This article originally appeared in the National Post.
By Eric Kaufmann, September 2, 2026
The case of Jason Arday shows that when a system of prestige institutions drops its standards on the basis of identity characteristics, the effects can be tragic. Cambridge University claims that Arday is an exception, but the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s new report, “The Equity-Excellence Tradeoff: a Study of EDI in the Canada Research Chairs Program,” suggests that he is the rule: equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) hiring damages academic excellence at scale. Nowhere is this more evident than in the prestigious Canada Research Chairs program.
While academic researchers have debunked the unrigorous “diversity is our strength” claims of EDI champions like consulting firm McKinsey & Company, ours is the first quantitative study to show that EDI is not merely neutral, but can actively reduce organizational performance. This occurs through “diversity hiring” less capable individuals and funding scholar-activism.
Existing scholarship and Harvard’s internal statistics establish that, on average, Black and Hispanic students are admitted to elite universities with lower test scores. They also generally perform less well on Advanced Placement (AP) tests in high school, as do females. Among faculty, women on the whole publish significantly fewer academic papers than men.
As in the Arday case, the hiring bar is considerably lower for subaltern minorities and women. New work from sociologists Jukka Savolainen and Kevin McCaffree examining all candidates hired from 2019 to 2024 by the top 50 American sociology departments reveals that white males averaged eight publications while Black females averaged just two. Forty per cent of white men had published in the top two journals compared to four per cent of Black women.
Furthermore, my re-analysis of data on American academic promotions from a prominent paper in Nature Human Behaviour shows that Black, Hispanic and female academics scored significantly lower on the industry standard h-index (papers multiplied by citations) than White, Asian and male academics.
The systematic hiring of lower-achieving minorities and women affects the performance of organizations and programs. In order to assess this, we examined the prestigious federal Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program. This is the pinnacle of Canada’s research system, spending $300 million annually on renewable seven-year awards of between $100,000 and $200,000 per year.
Beginning in 2003, and accelerating after 2017, the CRC program implemented an aggressive regime of diversity targets in which institutions that did not meet their quotas for female, minority and Indigenous chairs were threatened with losing their chair allocations. Canada’s Constitution allows for race and sex discrimination, thus CRC openings routinely state that able-bodied straight white males need not apply.
The effects have been dramatic. In 2000, 80 per cent of CRCs were white men. By 2025, just 20 per cent were. Between 2017, when unvarnished EDI was implemented, and 2025, the female share doubled from 30 to 60 per cent while the Black and Indigenous component jumped from two per cent to between 10 and 15 per cent.
We measured the research productivity of Black, Indigenous and female scholars between 2016 and 2025 and discovered that whites and Asians averaged an h-index of 34, Blacks 23 and Indigenous scholars 15. Men averaged 38 to women’s 28. Blacks, First Nations and women are significantly less productive even after controlling for length of career, tier of chair, discipline and year of award. This echoes American results. Moving from a white or Asian chair to a Black or Indigenous chair, or from a male to a female, results in 12 to 15 per cent less research impact.
The effect on the CRC program has been severe. The Canadian government pays chairs to produce research, and — taking into account differences in citing practices by discipline — the h-index is the best unbiased indicator of its impact. Assigning a dollar value to each h-index point, we estimate that EDI hiring costs the CRC program $18 million a year, or six per cent of its budget.
Arday was Black, but also a scholar-activist. That made him doubly attractive to Cambridge’s progressive Faculty of Education. This highlights a further problem with EDI: the huge sums poured into activist “research.” In the social sciences and humanities, the average CRC chair description now contains two EDI terms.
We calculate that money diverted to scholar activism in the social sciences and humanities costs a further six per cent of the CRC budget — and this excludes the tab for administering EDI. This means that around 12 per cent — $36 million of the program’s $300 million annual budget — is wasted on equity and diversity. The EDI “tax” across the Tri-Council agencies’ entire budget of $4.5 billion, not to mention the wider higher education sector, is enormous.
The problem is beginning to be addressed in America but is out of control in Canada. In the U.S., the proportion of EDI keywords in government-funded research soared until 2020-21, began to decline in 2024 and plunged in 2025 as the Trump administration cracked down on EDI-themed research. In Canada, there is no political pressure, so it continues to explode: between 2021 and 2025, the share of CRC chair descriptions using an EDI term rose from 38 to 53 per cent. The same is happening in Britain. Arday is a symptom of this unchecked grievance-industrial complex.
The Trump administration has many flaws, but its focus on EDI in higher education is a policy success that Canada and other western countries would do well to follow.
Eric Kaufmann is a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
