Canada’s universities are competing aggressively for funding attached to ‘unicorn’ faculty positions. These rare, prestigious posts are backed by Can$1 billion (US$734 million) in federal investment to attract 100 researchers working on global challenges over the next 12 years. The money is coming from centrally funded federal initiatives that present transformative opportunities.
Such positions — named the Canada Impact+ Research Chairs (CIRCs) — are touted as a long-term investment, but the majority are expected to be filled in the first year. University departments are therefore being pushed to identify, recruit and secure candidates at breakneck speed.
As an ecologist (A.B.) and a mathematician (M.M.), both working at Canadian universities, we’re witness to this gold rush. The drive to attract leading international scientists is remarkable, and it seems to be particularly directed at researchers from the United States — many of whom, evidence suggests, are keen to leave because of drastic changes to science and health policies. In many ways, the gold rush is exciting, and, on the face of it, it makes a lot of economic sense.
But we’re worried about what it means for universities and, especially, our early-career colleagues. Conversations we’ve had with staff in many academic departments suggest that the approach is landing a long way from thoughtful strategy — it’s more like a competitive scramble with little regard for downstream effects.
Jostling for position
CIRC posts come with excellent resources and generous salaries. But the current round is being filled on an extraordinarily tight timeline. We assume that this is to take advantage of some US scholars’ urgency to leave, and to keep pace with other countries hoping to achieve similar results (such as France, which is running a high-profile campaign to lure US scholars). Universities have effectively just been told: go. You have a couple of months to identify, recruit and secure a global scientific star willing to uproot their life, cross borders and align their research vision with institutional priorities they have only just encountered.
Academic hiring usually includes open calls, careful discussion, campus visits, research talks and teaching evaluations. Here, the process is being compressed or bypassed altogether. For the first call of the CIRC positions, the initial advertisements were up at universities in the last half of December, and the deadline for completed applications for the first intake is 24 March. When time is scarce, institutions fall back on what is fastest and familiar; informal networks and word of mouth become the primary recruitment mechanisms.
In many cases, standard interview and evaluation processes are quietly set aside. Employment equity, diversity and inclusion protocols, normally treated as essential institutional infrastructure, are reframed as luxuries that are incompatible with ‘competitive timelines’. Decisions are made top-down, often by senior administrators under intense pressure to secure lucrative and prestigious awards. Departments might be consulted, but sometimes only once candidates have been chosen and nominations are under way.
Bias boosted
The consequences are predictable. Selected candidates might be scientifically excellent, yet poorly aligned with departmental needs, pedagogically untested in the local context and disconnected from students and colleagues. More troublingly, the process can replicate existing power structures in academia, resulting in departments that remain demographically narrow, particularly in terms of ethnicity and gender.
This is not accidental. Much of the international recruitment push is framed as a rescue effort — or, more candidly, a form of academic poaching. Yet the pool of senior researchers most able to relocate quickly, and most visible in elite academic networks, remains overwhelmingly white, male and institutionally protected. The CIRC programme further amplifies this dynamic by offering incentives worth up to Can$500,000 for candidates who have received major international awards such as a Nobel prize, the Turing Award for computer science or the Fields Medal for mathematics. Because women remain significantly under-represented among recipients of these prizes (only around 4% of science Nobel laureates are women, and the disparity is worse for other prizes), tying recruitment advantages to such markers of prestige risks reinforcing existing inequities rather than correcting them.
Canada will benefit from US instability by attracting scientific talent, but we are also poised to import its biases.
