Welcome to Heterodox Academy - Heterodox Academy

Why is HxA Necessary?

In order to address society’s most intractable problems, learners must weave together the best ideas from a range of perspectives.

In many fields, scholars’ backgrounds and commitments are insufficiently diverse. As a result, important questions and ideas may go unexplored, key assumptions can go unchallenged, and the natural human tendencies towards motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and tribalism can go unchecked. This undermines research quality and the impartiality of peer review; it can also corrupt committee decisions about admissions, hiring, promotion, and curriculum design. Simultaneously, institutional policies, procedures and incentive models of colleges and universities are changing. The needs, priorities and expectations among new cohorts of students are evolving — even as the political climate in the United States (and beyond) has grown increasingly polarized and toxic. The result is a highly-combustible campus environment. Professors and students alike describe the toll self-censoring and the ever-present threat of social or bureaucratic censure have taken on learning, discovery, and growth.

These problems have not gone unnoticed by lawmakers, the media, or the general public. Many fields and institutions where these trends are most pronounced have faced declining enrollments and budget cuts. Meanwhile, trust in universities, expertise, and scientific research has eroded — reducing the impact and continued viability of many lines of inquiry.

What Does HxA Do?

As a collaborative of academic insiders, we are deeply committed to the continued flourishing of colleges and universities — and deeply concerned about the current state of affairs, which is not sustainable. We aspire to help chart a different path forward by:

Increasing public awareness of these issues, to spur action among faculty, staff, students, alumni and donors;
Conducting, disseminating and facilitating research to better understand the nature of the challenges facing institutions of higher learning — and how they can be effectively addressed;
Developing tools and resources that professors, administrators, and others can deploy to assess and then improve their own pedagogical, disciplinary and broader campus cultures;
Cultivating communities of practice among teachers, researchers, and administrators to help accelerate the process of reform; and
Identifying and celebrating institutions that make progress on these matters.

Key Tools & Resources:

A self-report tool you can use to assess which students are feeling intimidated to speak up about which topics and why.

An interactive, psychology-based platform designed to depolarize campuses and foster mutual understanding across differences.

LATEST BLOG POSTS

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- The Hidden Consensus on Free Expression
  For the past year, I have been working with an interdisciplinary team of collaborators to study free expression issues at my home institution, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This week, we made our findings public in the form of an extensive report, now available online. Our effort is distinctive in that it tries to gather information about students’ on-the-ground experiences in college. Other analyses have tried to speak to the status of free speech in colleges and universities by cataloging firings, speaker disinvitations, and so forth. Or they have asked students general questions, such as about whether “the climate on my campus prevents some people from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.” These efforts leave a lot of gaps in our understanding of what students experience on a day-to-day basis. For instance, if a student feels the “climate” is problematic, what do they have in mind? To improve our answers to such questions, my colleagues and I administered a survey to all UNC undergraduates and received 1,087 complete responses. (A random sample of students were offered a $10 incentive to respond, which helped make sure we wouldn’t only hear from disgruntled students.) One important feature of our survey was that we randomly chose one class from each respondent’s Fall 2018 schedule, and ask detailed questions about it. Doing this helps us understand what happens in the typical UNC classroom. What did we learn? Well, for starters, UNC faculty come across—at least to my eye—as favorably oriented toward free expression issues. Students who identify as both liberal and conservative generally seemed to think well of their instructors’ efforts to include a broad range of views in discussions. Focusing specifically on classes where politics became a topic of conversation, only 2 percent of liberal respondents and 11 percent of conservative respondents disagreed that “the instructor encouraged participation from liberals and conservatives alike.” In other ways, however, the experiences of liberal and conservative students seem to diverge. Again, focusing on classes that discussed politics, fifty percent of conservative respondents indicated some concern that their course instructor would have a lower opinion of them if they stated their “sincere political views.” Only thirteen percent of liberal respondents had this concern. Seventy-five percent of conservative students were concerned that peers would have a lower opinion of them. Only twenty-six percent of liberal respondents had this concern. Perhaps stemming from these anxieties, conservative students were more likely to hold their views back. We asked, “about how many times did you keep an opinion related to class to yourself because you were worried about the potential consequences of expressing that opinion?” Seventy-six percent of liberals indicated that they “never” kept an opinion to themselves; only thirty-two percent of conservatives indicated that they never did so. Thirty percent of conservatives said that they kept an opinion to themselves at least six times during the semester. Only two percent of liberal students said so. These are large divides. Other aspects of the report examine things that happen outside of class. These, too, highlight ways in which the experience of liberal and conservative students at UNC seem to diverge. We asked, “about how often do you hear someone at UNC make disrespectful, inappropriate, or offensive comments” about each of twelve identity groups on campus: men, women, whites, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Students born outside the US, Christians, Muslims, LGBT individuals, political liberals, and political conservatives. In the ensuing analysis, “political conservatives” really stand out as a target of inappropriate comments. In fact, our liberal, moderate, and conservative respondents all indicated hearing inappropriate comments about “political conservatives” more than any of the other groups we asked about. Several aspects of our report (including others not discussed here) highlight how conservative students at UNC face challenges that liberal students do not. And the early coverage of our report has focused largely on that series of conclusions. One might then construe us as intending to score a point for a common conservative take on free expression flare-ups that have dogged so many colleges and universities in recent years: that young conservative students face an overtly hostile environment at colleges and universities. As we say emphatically in the report, that reading of what we did is wrong. A careful reading of our results suggests a hidden cross-ideological consensus on free expression issues. Consider what we learned from various measures assessing willingness to engage with opposing views: We asked whether students from the ideological outgroup are an “important part of the campus community.” A substantial majority of liberal respondents (73 percent) and conservative respondents (86 percent) indicated that they are. We asked whether it is appropriate to obstruct a speaker with whom one disagrees. Noticeably more liberals (19 percent) than moderates or conservatives (both 3 percent) said it was appropriate to do so. But majorities in all three ideological groupings said that obstructing a speaker was not appropriate. We asked whether UNC provides too many, too few, or about the right number of opportunities for students to have outside speakers visit campus and articulate liberal perspectives. And we asked the same question about conservative perspectives. Among our liberal respondents, more said that there were too few opportunities to hear conservative perspectives (37 percent) than said there too many (16 percent). And more said that there were too few opportunities to hear conservative perspectives (again, 37 percent) than said there were too few opportunities to hear liberal perspectives (22 percent). Looking at patterns like these, it seems wrong to think of free expression on college campuses as a topic that must pit liberals against conservatives. At UNC, at least, many liberals and conservatives seem to want an environment where they can learn about and engage with views with which they disagree. I, for one, hope that students, faculty, and administrators alike renew our efforts to make sure that this hidden consensus does not get lost amidst the noise. Timothy J. Ryan is an associate professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As an organization that prizes pluralism and disagreement — with more than 3k members holding diverse views on most issues — Heterodox Academy almost never takes positions as an organization on current events and controversies. Opinions expressed here are those of the author(s). Publication does not imply endorsement by Heterodox Academy or any of its members. We encourage readers to follow us and take part in the conversations on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — or join an HxCommunity — to weigh in on this or other posts.... Read more...
- “Splitting” and Identity Politics
  A few years ago, I provided psychotherapy to a 20-year-old White female college student whom we’ll call ‘Amanda.’ She had regular conflicts with her parents. She was irritable, unfocused, and depressed — and had little energy for much outside of surfing the web and brooding in her room. She smoked pot regularly. She had friends, but felt socially isolated. At first, our sessions focused on her depression, but she took frequent detours toward politics and race. She was fixated on police shootings, institutional racism, and microaggressions. She “loved” Malcolm X and railed against White privilege. Then, one day, she told me that she “identified” as Black. She didn’t know where her ancestors came from (“France? Sweden?… I don’t know.”), but she said she felt “Black on the inside” because she “got it” and wasn’t ignorant or hateful. Everything she said about Black people was idealizing and positive. They were always blameless, strong victims, smart and good. In contrast, everything she said about White people was aggressively critical and shaming. They were always ignorant oppressors, fragile, selfish, and guilty. One was framed as proud, the other as ashamed. One was omnipotent, with 100% of the power; the other had 0% of the power. One’s perspectives were always valid; the other’s were invalid…etc. This led me to believe that she “identified” as Black because Whiteness was loaded for her as intolerably negative, whereas being Black was appealing to her because it was idealized as perfect. At first, I was thrown off guard by these comments and unsure how to respond. If I asked her ‘Do you feel anything positive about your White identity,’ the question in itself would likely have provoked her. If I tried to point out any of her inconsistencies or double standards, I felt confident that she would have accused me of racism and possibly ended treatment. More to the point, I couldn’t think of anything I myself could say that was positive about White people that didn’t sound racist, even to my own ears. Nor could I think of a shortcoming in another ethnic group that didn’t similarly sound racist. This was shocking to me. Could it really be that everything positive about White people sounds racist? Even exploring the topic in my own thoughts was disconcerting and felt wrong somehow. As her therapist, I had a professional duty to try to help her reduce her symptoms, but what exactly did that mean here? I could have ignored her comments about race and tried to steer the conversation back to her parents. But would it have been racist to ignore these themes or would it have been racist to explore them? And what would most help Amanda? Additionally, there was the question of how Amanda should understand her racial identity. Maybe she should be free to see herself however she wanted. If she identified as Black, so be it. Or maybe that’s racist, or unhealthy. Should she seek out some healthy way to embrace her White identity? Or should the goal be to somehow reduce the importance of race? What is ‘Whiteness’ anyway? The case was riddled with pitfalls. I think this is in large part what people mean when they refer to ‘political correctness.’ It’s not that people are frustrated that they can’t say racist or sexist things anymore; it’s that often virtually any comment about race can be framed as racist. It’s maze without any escape. This tension was all the more palpable here because Amanda was exactly the kind of patient who would have loved to call me out as racist for asking the wrong question. She did this frequently with friends and her parents. If I made a comment she perceived as racist, it could have damaged our relationship and potentially impaired her care. Nonetheless, I did eventually find a framework for understanding Amanda—a construct called “splitting.” On Splitting Like many concepts in clinical psychology, the term “splitting” originated in psychoanalytic literature. First dubbed “splitting of the ego,” the concept was crucial to the theories of the eminent psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, and it was expanded by other prominent psychoanalysts, including Wilfred Bion and Otto Kernberg. Though the concept is still popular in psychoanalytic circles, “splitting” has since been embraced by mental health professionals throughout the field. Splitting is referenced widely in the literature on personality disorders, particularly Borderline Personality Disorder. The concept also plays an important role in many evidence-based forms of psychotherapy, such as Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). Simply put, splitting is the tendency to see things in black-and-white terms. One is either good or bad, a saint or a demon, perfect or worthless, all one thing or all the other. It’s called “splitting” because presumably intolerable thoughts and feelings are “split off” from one’s awareness, leading to a partial view of the world. To see our foes as pure evil, we have to split off the parts of them that are sympathetic, admirable, and well-intentioned. To see ourselves as purely righteous, we have to split off the parts of ourselves that are selfish, ignorant, and hypocritical. At the root of this process is the distress we often feel about contradictions. It can be painful to think that the people we idealize are flawed and the people we loathe have some virtues. It can be unnerving to accept that we have negative feelings toward the people we love or that the people who love us also have negative feelings towards us. In dysfunctional familial relationships, people often feel victimized and have difficulty acknowledging the role they play in victimizing others. It’s much more comfortable to see people as all-good or all-bad than to sit with these conflicts, nuances, and tensions. By pushing these conflicts out of awareness, splitting reduces anxiety, increases self-esteem, and makes the world appear simpler, more coherent, and more stable—at least in the short term. When people split, they often frame themselves as the good ones and others as the bad ones, but this isn’t always the case. Sometimes it’s easier to see oneself as bad and others as good than to acknowledge the messier truth. Many depressed and masochistic people can understand the appeal of seeing themselves as bad to reduce conflict, confusion, and anxiety. Splitting is also fundamentally interpersonal. When people split, they misunderstand themselves and their identities, and they also misperceive others. If someone sees themselves as motivated purely by love or justice, they’re probably denying their other, less savory motivations—be they based on narcissism, anger, or desire for economic gain, approval, or power. If they view people with whom they have disagreements as incomprehensible demons, they’re denying the fact that others nearly always have some positive motives and insights. Splitting is theorized to be entirely unconscious. By definition, people never know when they’re splitting. Instead, they think they’re seeing the unvarnished truth. Just as importantly, because splitting is unconscious, people never know why they’re splitting. They’re unaware of the uncomfortable mix of emotions that arose, created anxiety, and led them to feel the need to split off information and distort reality. They’re oblivious to the fact that they can’t tolerate the nuances of the situation. Typically splitting is contrasted with another psychological term, “ambivalence.” Healthy identities are ambivalent in that they involve an appreciation of one’s strengths and weaknesses, one’s ignorance and wisdom, beauty and ugliness—all held together in an integrated and coherent sense of self. Healthy relationships also involve ambivalence. Rather than idealizing others as perfect or demonizing them as evil, healthy relationships require that we see our loved ones with their admirable qualities along with their annoying foibles, frustrating shortcomings, and tragic struggles. As people mature, their capacity to tolerate ambivalence typically increases, and they split less. They begin to understand that problems rarely have easy answers, that most proposed solutions have pros and cons, that social and personal ills typically have multiple overlapping causes, and that there is a lot of information that one is always missing. These are often difficult things for younger people to appreciate, especially if they’re never taught them, which is one reason why teenagers and young adults are thought to split more than older adults. Instructors can help students resist these tendencies by better emphasizing the uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity surrounding many controversial topics. Splitting and Group Identity Because splitting is driven by anxiety about complex emotions, it is most likely to occur in the contexts that are the most emotionally charged, anxiety-provoking, and controversial. In the Victorian era, this may have involved issues of sex, but in our present era, the most loaded topics revolve around issues of group identity, particularly race, gender and sexuality. When most people discuss race, their demeanors shift, their voices change pitch; their body language and word choice takes on a different character—regardless of their political persuasion. The anxiety in the room is often palpable. This is precisely the context in which people are likely to split: they want moral and conceptual clarity, but instead they feel a confusing mix of conflicting emotions—empathic and ashamed, generous and angry, stifled, powerless, hurt, confused, afraid, sad, etc. For instance, in a racially ‘split’ worldview, White people tend to be associated exclusively with negative qualities such as racism and privilege — never positive qualities. And people of color can only be associated with positive qualities such as cultural strengths and innate talents, never anything negative. It’s not possible for both groups to have a mix of good and bad, blame and praise, guilt and credit. This simplistic worldview is emotionally containing because all the negativity is located in one group and all the positivity is located in the other. Because this reduces anxiety, it feels reasonable and “non-racist” to many people. In fact, accusations of “racism” are frequently leveled against speech that doesn’t split (i.e., doesn’t frame groups as all-good or all-bad). Empirical evidence rarely enters into these discussions because most people’s reasoning is driven by unconscious defense mechanisms. Splitting has a logic of its own that’s stronger than other forms of reasoning like an examination of empirical evidence. Splitting, driven by anxiety about complexity, is the chief reason why many instinctively oppose nuanced dialogue. If we can address the splitting, robust dialogue might be possible, and improved dialogue could, in turn, lead to better policies and healthier socio-political dynamics. Even more to the point, dialogue is unlikely to improve unless the defense of splitting is addressed directly. The problem isn’t just others splitting; it’s the splitting in ourselves. Most of us censor our own thoughts and feelings about race, especially controversial and anxiety-provoking thoughts. Many of us are afraid to even privately think about questions that we worry might have non-split answers. This shapes our identities and sense of right-and-wrong, real-and-false. With this in mind, much of the work of confronting splitting starts with us courageously engaging with our own feared thoughts, feelings, and experiences, and working through their implications. This means allowing ourselves to acknowledge taboo questions, thoughts, and feelings, so we can have more clarity and insight. Ideally, spaces in which people can dialogue with others about these thoughts can lead to better solutions to social problems, healthier relationships, and richer more complete identities. It’s unfortunate that virtually no such spaces are widely accessible at this time. To the extent that colleges and universities can become forums where these kinds of exchanges are not only possible but common – this would likely go a long way towards ameliorating America’s contemporary cultural and civic crises. Andrew Hartz is a postdoctoral fellow at Rose Hill Psychological Institute and has a private psychotherapy practice in New York City. As an organization that prizes pluralism and disagreement — with more than 3k members holding diverse views on most issues — Heterodox Academy almost never takes positions as an organization on current events and controversies. Opinions expressed here are those of the author(s). Publication does not imply endorsement by Heterodox Academy or any of its members. We encourage readers to follow us and take part in the conversations on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — or join an HxCommunity — to weigh in on this or other posts.... Read more...

Heterodox Academy

Why is HxA Necessary?

What Does HxA Do?

Key Tools & Resources:

LATEST BLOG POSTS

The Value of Heterodoxy in the Academy

“The whole educational process will be enriched and enlivened by a multiplicity of voices and perspectives.“
–Nadine Strossen

We welcome applications from academics, graduate students, and others.

Heterodox Academy

Why is HxA Necessary?

What Does HxA Do?

Key Tools & Resources:

LATEST BLOG POSTS

The Value of Heterodoxy in the Academy

“The whole educational process will be enriched and enlivened by a multiplicity of voices and perspectives.“ –Nadine Strossen

We welcome applications from academics, graduate students, and others.

“The whole educational process will be enriched and enlivened by a multiplicity of voices and perspectives.“
–Nadine Strossen