That a liar and fraud such as the late Jason Arday has become a martyr to “progressive” academics is evidence enough of how thoroughly universities have been captured by wokism. But all is not lost. Jonathan Barazzutti recently travelled to England for the annual conference of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science and spoke to those fighting back. Their weapons? Courses and workshops encouraging open inquiry, a push for policies enshrining political neutrality in institutions of higher learning and the creation of brand-new centres or entire universities dedicated to academic freedom. Much more needs to be done if universities are to rediscover the one form of diversity that really matters in higher education – diversity of thought.

When a student protest against rising tuition fees disrupted his classes at the University of Calgary, Jonathan Barazzutti had questions. He didn’t have to look far for the answer. While it has become popular to blame government for the financial crisis on Canadian campuses, Barazzutti uncovered that the real reason lies much closer to home. Metastasizing school bureaucracies are not only pushing tuition fees higher but also shifting the focus of universities away from the pursuit of academic excellence towards woke-minded empire-building. If students want to see their school costs come down, Barazzutti concludes, they ought to be targeting the administrative Leviathan on campus.

Segregation is a dirty word these days. But not every effort at separating individuals is a bad thing. And some attempts at enforced inclusion can yield provably disastrous results. A case in point is the treatment of gifted students in Canada’s rigid, DEI-focused public school system. Combining personal experience with rigorous academic research and recent education policy changes, Jonathan Barazzutti charts the damage being done to exceptional students – and to their average-ability classmates – by keeping them in classrooms where they clearly don’t belong. Barazzutti argues it is time for schools to let gifted students soar.

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies are thoroughly entrenched at Canadian universities, and the harm they cause – from squashing free speech to destroying the merit principle to propagating outright discrimination – is widespread. But there is a path back to sanity. Jonathan Barazzutti lays out concrete steps universities can take to restore intellectual diversity, which should be a pillar of any academic institution and would, as a byproduct, support demographic diversity as well. Barazzutti’s proposals would enable universities to correct current abuses and turn back to their true mission: the pursuit of innovation, knowledge and truth.