Measuring the Economic Cost of Affirmative Action in Academia

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.

In 2025, the most recent year for which statistics are available, women and “gender-equity-seeking groups” (i.e., trans, “non-binary,” and all the rest) made up 61 percent of chairs; “racialised individuals” accounted for 40 percent; and Indigenous peoples just over five percent. In all cases, these numbers exceed the preferentially recruited group’s corresponding share of the general population. So it isn’t surprising that some universities—Memorial appears to be one of them—have to resort to blunt able-bodied-white-men-need-not-apply language to hit their spreadsheet targets.

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 demolishing 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 embraced 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.

What Does Two-Spirit Mean? Canada’s Vague Indigenous Identity

In a new report, Canadian educators are instructed about a Two-Spirit LGBT subcategory that, even the authors admit, lacks any real definition.

Except, of course, no one in Canada calls it “affirmative action,” or uses other straightforward terms such as “racial preferences.” The preferred euphemism is now “inclusive excellence,” though more fashionable variants emerge all the time, such as “Black flourishing.”

For a representative sampling of the 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 word salad, which is now part of the everyday institutional idiom of Canadian academic life, doesn’t just serve up a series of 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). Indeed, it has become popular to claim that Canadian universities would (literally) be incapable of fulfilling their educational mandates without “inclusive excellence”—i.e., race-based hiring and admissions—since “equitable inclusion is critical to…the ability of universities and colleges to educate.”

In his new think-tank report, titled The Equity-Excellence Trade-Off, Kaufmann and his co-authors attempt to put a price tag on these policies, using the CRC as a case study. First, they downloaded a list of CRC award holders, then cross-indexed the identity markers of the awardees against their h-index, a standard scholarly metric derived from the number of papers an author has published, as adjusted for the number of times each paper has been cited.

The authors found that the average h-index for female award holders is about 25 percent less than that for males, while the average h-index for black and Indigenous award holders is less than half that for whites and Asians. To the extent that h-index may be taken as a proxy for the public value of Canada Research Chair professorships, the report concludes, affirmative action costs the program (and the Canadian taxpayers who fund it) about $18-million per year—effectively a six percent tax on the program’s $300-million annual budget. (In a separate analysis, the authors also argue that a similar amount is wasted thanks to the diversion of funds from mainstream scholarship to “scholar activism in the social sciences and humanities.”)

Kaufmann’s report hit a nerve with at least one member of Canada’s higher-education brain trust, who claimed Kaufmann was either profoundly ignorant or “deliberately spreading racist tripe.” But despite prominent treatment in the conservative press, I suspect most Canadian academics and government bureaucrats will simply ignore the report entirely, especially insofar as it is couched in the logic of dollars and cents. As Kaufmann himself documents, the very language that administrators use to describe affirmative action communicates a belief that it is an essential instrument of pedagogy and anti-racism, and therefore morally non-negotiable.

I’m also sceptical as to whether Kaufmann’s conclusions will move the needle among the Canadian population at large, a clear majority of whom already oppose racial preferences. For most of us (and I include myself in this majority group), the argument against affirmative action is that it undermines the merit principle, while stoking racial grievances among both the preferred and non-preferred members of society. On the one hand, members of equity groups are encouraged to present themselves as victims of the (often invisible) “systemic” forces that form the basis for their preferential treatment. On the other hand, white men can point to this kind of reverse discrimination as proof that society is deliberately targeting them for failure.

Moreover, the idea that the population-at-large can be fooled with sugar-coated language such as “inclusive excellence” and “Black flourishing” is a condescending self-delusion. This is an idiom that academic elites employ for their own propaganda purposes. Few ordinary people are stupid enough to take it at face value.

I observed some version of this first-hand when I studied in the United States more than a quarter century ago. As a Canadian attending Yale Law School (YLS) in the 1990s, I was mystified by the American obsession with race, a fixation that hadn’t yet taken hold among very-online Canadian progressives (this being a pre-Twitter, pre-iPhone age, when being very-online required the use of a dial-up modem).

As I would later detail in a 2003 U.S. magazine article, my class at YLS was caught up in a controversy surrounding the low number of black students who’d passed the (anonymously graded) test used to screen applicants to the Yale Law Journal. Because no one wanted to say out loud that the problem might be connected to the preferentially admitted nature of the underlying student mix, we were all encouraged to find evidence of racism in the school environment that was sabotaging black performance. There followed a more general intellectual estrangement between black and white students, as the latter were pressured to keep their mouths shut about any topic touching on race, lest they utter some forbidden truth about affirmative action.

“Too Much Science in the Curriculum”

Tragicomic scenes from reparations-based medicine.

Conservatives typically couch their opposition to affirmative action as a matter of principle: it’s morally wrong to discriminate against groups A, B, and C (whites, Asians, and men, for instance) because groups D, E, and F (blacks, Indigenous, women, and so on) were discriminated against in the past. But I don’t take that absolutist view—because it isn’t affirmative action itself that I find objectionable, but rather the institutionalised forms of intellectual dishonesty that are required to reconcile it with traditional ideas of merit.

This may surprise some readers, but I’d actually be perfectly content if Canadian academics implemented some limited form of affirmative action to assist groups that have faced bigotry or other hardships—on condition that administrators were completely forthright about the nature of policies, and didn’t try to lie to the world about the fact that they were applying diminished standards to the favoured groups.

In that case, it wouldn’t bother me that my tax dollars were trading at a six percent discount when it came to funding Canada Research Chairs or any similar program. Providing remedies to (real) forms of discrimination is, after all, a legitimate public mandate. 

Unfortunately, the prospect of Canada’s academic establishment coming clean in this way is something of a pipe dream. 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 their professional descriptions from its website.

The authors note that the government has so far provided “no explanation” for memory-holing these names. For anyone who’s studied this issue over the years, it’s easy to hazard a guess.