Jonathan Barazzutti

I am proud to announce that I recently won first place in the 2nd Annual Patricia Trottier and Gwyn Morgan Student Essay Contest. My article, now published in the C2C Journal, discusses how universities can help fix the lack of intellectual diversity within their institutions, most notably political diversity. I argue that existing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, while claiming to increase the number of perspectives in universities, fail to do so and propose solutions that would actually address the issue. The solutions include explicitly promoting intellectual diversity as a goal, and changing institutions to be more in favor of freedom of speech and academic freedom.

Winning the contest was a lesson in perseverance for me. In late 2023, I had tried to discuss this issue to some degree in my school’s student newspaper and was prevented from doing so. I then wrote a paper on the subject two months later and tried to get it published in an undergraduate journal, only for it to get rejected. Waiting until now to get it published in the essay contest has meant that I was awarded a significant amount of money and other things, as well as getting a significant reach for my work, neither of which would have been possible if my work was published in my school’s newspaper or a random undergraduate journal.

However, the most satisfying part about winning the essay contest is not the prize money I’ve won or the conferences I’ve been invited to, but that I had the opportunity to write about an issue that hits close to home for me. Many who read the article and are familiar with my past activities at the University of Calgary will notice that I indirectly wrote about systemic and social barriers that I’ve had to deal with as someone with heterodox views, particularly when it comes to mobbing as discussed in my article. 

About a year ago, I experienced a targeted mobbing when I tried to run for my school’s student union to promote intellectual diversity and freedom of expression on campus. The mob, started and perpetuated by students, student groups, and the university’s student newspaper, went after my reputation and a club I founded dedicated to having open discussions on political issues. I was maliciously labelled as, among other things, a residential school supporter, a white supremacist, and anti-transgender. The mobbing ended with me receiving extensive harassment and violent threats, having to shut my club down, getting banned from numerous other clubs, blacklisted from my own faculty students association, calls for and attempts to expel me, and more. Ironically, despite many claiming I violated the University of Calgary’s student code of conduct, nothing I did was ever in violation, while many of the actions that students took against me clearly were.

The sociologist Kenneth Westhues, whose work I discovered a few months ago and wrote about in my article, describes how these situations tend to play out. On his website he provides a checklist of 16 indicators that a mobbing is occurring. To be frank, it was uncanny to read through the list as while it is designed to analyze mobbing in workplaces specifically, I found that everything I had experienced and witnessed with my mobbing as a university student checked off not 1, not 5, but all 16 of the indicators.

I could easily write tens of thousands of words about the absurdity of the situation and the dishonesty of many of the actors involved. But the purpose of me mentioning all of this is not to litigate past events, and would furthermore repeat my mistake of naively assuming you can rationalize people out of positions they never rationalized themselves into. I discuss this to emphasize the sad reality that academic mobbing is all too common and succeeds regularly in barring individuals from careers in academia. My situation will likely end in this way. In email correspondence with an academic from an elite institution who faced a mobbing of a similar nature, I was told that in the current political climate I will probably be unable to get a permanent academic job at any English-speaking university in the western world.

However, as bad as the effects of mobbing are on their targets, what is worse is its impact on the broader culture of academic institutions. Following my targeting, I have seen in my personal life a sense of paranoia or neuroticism in many of my peers, worried about what will happen if they speak their minds about anything heterodox. Others, even those who on paper claim to support values such as freedom of speech, will actively participate in this type of mobbing for self-gain or to performatively distance themselves from a target. And this creates a black hole of discourse on university campuses, where nonconformity and attempts to think outside the box are increasingly socially pathologized. Innovation is characterized by ideas that break from the status quo, so when thinking outside the status quo is met with hostility, innovation suffers.

But not all is bleak. In my article I lay out something that has scarcely been systematically written about: a set of policies to actually address the issue of intellectual diversity on campuses. I encourage everyone reading this to take a look at the framework I outline in my article, as it provides an excellent springboard from which to have productive conversations about improving our academic institutions.

I am somewhat pessimistic about the prospects of implementing them in existing institutions. I think that, to paraphrase Robert Conquest’s second law of politics, any institution that is not explicitly for academic freedom/intellectual diversity sooner or later becomes against those values. Universities at their inception were not for these values, but rather many were institutions designed to train religious officials such as clerks and monks. As such, these institutions are more easily swayed towards particular causes that are fashionable at a period of time as opposed to being swayed towards searching for the truth.

Nonetheless, even if existing institutions are difficult to change, the possibility of creating alternative institutions that are at their inception explicitly in favor of academic freedom and intellectual diversity remains open. I want to devote my life to fostering such institutions in whatever way I can.

At age 15, I began questioning certain ideas I had dogmatically held onto in politics and philosophy for nearly two years. I realized many claims about the world that I thought were true were believed on shaky ground, and I wanted to find a place or institution that would help answer my questions about the world. I latched onto academia, began reading papers and teaching myself basic statistics, believing that academic institutions disinterestedly sought what was true about society. And while universities are great in many ways, even in the context of the social sciences, I realized that this isn’t always true as time went on. I want to create precisely what I wish I had access to when I was 15: institutions that genuinely try to search for what’s true in the world, regardless of what social fashions exist at the time and the place in which they are situated. Institutions, maybe physical or digital, that advocate for the values that my old student club once did: open-mindedness, tolerance of differing views, and seeking the truth wherever it may lead.

When such institutions are created, we can get closer to maximizing human flourishing. Because there is nothing more powerful or beautiful than the freedom to think.