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In a Macdonald-Laurier Institute report published last week, authors Eric Kaufmann, Leif Rasmussen and Jonah Davids dare to ask what seems to be, for some, a forbidden question in Canada: Does prioritizing diversity in hiring mean losing excellence?
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The claim that equity leads to research excellence is made regularly. Our national research funding agencies declare that equity “strengthens research outputs and increases the overall excellence of research,” and the Canada Research Chairs program itself, which mandates diversity quotas, insists that “Achieving a more equitable, diverse and inclusive Canadian research enterprise is essential to creating the excellent, innovative and impactful research necessary to seize opportunities.”
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The MLI report set out to test that claim using the CRC program, which was created in 2000 to reverse the brain drain of Canada’s brightest minds abroad, hardly a solved problem.
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Since 2017, partly in response to human rights tribunal claims and criticism that it wasn’t diversifying fast enough, the CRC program imposed diversity quotas: universities that didn’t meet them risked losing chairs altogether. It worked. White male representation fell from roughly 80 per cent of positions to about 25 per cent today. So far, so good, you might say — why shouldn’t the chairs roughly reflect the population?
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The MLI report then asks what the consequence has been — and here’s where things get controversial. It tries to measure how research excellence changed alongside these shifts, using h-index (a widely used, not uncontroversial metric) to score every chair-holder, controlling for sex, ethnicity and career length as a proxy for age, then putting a dollar figure on the resulting gaps. The methods are interesting, defensible and not beyond critique.
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The report finds that there has been a real trade-off. Some equity gains — hiring more Asian-heritage CRCs, for instance — show no trade-off at all. But on average, research metrics are weaker for female CRCs and for Black and Indigenous scholars, even after the study’s controls for career length and discipline. The report also finds a rise in politicized language in CRC research descriptions, concentrated in the social sciences.
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As you can imagine, this has not gone over well in certain circles.
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The most dramatic — and most telling — reply came from Alex Usher, a prominent higher education consultant who sells his expertise to university administrations across the country. Usher was so offended that he wrote a letter to MLI director Brian Lee Crowley and published it on Bluesky, calling the report “the worst piece of social science I have ever seen published by a Canadian think tank” and “racist nonsense.” His argument: the authors hadn’t done the most basic statistical work, failing to account for how age and career length affect h-index, or how it varies by discipline, which makes comparing a historian to a chemist absurd. All the study really showed, he argued, was that white males are more likely to work in the sciences.
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His conclusion: “This is not just gutter social science: it is a drive-by smear. Some people would call it clearly racist and sexist.”
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This sounds horrible. Surely the think tank would retract the report and try to salvage its reputation? Not quite — because the report doesn’t make the errors Usher accuses it of, not even close. It explicitly controls for both career length and discipline. Kaufmann replied that both of Usher’s main criticisms were “manifestly false, and even a cursory read of the report would have shown this very clearly.”