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Heterodox Academy

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Heterodox Academy
AbbreviationHxA
Formation2015; 9 years ago (2015)
FoundersJonathan Haidt, Chris C. Martin, and Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz
Type501(c)3 organization
82-2903153
Location
President
John Tomasi[1]
Interim Executive Director
Manon Loustaunau
Chair, Board of Directors
Jonathan Haidt[2]
Websiteheterodoxacademy.org Edit this at Wikidata

Heterodox Academy (HxA) is a nonprofit advocacy group of academics working to counteract what they see as a lack of viewpoint diversity on college campuses. The organization was founded in 2015 by Jonathan Haidt, Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, and Chris Martin, who each cited a lack of politically conservative viewpoints in their academic disciplines. As of 2023, the organization had approximately 5,000 members in both faculty and non-faculty positions.

History

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In 2011, Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, gave a talk at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in which he argued that American conservatives were underrepresented in social psychology and that this hinders research and damages the field's credibility.[3][4] In 2015, Haidt was contacted by Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, a Georgetown University law professor, who had given a talk to the Federalist Society discussing a similar lack of conservatives in law and similarly argued that this undermines the quality of research and teaching.[4] Haidt was also contacted by Chris C. Martin, a sociology graduate student at Emory University, who had published a similar paper in The American Sociologist about the lack of ideological diversity in sociology.[5][6] Haidt, Martin, and Rosenkranz formed "Heterodox Academy" to address this issue.[7][8][9]

Initial funding for the group came from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation and The Achelis and Bodman Foundation.[4] The Heterodox Academy website was launched with 25 members in September 2015. A series of campus freedom of speech controversies, such as those surrounding Erika Christakis at Yale University and the 2015–2016 University of Missouri protests, coincided with an increase in membership.[4]

Membership was initially open to tenured and pre-tenure professors, but has been expanded to a range of other faculty ranks (including career/full-time as well as adjunct/part-time), and even non-faculty positions such as graduate students and postdoctorals. Initially, the group had a selective membership application process which is partly intended to address imbalances toward any particular political ideology.[4] In 2017, Heterodox Academy had about 800 total members.[4][10] By 2018, about 1,500 professors had joined, along with a couple hundred graduate students.[11]

In 2018, Debra Mashek, a professor of psychology at Harvey Mudd College, was appointed as the executive director of Heterodox Academy, a position which she held until 2020, after which an interim executive director was appointed.[11][12][13] In 2020, the organization had around 4,000 members.[14] John Tomasi, a political philosopher at Brown University, became the first president of Heterodox Academy in 2022. As of 2023, total membership was approximately 5,000.[15]

Programs and activities

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In 2016 and 2017, Heterodox Academy published an annual Heterodox Academy Guide to Colleges, a ranking based on "political conformity and orthodoxy".[16]

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 issues, like Robert Zimmer, Lucía Martínez Valdivia, Allison Stanger, Alice Dreger, and Heather Heying.[17][18]

The organization administers a "Campus Expression Survey", designed to allow professors and college administrators to survey their students' feelings about freedom of expression on campus.[19]

Ideology and reception

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Heterodox Academy describes itself as non-partisan.[12] In 2018, the group's website described its mission as encouraging political diversity to allow dissent and challenge errors.[12]

In a study responding to Heterodox Academy's contentions of bias against conservative professors, Jeffrey Adam Sachs, a professor of political science at Canada's Acadia University, found that liberal professors were more often dismissed for their speech than were conservative professors.[20] According to Vox's Zack Beauchamp, Heterodox Academy advances conservative viewpoints on college campuses by ignoring the data and arguing that such views are suppressed by left-wing bias or political correctness.[21] In the same 2019 article, Beauchamp disputes Heterodox Academy's contention 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.[21]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "The Team at Heterodox Academy". Heterodox Academy. Retrieved August 21, 2023.
  2. ^ "Board of Directors". Heterodox Academy. Retrieved 28 January 2022.
  3. ^ Tierney, John (February 7, 2011). "Social Scientist Sees Bias Within". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 9 August 2014. Retrieved March 9, 2019.
  4. ^ a b c d e f Goldstein, Evan R. (June 11, 2017). "The Gadfly: Can Jonathan Haidt Calm the Culture Wars?". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol. 63, no. 40 (published July 7, 2017). pp. B6–9. Archived from the original on May 4, 2019. Retrieved March 6, 2019.
  5. ^ Jonathan Haidt (June 20, 2019). 2019 HxA Open Inquiry Awards. New York: Heterodox Academy. Retrieved January 11, 2022.
  6. ^ "The Well-Meaning Bad Ideas Spoiling a Generation". Nautilus | Science Connected. 2019-03-06. Retrieved 2022-01-28.
  7. ^ Rauch, Jonathan (2021). The Constitution of Knowledge. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press. p. 317. ISBN 9780815738862.
  8. ^ Wehner, Eric (May 24, 2020). "Jonathan Haidt Is Trying to Heal America's Divisions". The Atlantic. Retrieved January 15, 2022.
  9. ^ "In College Classrooms, A Spreading Silence On Hot-Button Topics". John Templeton Foundation. Retrieved January 16, 2022. Heterodox Academy was founded in 2015 by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, sociologist Chris Martin, and legal scholar Nicholas Rosenkranz because all three worried that a lack of ideological diversity within their disciplines was impacting the quality of research
  10. ^ Belkin, Douglas (June 24, 2017). "Colleges Pledge Tolerance for Diverse Opinions, But Skeptics Remain". The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on June 27, 2017. Retrieved March 4, 2019.
  11. ^ a b Friedersdorf, Conor (February 6, 2018). "A New Leader in the Push for Diversity of Thought on Campus". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on May 25, 2018. Retrieved May 24, 2018.
  12. ^ a b c Lerner, Maura (April 24, 2018). "Nurturing a new diversity on campus: 'Diversity of thought'". Star Tribune. Archived from the original on May 24, 2018. Retrieved May 24, 2018.
  13. ^ "Deb Mashek, PhD". LinkedIn. Retrieved 28 January 2022.
  14. ^ Wehner, Peter (May 24, 2020). "Jonathan Haidt Is Trying to Heal America's Divisions". The Atlantic. Retrieved July 27, 2020.
  15. ^ Bartlett, Tom (January 9, 2023). "How Heterodox Academy Hopes to Change the Campus Conversation". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Archived from the original on January 9, 2023. Retrieved August 21, 2023.
  16. ^ Richardson, Bradford (October 24, 2016). "Harvard among least intellectually diverse universities: Report". The Washington Times. Archived from the original on 25 May 2018. Retrieved May 24, 2018.
  17. ^ Rubenstein, Adam (June 22, 2018). "Heterodoxy Now". The Weekly Standard. Archived from the original on 2 March 2019. Retrieved 1 March 2019.
  18. ^ Bartlett, Tom (June 21, 2018). "A Conference's Recipe for 'Viewpoint Diversity': More Free Play, More John Stuart Mill". The Chronicle of Higher Education. New York. Archived from the original on 2 March 2019. Retrieved 1 March 2019.
  19. ^ Mikics, David (July 21, 2019). "The High Priest of Heterodoxy". Tablet. New York, New York. Retrieved July 28, 2020.
  20. ^ Quintana, Chris (April 30, 2018). "The Real Free-Speech Crisis Is Professors Being Disciplined for Liberal Views, a Scholar Finds". The Chronicle of Higher Education. ISSN 0009-5982. Archived from the original on 6 March 2023. Retrieved February 28, 2019.
  21. ^ a b Beauchamp, Zack (August 31, 2018). "The myth of a campus free speech crisis". Vox. Archived from the original on 1 March 2019. Retrieved February 28, 2019.
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