In 2021, C. Darius Stonebanks was fired from his full professorship at Bishop’s University after he raised complaints of systemic racism, he explains in a new video connecting non-disclosure agreements with racism.
A non-disclosure agreement, or NDA, is a signed legal document restricting what information can be shared with others, depending on what is deemed confidential. It can extend to friends, family and therapists. Typically, it is forever. NDAs are often used to silence survivors and prevent information from being shared that would make a person, company or institution look bad. When NDAs are used to cover up racism, discrimination, harassment and misconduct, they protect perpetrators and institutions, while preventing accountability.
Stonebanks was offered an NDA as part of the discrimination investigation at his job, but he refused to sign it. Now, he’s asking others to join him in speaking about their experiences of racism in universities to raise awareness and bring about change.
As Stonebanks recalls in the video, the culture of discrimination that would continue for his tenure at Bishop’s and end in his dismissal began on day one, in 2005. As he was unpacking books in his new workspace, he was called into his administrator’s office and “read the Riot Act,” he says, as if he had already done something wrong. He was told how to behave, where he was allowed and not allowed to be seen, what texts he was allowed to teach and how he should check that his standards fit the school’s. “I was shocked,” he recalls.
Stonebanks was recruited to teach in the Department of Education at Bishop’s University, which meant leaving his job as a lecturer at McGill University, selling his house and moving his family to the Eastern Townships, two hours outside of Montreal. Going into Bishop’s, Stonebanks says he “already knew the university I was going to was very white” and that he would be the only person of colour in the department. He says he’s still the only West Asian racialized Muslim who’s taught at the university.
On day one, after being told not to misbehave, Stonebanks says it got to the “absolutely humiliating experience” when he says his administrator told him she’d heard from another faculty member he was still teaching at McGill, reprimanded him for not taking his tenure-track position seriously and made him show her that he wasn’t assigned to any McGill classes. “I was just completely confused,” he recalls. “It was so shocking I didn’t know how to respond.”
He remembers thinking, “Okay, we’ve made a mistake. We left our entire communities. We left our support system.”
Over the next 10-plus years, Stonebanks says there was a “constant onslaught” of discrimination, including offensive name-calling and three faculty members asking him, knowing he was a Muslim, if they could take his three children to their Christian Sunday school “‘so they [could] learn morals,’” he recounts. He says he was repeatedly passed over for opportunities within the school as less-qualified, non-racialized colleagues received them in his place. Eventually, it became too much, and Stonebanks asked his union, the Association of Professors of Bishop’s University, for advice on what to do.
He told his union that, despite the university saying they recognized systemic racism, there was no process to deal with it internally; instead, it had doubled down and treated Stonebanks “with this great difference.”
It was at that point, says Stonebanks, that the university “came up with a completely invented procedure, which didn’t exist anywhere in the university” called an “administrator investigation,” to look at counter-accusations filed against Stonebanks “that were basically retaliation.” He was told to sign an NDA as a part of this “ad hoc” investigation process, which his initial complaint of workplace discrimination had triggered. Stonebanks says he realized that if he signed the NDA, “it was going to keep my entire experience locked away.” He didn’t sign.
The investigation ended with Stonebanks being terminated, and his union is fighting his dismissal through arbitration–an ongoing process. Stonebanks says this point needs further discussion “because the process in itself guarantees your destruction.” He says this is what is meant by systemic discrimination, too, because “it doesn’t matter if I’m found innocent; I still will lose my career.”
Stonebanks has since learned that his experience is not unique. Too often, others are prevented from sharing their experiences of systemic racism in universities because they’ve signed NDAs, also known as gag orders. Building a collective voice to track and fight this silence motivated him to co-found the BIPOC Academic Coalition, which he did in 2021 with fellow academics and educators Aimé Avolonto and Christine Faucher. The coalition’s mandate is to break the cycle of racial inequity in higher education through unity, research, education and advocacy.
“People tend to discredit anecdotal experience, but in the absence of building [it up], you can never find enough data to make a conclusion, and that’s what they’re going for,” he says. “They want everyone to be silent.” This makes researching systemic racism in universities very hard, he says, even within universities, because people’s experiences are “hidden away in NDAs.”
“That is very purposeful.” So, while universities can make “large claims about recognizing systemic racism because the university students want them to,” simultaneously, “they’re never going to recognize it in their own backyard…because it’s too dangerous for them.”
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Thus, the BIPOC Academic Coalition is aiming to raise awareness in the younger generation of how universities employ standard processes, like NDAs, to silence and perpetuate systemic racism. “We want more people to be aware of this so that more people will stand up and say, ‘This has happened to me,’” says Stonebanks. “Until that happens…it’s just going to continue.”
Stonebanks’ video story is part of a series on NDAs and racism produced by the anti-NDA advocacy group Can’t Buy My Silence.
CBMS has been advocating for government legislation to ban NDAs in settlement cases involving all forms of racism, discrimination, harassment and misconduct. Using NDAs in these cases is an abuse of their original purpose–to protect trade secrets–but one that has become widespread. CBMS advocates for ending the abuse of NDAs, teaches about the harms of their misuse, presents alternative options for survivors who wish to protect their identity–such as one-sided confidentiality agreements–and offers advice on how to request a release from an NDA for those bound by them.
CBMS also researches when NDAs are used and how frequently, collects testimonials and tracks instances globally through a dashboard built by its partner group, Speak Out Revolution.
This dashboard reports that nearly 42% of people who report workplace harassment, bullying and discrimination in Canada sign an NDA, with 13% unable to say for legal reasons. However, the true amount of NDA misuse within universities is difficult to determine because of the secretive nature of NDAs, which makes them so damaging.
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So far, PEI is the only province or territory in Canada to pass legislation restricting the use of NDAs in cases involving harassment or sexual misconduct. However, Nova Scotia’s New Democrats re-introduced a bill on Wednesday, Feb 19, called the Non-Disclosure Agreements Act, into the House of Assembly. If it passes, this bill would limit NDAs in all cases of discrimination and harassment unless certain conditions were met, including survivors being presented with alternatives, there being no risk to the public and survivors not being pressured to sign.
Premier Tim Houston had not supported the NDP’s proposed bill when it was presented in previous sittings of the House, countering that he’d heard from people who were “thankful” for the option to use an NDA, as reported by CBC’s Jean Laroche. “There is another side to this story, and I do hear from survivors who have entered into them, and they were appreciative [of] that option,” Houston said when questioned about his lack of support for the bill on International Women’s Day in 2024. “They asked me not to remove that option from those who may want to choose it.” Yet, that option remains in the NDP’s proposed legislation.
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This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2025.