Equity Reduces Excellence

Eric Kaufmann, Leif Rasmussen, and Jonah Davids:

Is diversity truly our strength? Does equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) improve excellence?

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.

While previous studies have examined demographic differences and the effects of EDI on organizational and team performance, none has examined its organizational-level consequences in academic research. This study fills that gap by testing EDI’s impact on research output in the CRC holders program from 2016 to 2025. It turns out, diversity is not merely neutral — it can actually lower performance.

To determine the scope of the EDI problem, we measured all award holders listed on the CRC site using the industry standard publication metric, the h-index, which combines both the number of articles a scholar has written or co-written with the number of times those articles have been cited by other researchers.