Tough choice faces the Heterodox Academy

Their raison d’être is an important one. Conservatives are vastly underrepresented among professors as compared to the public at large. The leftward tilt is especially marked in the arts, humanities, and law. Among administrators who engage with students, “liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-1,” according to data compiled by Sarah Lawrence College political scientist Samuel Abrams.

This monoculture and the censorious speech codes in place at hundreds of colleges and universities are chilling open discussion. According to a survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, 54% of students say they “have stopped themselves from sharing an opinion in class at some point since beginning college.”

It’s against this backdrop that Heterodox Academy was born, first as private correspondence between three scholars worried by the dearth of political diversity in their fields, then as a blog, and later as the membership collaborative of today.

The group has become a rare, promising bright spot on a gray academic landscape dominated by stifling orthodoxy, ideological imbalance, and smug self-satisfaction. But questions remain whether Heterodox Academy is truly up to the challenges of academic heterodoxy.

Its first annual conference, which I attended in June last year, garnered criticism from members and supporters about the lack of political diversity on display. Haidt himself conceded only three of the 28 panelists were on the ideological Right, and nearly all panelists came from prestigious Ivy League universities.

Others questioned whether an organization composed of academics and administrators could significantly reform the academy from the inside. Panelists broadly agreed that speakers shouldn’t get shouted down and professors shouldn’t get punished for teaching hot-button issues, but there was little self-reflection on how and to what extent academia is to blame for its woes. As Stephen Messenger wrote following last year’s conference, “If HxA were run like a normal business the first thing one would expect it to do is seek outside help. But so far, Heterodox Academy has done the opposite: restricting membership to those affiliated with institutions of higher learning, and stacking their conference almost entirely with professors and administrators.”

To its credit, Heterodox has been receptive to such concerns. Messenger’s “constructive criticism,” for example, was published on its official blog. Outside critics have likewise been invited to participate on panels and podcasts, and such engagement is undertaken in good faith.

This year’s conference offered little, however, to assuage certain worries. The conference was opened on June 20 with a keynote address by the president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, Lynn Pasquerella. Putatively titled “The Role of Liberal Education in Discerning the Truth in a Post-Truth Era,” Pasquerella’s speech included little discussion of truth and its importance to academic study, and was instead full of academic jargon and boilerplate about “equity,” “justice,” and “universal access to higher education.” Such pablum was paired with swipes at state legislators and critics of higher education for promoting “a false crisis narrative” and caring about such malevolent things as “return on investment” and employability. This is pretty standard fare from the president of a college advocacy organization with a Ph.D. from Brown, but it is not exactly heterodoxy.

The party line was toed yet more in the ensuing Q&A. Asked by New York Times columnist Jennifer Senior how the academy came to be held in such suspicion, Pasquerella placed the blame — surprise, surprise — on Ronald Reagan. When Senior pushed back, wondering how much “postmodernist” professors and some in the humanities were to blame for living in a “post-truth world,” Pasquerella conceded that “much of the problem is coming from inside the house,” only to obfuscate in her answer to a follow-up question from the audience about the difference between activist humanities departments, such as “gender studies,” and traditional liberal arts, saying uncritically that we need all of them.

The following panel, exploring “the relationship between viewpoint diversity and other aspects of diversity,” managed to feature even less heterodoxy. Several panelists, including Taffye Benson Clayton, vice president and associate provost of the Office of Inclusion and Diversity at Auburn University, spoke well and eloquently about their campuses’ experiences of bringing together diverse, disparate factions in constructive ways around viewpoint diversity. Clayton noted how Auburn had brought in Robert Shibley, executive director of FIRE, to teach on free speech and the First Amendment. Tony Banout of Interfaith Youth Core explained how his organization uses religious diversity as a starting point to promote ideological tolerance and understanding.

Treating differing opinions as part of a broader commitment to diversity can, in theory, help package your message to skeptical students and administrators. Yet the panel discussion served to subordinate the former to the latter, elevating the paternalizing diversity agenda now regnant in higher education above viewpoint diversity and vastly higher than inquiry or the pursuit of truth. Clayton explained her efforts at “setting an environment that says ‘It is absolutely okay to disagree, but let’s do that in ways that don’t challenge one’s humanity, or existence, or even their own lived experiences, their ideologies, etc.’” Granting primacy to feelings is an invitation to censorship, not serious discussion. Jennifer Collins Bloomquist, associate provost at Gettysburg College, went so far as to say that bias incidents are not “a freedom of expression issue.” Moderator Jamal Watson wanted to promote intellectual diversity but “at the same time, safeguard against hate speech.”

All were so agreed on this diversity agenda, in fact, that Alice Dreger, a breakout star from last year’s conference, asked if panelists could find something that they disagreed on. They could not. Perhaps Shibley, who was in attendance, should have been invited to explain what the First Amendment says about “hate speech” or “bias incidents.” Or perhaps someone familiar with the cogent analysis of The Coddling of the American Mind, co-authored by Haidt and FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff, could also have noted the myriad problems with training students to seek protection from hateful words.

Consideration of freedom of expression and open inquiry remained disappointing throughout the conference. Most discussion focused on the overwrought, superficial topic of “controversial outside speakers” rather than more substantive policies, dynamics, or mores affecting the academic environment. University of California, Berkeley Assistant Vice Chancellor Dan Mogulof spoke on the second morning about the violent riots that roiled the campus in February 2017, offering some constructive insights into his university’s experience but also plenty of mealy-mouthed appeasement of churlish students and professors. “Who am I to judge [a student’s] ‘lived experience’?” he reminisced.

In a breakout panel on the second day, “Is Open Inquiry Truly at Risk on Campus?,” nearly all debate was about speakers being shouted down and disrupted, with no reference given to the documented fact that hundreds of universities maintain restrictive speech codes that curtail speech, foreclose inquiry, and threaten research quality, and that these codes are routinely used to punish professors for simply participating in the scholarly enterprise. While doubting that there was a free speech and inquiry problem at universities, Inside Higher Ed editor Scott Jaschik expressed doubt that conservatives are committed to free speech themselves — apparently unaware that, if true, this is more evidence that free expression is at risk on campus.

Ironically, many of the issues affecting viewpoint diversity on campus went underexamined because of a lack of viewpoint diversity on the panels. There were more right-of-center panelists this year — I counted roughly eight — but there were also 54 total panelists, about twice as many as last year. To their credit, there were more religious perspectives and more representatives from non-Ivy League universities, state colleges, and even community colleges. And the New York Times’ David Brooks, a pro-Obama, pro-reparations conservative, gave a terrific, stirring keynote speech on the soul-shaping power and mission of higher education. (To date, it is the only speech I’ve ever heard featuring quotes from Oakeshott, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Taylor Swift.)

Still, there remained a conspicuous lack of critical voices, particularly conservative ones, perspectives which could have elevated discussion and better served Heterodox’s mission. One wonders how John McAdams, a Marquette University political science professor who had to sue his university to be reinstated after he was fired over a dispute stemming from his views on gay marriage, or Bruce Gilley, a tenured Portland State University professor who was investigated over an academic journal article he wrote, would have contributed to the panel debating whether open inquiry is truly at risk on campus. Or perhaps Patrick Deneen, University of Notre Dame political theorist and author of the best-selling polemic Why Liberalism Failed, who is the definition of heterodox. More names come to mind, such as Warren Treadgold, Saint Louis University history professor and author of The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education, Stanford University’s Niall Ferguson, or even Frank Furedi or Sir Roger Scruton from the U.K.

Outside the academy, National Review’s David French, Harvard Law graduate, former president of FIRE, and prominent conservative Christian, would have been a perfect fit for the diversity panel (or any of them, really). There is no better defender of liberal education living than Peter Berkowitz, Hoover Institution fellow and Yale Ph.D.; pairing him and Pasquerella on the topic of liberal education and its purposes would have been illuminating, civil viewpoint diversity. Stanley Kurtz, Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow and co-author of the much-discussed Goldwater Institute model free speech legislation, would have made for a lively participant, as well.

What these names have in common, more than most being on the ideological Right, is that they are all critical of major aspects of higher education and point at real differences and disagreements not commonly reflected on campus. The elephant in the room is that many of these charges are directed at liberal professors and administrators, groups whom Heterodox is, laudably, trying to win over to its cause. Not many chief diversity officers or college association presidents will want to attend a conference or join a coalition they feel puts them in the crosshairs. But rehabilitation is never painless, and the reality is that if Heterodox Academy truly wants to remedy campus ills, some fingers must be pointed and some people made uncomfortable.

Instead, administrators and diversity officers were granted uncritical hearing at the same conference that gave Sam Abrams a “Courage Award.” Abrams, a Sarah Lawrence professor and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (where I used to work as a research assistant), spent much of this year weathering a warrantless firestorm after he published a New York Times op-ed recounting data on the ideological imbalance of campus administrators (quoted above). For this affront to orthodoxy, Abrams’ office was vandalized, his reputation maligned, including by fellow faculty, and he was abandoned by his craven administration. Sarah Lawrence President Cristle Judd even insinuated that Abrams brought these attacks upon himself, alleging his op-ed created a “hostile work environment.” Yet at the conference, only Steven Pinker and Abrams himself noted the costs bloated administrations and university bureaucracies impose to free speech and scholarly inquiry.

Of course, an annual conference is not the sum of an organization’s parts. Heterodox’s research and development capacity, for which it recently received a $2.8 million grant from the right-leaning John Templeton Foundation, is an invaluable asset to anyone interested in measuring higher education climate and viewpoint diversity. This year, they became host to the Gallup-Knight Foundation survey data on campus free expression, further improving the group’s ability to appraise these problems (and successes) on campus. And Heterodox’s existence as a membership organization linking those professors and students who remain committed to the classically liberal ideals of civil discourse and epistemic discovery is arguably its most valuable contribution still.

But the Heterodoxy Academy conference, as the most prominent public gathering, does reveal its trickiest problem. Heterodox is attempting to convince people in authority at universities to expand viewpoint diversity and open inquiry, while at the same time trying to ward off the attacks of those who depict it, falsely, as a right-wing front organization trying to destroy academia. Naturally, this approach means leading with honey rather than vinegar, courting those who are amendable rather than critiquing those who are at fault. It’s an understandable, reasonable, even worthwhile tactic, and affords them relationships and access to universities (and their data) they would not otherwise receive.

Yet, the two conferences augur a looming reality. If Heterodox truly wishes to bring about change in line with its stated principles, there will inevitably come a time for choosing: between comfortable quibbles and true heterodoxy, between administrators and professors, between consensus building within the academy and critical conversations about the academy.

Haidt speaks masterfully about how universities can have only one telos: truth or social justice. At some point, the choice for Heterodox Academy will come to this: diversity, equity, and inclusion, or open inquiry and the pursuit of truth. I do not mean diversity, equity, or inclusion as values or principles, which are of universal import; I mean the stifling, infantilizing, bureaucratic agenda that has come to suffocate and overwhelm every facet of university and academic life, dragooning all else into service of its dogmatic mission. The pursuit of truth is impossible if there is no right or wrong, if all disagreement must be forestalled so that all (non-conservative) perspectives feel included, if bureaucrats cowed by students can tell professors what they can and cannot research and punish all dissent. Heterodox Academy and its members may believe this; many of those they are courting do not.

Suffice to say, Heterodox Academy is in an unenviable position, but a crucial one. Those of us outside the academy who wish to restore higher education from its present infirmities, particularly those of us on the Right, will need the aid of some from within. Heterodox Academy, admirably, is open to that task. They just might need some help sticking to it.

J. Grant Addison is deputy editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine.