Many universities across Canada are introducing term limits for their Canada Research Chairs to get new academics into the jobs as the prestigious program struggles to meet diversity targets set by a court settlement.
The Canada Research Chairs gives annual funding of $100,000 or $200,000 to successful academics for research projects. The program is divided into Tier 1 chairs, who have seven-year terms that can be renewed indefinitely, and Tier 2 chairs, who have five-year terms that can be renewed once. Federal granting councils allocate the 1,600 chairs among universities, and the schools nominate academics to fill those positions.
The federal government told universities in May that they had until Dec. 15 to write an action plan on how to boost the diversity of their nominees, and another 18 to 24 months to follow through on those plans, or they could lose their research chair funding.
Because of a 2006 legal settlement, the Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program was obligated to set equity targets that match the number of academics eligible for the positions. For instance, 31 per cent of chairs are supposed to go to women, but in data from 2015 and 2016, fewer than 28 per cent of chairs were female. Universities have generally failed to meet the targets, but the government has only begun to threaten to enforce them in the past year.
The other three groups are visible minorities (15 per cent), Indigenous people (1 per cent), and people with a disability (4 per cent).
