A new paper has studied the effects and costs of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in Canada, and reports that “EDI has actively weakened Canadian research and reduced overall academic performance at Canadian universities”.
Since 2017, the prestigious Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program, which sets the agenda for Canadian academic research, has moved dramatically in the direction of implementing EDI ideology and quotas.
Regrettably, prioritizing EDI results in an “equity-excellence trade-off”: Canadian taxpayers are funding cultural socialist activism among elite professionals at the expense of the disinterested pursuit of truth.
And, Canadian research is paying a high cost for its unfettered embrace of EDI, both through the non-meritorious appointment of less qualified Black, Indigenous, and female chairs, and by diverting millions of dollars to left-wing scholar-activist research.
According to our analysis — the first of its kind — EDI ideology is costing approximately $36 million per year, equivalent to a 12 per cent “tax” on the CRC’s $300 million annual budget.
Jonathan Kay at Quillette:
In April, Memorial University—the only university in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador—posted five job openings for prestigious Canada Research Chair (CRC) professorships. In all five cases, it was specified explicitly that able-bodied white men need not apply. Rather, the jobs were reserved for members of “equity groups, including women; 2SLGBTQIA+ people; Indigenous peoples; racialised persons; and persons with disabilities.”
Following the uproar, Memorial administrators refused to apologise or back down. Instead, they explained that universities across Canada were all doing the same thing (even if they weren’t so blatant about it)—since any school seeking to get Canada Research Chair funding from the federal government must demonstrate that they are tearing down “systemic barriers in academic hiring.”
Memorial University isn’t wrong. As a group of researchers led by University of Buckingham professor Eric Kaufmann details in a new report published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Canada’s $300-million-per-year Canada Research Chairs program restricts disbursements to universities that hit aggressive affirmative-action targets set by government officials….
As Kaufmann notes in his report, the mania for identity-based hiring and admissions that’s taken hold of Canadian academic culture is a relatively recent phenomenon, largely dating to the mid-to-late 2010s. Until then, most Canadians regarded affirmative action as an American institution that had been developed to address that country’s shameful history of slavery and Jim Crow. Canada, by contrast, came into being more than three decades after the British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Historically, our universities typically applied the same admissions and hiring standards to people of all races.
That changed about a decade ago, as the influence of social media began eroding the cultural firewall that had once insulated the sleepy world of Canadian academia from America’s race-based culture war. During this period, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government promoted race-based policy-making as a means to ingratiate itself to young voters. And by the time he’d worn out his welcome with voters (of all ages) in the early 2020s, the Canadian academic establishment he subsidised was embracing affirmative action with a fervour that even the most progressive American liberal-arts college would find embarrassing. As alluded to above, this expansive northern version of affirmative action doesn’t just focus on race, but also numerous other self-identifiers, including some, such as “two-spirit,” that even academics themselves are completely incapable of defining.
Except, of course, no one in Canada calls it “affirmative action,” or uses other straightforward terms such as “racial preferences.” The most common euphemism is now “inclusive excellence,” though new variants emerge all the time, such as “Black flourishing.”
For a representative sampling of this faddish vernacular, I refer readers to the University of Waterloo’s recent press release, boasting that the school had been praised by academic activists for its “ongoing commitment to addressing anti-Black racism and fostering Black flourishing, inclusive excellence, mutuality and accountability…through initiatives that amplify Black voices, cultivate community partnerships and address systemic barriers.”
This kind of preposterous word salad, which is now part of the everyday institutional idiom at schools across Canada, doesn’t just supply a series of gauzy euphemisms for lower academic standards. It also implicitly conflates the idea of racial preferences with anti-racism, thereby pre-emptively dismissing naysayers as anti-anti-racists (which is to say, racists).
So here we are. Not that anything is likely to change.
It’s telling, for instance, that right after Kaufmann and his colleagues downloaded the full list of Canada Research Chair beneficiaries in April, the government scrubbed the corresponding professional descriptions from its website.
The report authors note that the government has so far provided “no explanation” for memory-holing this information. But for anyone who’s observed the intellectual shell game that gets played when it comes to affirmative action, it’s easy to hazard a guess.
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