Heterodox Academy

Formation	2015 (2015)
Founder	Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz and Jonathan Haidt
Location	New York
Membership	2,651 academics
Executive Director	Debra Mashek
Website	heterodoxacademy.org

Heterodox Academy is a non-profit organization which seeks to promote open inquiry and viewpoint diversity within institutions of higher learning. Their membership includes professors, graduate students, postdoctorals, and academic administrators.

History

In 2011, while giving a talk at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Haidt asked the 1000-person audience to raise their hands to show their political alignment, and estimated that, while 80% signified they were liberals, only three identified as conservative. He observed that, in similar situations, such a disparity is usually attributed to discrimination or a hostile climate. Although Haidt's talk was widely-discussed among his colleagues, he took a particular interest in a post by José Duarte, then a grad student at Arizona State University, describing how he had been denied a place at another PhD program due to his political views. The two decided to collaborate on a research study of political diversity within their field, along with other interested colleagues Jarret T. Crawford, Charlotta Stern, Lee Jussim, and Philip E. Tetlock. Their paper, "Political diversity will improve social psychological science", was published in the January 2015 edition of Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Around the time of the paper's release, Haidt was contacted by Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, a Georgetown University law professor, who shared a talk he'd given to an association of legal scholars called the Federalist Society in which Rosenkranz had discussed a similar disparity in intellectual diversity within his field. The two met in New York and decided to start an association of faculty which would support political diversity. It was Rosenkranz that suggested the name "Heterodox Academy". They invited Haidt's co-authors from the research study, as well as Chris Martin from Emory University, who had also published an article on the subject. Initial funding for the group came from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation and The Achelis and Bodman Foundation.

The Heterodox Academy website was launched with 25 members in September 2015. In the wake of campus freedom of speech controversies such as those surrounding Erika Christakis at Yale and the 2015–16 University of Missouri protests, the membership grew and the website became "a clearinghouse for data and views on academic bias, scientific integrity, and the latest campus free-speech flaps."

In June 2018, Heterodox Academy held an inaugural Open Mind Conference in New York City, featuring several academic guests recently involved in campus free speech or viewpoint diversity issues, like Robert Zimmer, Lucía Martínez Valdivia, Allison Stanger, Alice Dreger, and Heather Heying.

Membership

Membership was initially open to tenured and pre-tenure professors, but has been expanded to adjunct professors, graduate students, and postdoctorals. The group has a selective membership application process, which has led to the rejection of a few undesirable applicants. They also actively recruit to address imbalances toward any particular political ideology. In July 2017, the group had 800 members from across the political spectrum and located throughout the USA and internationally. The smallest number of members are those that consider themselves conservative/right; most are moderates/centrists, liberals, or progressives.

By February 2018, over 1500 college professors had joined Heterodox Academy, along with a couple hundred graduate students. As of February 2019, the organization reported that it had over 2,600 academic members and over 350 graduate affiliates.

Notable members of the Heterodox Academy include:

• Jonathan Haidt (founder, social psychologist)
• Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz (founder, law professor)
• Lee Jussim (social psychologist)
• Philip E. Tetlock (political science writer and professor)
• John McWhorter (linguistics professor)
• Daniel Gilbert (social psychologist)
• Steven Pinker (cognitive psychologist)
• Nadine Strossen (law professor, former president of the ACLU)
• Vernon Smith (economist, Nobel Memorial Prize laureate)
• Jack Citrin (political scientist)
• Nicholas A. Christakis (sociologist)
• Robert P. George (legal scholar)

Goals and outreach

Heterodox Academy's goal is to broaden the diversity of opinions on college and university campuses. The group's website describes its outlook and its rationale for their mission as follows: "When nearly everyone in a field shares the same political orientation, certain ideas become orthodoxy, dissent is discouraged, and errors can go unchallenged."

To directly engage students, the Heterodox Academy created a "Viewpoint Diversity Experience" designed "to prepare students for democratic citizenship and success in the political diverse workplaces they will soon inhabit." Due to strong interest by corporations, non-profits and civic organizations in this tool, the "Viewpoint Diversity Experience" eventually evolved into a separate organization, OpenMind.

The group is also known for their Guide to Colleges – a college ranking guide in which 150 prominent universities and colleges are rated on their level of support of ideological diversity and free speech based on each school's internal regulations, incidents of censorship, and the ratings of other First Amendment-supporting groups. Due to internal concerns about the reliability of the guide and the metrics it relied on, Heterodox Academy chose to take down the Guide in early 2019, and are working on an alternative method for evaluating and comparing institutional support for academic freedom and viewpoint diversity.

Criticism and controversy

In a 2015 cover story for The Atlantic, Heterodox Academy co-founder Jonathan Haidt and FIRE President Greg Lukianoff argued that many of the current campus controversies seem to be resultant from a new cohort of students, iGen, achieving a critical mass within institutions of higher learning. In their telling, upper-middle class children from this generation have been overly-supervised, managed and catered to throughout their childhood, leaving them unable to properly deal with conflict, failure or other forms of adversity. In a subsequent essay on the Heterodox Academy site, Haidt argued that another defining trait of this cohort is a culture of victimhood, which expresses itself in, for instance, attempts to seek bureaucratic remedies to interpersonal disputes. Consequently, it was asserted, contemporary students do not value free speech in the same manner as previous cohorts.

Some commentators have analogized these concerns to a moral panic. Others, including The New York Observer's Davis Richardson and The Chronicle of Higher Education's Chris Quinta, have disputed the assertion that college campuses are facing a "free-speech crisis", noting the lack of data to support it and arguing that advocacy groups such as Heterodox Academy functionally do more to narrow the scope of academic debates than any of the biases they allege. Jonathan Haidt and Heterodox Academy's research director Sean Stevens attempted to respond to these criticisms in a series of posts on the website. Jonathan Haidt and Andrew Sullivan later debated prominent critics Jeffrey Adam Sachs and Suzanne Nossel about the extent to which there is a "crisis" of free speech on campus. Following the debate, Sachs conceded that there did seem to be a shift among some students on speech issues in recent years. However, he argued, this was likely tied to passions about the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election rather than a change in generational attitudes -- as evidenced by the steep decline in these events as we have moved further away from that election cycle. However, he credited Heterodox Academy with playing a constructive role in helping to bridge political differences.

Vox has described Heterodox Academy as advancing an argument that political correctness was a major problem on college campuses; Heterodox Academy objected to that characterization and accused the piece making it of inaccuracies and bias.

Heterodox Academy has formally condemned the Turning Points USA "Professor Watchlist." The organization's leadership has spoken out against attempts by some Republicans to legislate or otherwise impose ideological diversity on colleges or universities. Articles on the site have highlighted the political firings of left leaning faculty, criticized donor agreements by right-aligned patrons that seemed to undermine academic freedom, and condemned the right-aligned 'industry' targeting universities and professors. Nonetheless, some have alleged that Heterodox Academy has provided ammunition for these actors and their efforts by playing into or presenting the argument that such views are suppressed by left-wing bias.

See also

• Chicago principles
• Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
• Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship

External links

• Heterodox Academy website