toronto and Montreal. It is profoundly racially segregated and you see that on worksites. It is a very difficult place for Blacks, Latinos and other People of Colour to be in terms of the in-your-face racism on the job. It is shocking.”
Nelson said African Nova Scotians navigate racism in different ways than Blacks from outside the province.
“When an African Nova Scotian woman asked me if I was going to give a public lecture on the issues of the Institute and where I would do it, I said, ‘Sure, I would love to do it and I would probably put it in the main downtown library,” Nelson pointed out. “The woman told me I can’t put it over there because ‘we won’t come as we don’t go on that side of Citadel Hill. When I inquired what she was talking about, she told me I had to put it in the North side library, in our library, or Black people would not come.
“They have developed that mindset as a form of self-protection from the racism they have experienced for centuries in the province. If you are a Black person from the outside and that happens to you, you might have a different response which is I am going to take up space everywhere. The state of the Black community in Nova Scotia is fractured across different populations. What that does and feels like there is different from what it feels and looks like in Montreal and Toronto.”
Right from the beginning, Nelson sensed she was in for a rough ride at NSCAD.
At most universities, new faculty members take part in an orientation to introduce them to the institution’s resources and policies.
Although hired during the heightened disorder of the COVID-19 pandemic when such an official introduction was essential due to the lack of face-to-face interaction, that didn’t happen.
“Someone sent me a faculty handbook about eight months after I got there,” recalled Nelson who was the first Black person to be hired into a tenure-track Art History position at a Canadian University when she joined Western University in 2001. “I thought if I was not given a faculty handbook, it doesn’t exist. I was always trying to figure out who I should contact for something because I didn’t know and I was never given appropriate information.”
When she decided to put together a handbook for incoming institute fellows, she tasked her research assistant with the job months ahead of their expected arrival.
Nevertheless, after a colleague gave her student erroneous information, she was reprimanded for an assumed error about a payroll issue in a group e-mail by a White senior administrator which was shared with her colleagues and students.
Nelson was also denied the opportunity to affix her name to contracts to hire research assistants with her personal grant funds.
“To the outer world, I am directing the Institute and inside, a senior person was refusing to have a conversation about the parameters of my authority,” she said. “When I reached out to someone in the upper administration saying I need to know what decisions I can make on my own and what decisions have to go through you or the President, they ignored my emails. I know they did because other emails I sent at the same time before and after were answered. It was a conversation they did not want to have.”
Finding out in early 2021 that she could not access a $10,000 research stipend from her salary that she planned to set aside for graduate students, said Nelson, was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“When I wrote to the financial head saying I was ready to access this funding and how do I do it, I was told the money was gone,” she said. “When I asked where it went, I was told it doesn’t roll over and I had to use it within the financial year. This policy was never shared with me.”
Not buying the explanation, Nelson reached out to officials in Ottawa who administer the Tier 1 Canada Research Chairs who told her they were going to meet with NSCAD’s Provost and Chief Financial Officer.
With the matter still going nowhere, she wrote to the Interim President several times.
When promises of action were unfulfilled, Nelson filed a grievance against the Provost to get the money back.
“For about four to five months, I was going back and forth with officials in Ottawa, a lawyer I consulted privately and, finally, the NSCAD union about the $10,000,” said the 2010 Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “They tie us up in nonsense and then say we are not doing our jobs.”
Dr. Charmaine Nelson (Photo by Meghan Tansey Whitton)
Walking away from NSCAD was not easy for Nelson who was the second Black Professor to hold the prestigious William Lyon Mackenzie King Chair for Canadian Studies at Harvard University in 2017-18.
“The Tier 1 Chair that I won was two back-to-back seven-year appointments and the teaching is reduced which is a Professor’s dream,” she noted. “I was going to teach one class a year for the first seven years and two for the second seven years. Part of why these Chairs are so coveted is because they allow Professors the money and time to excel at research.”
While the Institute for the Study of Canada Slavery that Nelson founded in 2020 is no more as of November 1 of this year, she has started Slavery North.
“When I decided to leave NSCAD, I was very clear this was my intellectual property and I am taking it with me,” Nelson said. “Now that I am in Massachusetts, I thought why not expand the mandate to also cover the American North. The average American has no clue that slavery happened in the Northern states. Like Canada, those states hid it very well and places like Massachusetts pretend that they were only ever abolitionists which is a lie. I also have specific areas of study that I also want to highlight.
“With access to the university’s grant writing and advancement teams, I will be working with them to try to get a permanent endowment for Slavery North to be able to have a physical space and also be able to hire permanent staff and to have a permanent suite of Fellowships for scholars and artists-in-residence.”
Would Nelson ever return to Canada to teach?
“I don’t know,” said the prolific author who is working on four books. “Montreal was a difficult place to be because the politics there is really exhausting. One of the things I found out in my short time in Nova Scotia is that you are constantly asked if you are ‘from away’. You feel as if you can never fit in there. For me in terms of Art History, I am not sure Toronto presents the same types of opportunities because some of the programs are considered quite conservative. I think my best bet is to stay down here (in the United States). Of course, other universities in Canada would be great, but for my husband and I, we want to live close to a metropolitan centre.”
In 2012, Nelson launched a website – blackcanadianstudies.com – as a resource for Black Canadian Studies and a space to share her past, present and future research agendas and production.
Renamed ‘Black Maple’, the site — blackmaplemagazine.com — has been expanded to include Black Canadian arts and popular culture and will soon relaunch.
“I believe that academia and pop culture are not separate,” Nelson added. “My art and visual culture interests span ‘high art’ like marble sculpture and oil paintings. But I also love pop culture, meaning the print ad, the poster, the article of clothing and the television show. Also, what makes me unique as a scholar is that my research goes from the 18th century to the present. I am not wedded to a specific timeframe. What governs my passion is the Black Diaspora.”
