Jonathan Barazzutti

On a journey to create pro-truth academic institutions.
Contributor at @CityJournal @c2cjournal
Now on Substack

[Jonathan Barazzutti @JBarazzu]

My latest for @CityJournal:

"About 1 percent of students skip a grade, even though between 15 percent and 45 percent of American students enter late-elementary classes performing at least one year ahead of standard academic expectations."

https://t.co/fxWqeDaIaR

[Jonathan Barazzutti @JBarazzu]

@zagrebbi I like to think I am

[Eric Kaufmann @epkaufm]

Nice to see our work mentioned in this fine piece

[Jonathan Barazzutti @JBarazzu]

@PsychRabble @alexbronzini A “Truth and reconciliation”-esque hearing on mobbings as a result of DEI would be so fascinating to see at one of these institutions. Imagine the moral vindication that people who had been abused or humiliated for years would finally get.

[Jonathan Barazzutti @JBarazzu]

This contest was invaluable to putting me on the map as a writer for several outlets, highly recommend submitting if you're a student who wants to gain experience in writing for an audience.

[Free Speech Union of Canada @FSU_Canada]

🚨 STUDENT ESSAY CONTEST 🚨

The Free Speech Union of Canada is proud to promote The Manning Foundation’s 4th Annual Patricia Trottier and Gwyn Morgan Student Essay Contest:

Undergraduate Canadian students are invited to submit an essay addressing a current political, cultural or economic topic broadly consistent with the tenets of classical liberalism and Western civilization which include the principles of free markets, democratic governance, individual liberty, reason, personal responsibility and freedom of conscience and expression.

In the spirit of open inquiry and free expression the contest encourages essays that challenge conventional orthodoxies.

Read the full contest details and submit your essay here! 👇

https://t.co/iDx56aQx9Q

[Jonathan Barazzutti @JBarazzu]

@c2cjournal https://t.co/5dw2HU2afC

[Jonathan Barazzutti @JBarazzu]

"Bringing sanity back to campus won’t be easy. But it is vitally necessary if universities are to reclaim their historical role as places that offer the freedom to engage in the truest and most important form of diversity – diversity of thought."

My latest for @c2cjournal:

@epkaufm @FrancesWiddows1

[National Post @nationalpost]

The DEI tradeoff is worse than you think, says Eric Kaufmann.

The University of Buckingham professor joins NP's Rob Breakenridge to explain the results of his latest research https://t.co/phqzJiZhrd

[Jonathan Barazzutti @JBarazzu]

@follynomics Have fun, I’ve been to two of the ILS seminars (outside of our fellowship) and they’ve both been great

[Jonathan Barazzutti @JBarazzu]

@FrancesWiddows1 @MountRoyalU Good luck

[Jonathan Barazzutti @JBarazzu]

@WASPZoomer Consider making a mediawiki-style site. I find that’s helpful for putting all of your ideas in one place without very different topics being merged together

[Jonathan Barazzutti @JBarazzu]

@epkaufm @MLInstitute Many such cases!

[Eric Kaufmann @epkaufm]

1/ TRIGGERED: The Progressive Activists who police elite institutions just tried to force a retraction of my recent @MLInstitute report on EDI in Canada Research Chairs. This higher ed consultant's frothing conniption exemplifies how emotional blackmail has replaced reason:

[Jonathan Barazzutti @JBarazzu]

@Sculpturatus I know the whole purpose of these is to try and equalize outcomes for “marginalized” groups, but in this case I think straight people might be underrepresented due to homosexuals having a slightly higher average IQ, which makes the whole thing even stranger

[Jonathan Barazzutti @JBarazzu]

@SwipeWright The name "compliance division" screams dark triad traits, quite common amongst those who believe one should censor their political opponents.

[Jonathan Barazzutti @JBarazzu]

As someone who assisted with scraping and cleaning the data for this project, it’s very disheartening that not only is critiquing the paper on statistical grounds that we clearly accounted for, but also is trying to smear us as bigots for doing what is a very simple and important research project.

It’s obvious that these non-existent “methodological flaws” wouldn’t be mentioned by people like Alex Usher if the paper had concluded that women and ethnic minorities on average were more productive in their research output than white men. Instead, the paper would’ve been celebrated as empirical proof that we need more DEI in the research world, and its alleged flaws overlooked (and again, the flaws Usher pointed out were non-existent).

It’s only because we came to a conclusion not in line with current cultural mores that the paper was attacked and smeared. But it also exposes how fragile the DEI ideology is, that by doing simple research projects like this you can completely undermine their credibility.

[Peter Copeland @CopelanPeter]

Please read this thorough response to the misguided claims made about an @MLInstitute paper in a letter from Alex Usher, and circulated Heather Campbell.

"Eric Kaufmann, September 3, 2026

Alex Usher, a higher education consultant, sent Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) managing director Brian Lee Crowley a letter following the publication of our report, The Equity-Excellence Trade-off: A Study of EDI in the Canada Research Chairs Program. Usher’s letter, which he published online and widely circulated among academics, claims that the report is “not just gutter social science: it is a drive-by smear. Some people would call it clearly racist and sexist. You can count me among them.” Before MLI could respond, Heather Campbell repeated Usher’s claims, called our report “racist nonsense,” and republished the email to her social media...

"If Alex Usher had read the report, he would have seen that we control for both career length and date of appointment, which are highly correlated with age and, more importantly, directly measure “more time to accumulate publications,” his construct of interest. More than that, we also accounted for the fact that h-indices at entry in the profession have been rising over time, and that Tier I chairs have far higher h-indices than Tier II chairs. This is a careful multivariate analysis, not the caricatured bivariate crosstabulation that Usher accuses us of.

Usher then moves on to a second charge. “There is a second massive problem with using H-index to compare individual scholars,” he adds. “Different scholarly cultures produce different patterns of scholarly publication. In the humanities, for instance, scholars are more likely to communicate via monographs (not captured by standard bibliometrics) than by articles..."

The only problem with the above is that we explicitly controlled for discipline. Not only for research council (SSHRC, NSERC, CIHR) but for 178 subdisciplines, which we modelled using fixed effects. We also use standardized h-indices to account for a non-normal pattern of distribution on the outcome measure. This was in turn compared with American data on promotions (also controlling for discipline and length of career), revealing very similar results...It is astounding that any serious critic could say that we were unaware of these dynamics.

In fact, at the same stage of career, in the same discipline, female, Black, and Indigenous chairs have less research impact than male or White or Asian chairs. This kind of knee-jerk response reflects extremely poorly on an industry professional who claims to have worked with numbers.

False accusations of racism are not virtuous, but harm those they are intended to help...

It speaks volumes about the culture of ideological conformity in this industry that someone so highly placed could make grandiose normative claims on the basis of such basic mistakes."

https://t.co/wwn7scaNEm

[Jonathan Barazzutti @JBarazzu]

@lokitekone Imagine someone claiming the paper is “gutter social science” and then listing off “problems” clearly accounted for in the paper

[Eric Kaufmann @epkaufm]

1/ OUR NEW REPORT: EQUITY REDUCES EXCELLENCE. Jason Arday was not an aberration. He was a feature, not a bug, of a system that replaced merit with identity. Our new study of nearly 2,000 prestigious Canada Research Chairs provides the hard numbers. 🧵

[Jonathan Barazzutti @JBarazzu]

@peterboghossian What if I think the vast majority of people (including myself) wouldn’t be able to beat any of these animals in a fight?