Welcome
We are a politically diverse group of social scientists, natural scientists, humanists, and other scholars who want to improve our academic disciplines and universities.
We share a concern about a growing problem: the loss or lack of “viewpoint diversity.” When nearly everyone in a field shares the same political orientation, certain ideas become orthodoxy, dissent is discouraged, and errors can go unchallenged.
To reverse this process, we have come together to advocate for a more intellectually diverse and heterodox academy.
Recent Blog Posts
Scott Lilienfeld on Micro-Aggressions, and The Goldwater Rule
Scott Lilienfeld is professor of psychology at Emory University. Here, he talks about his 2016 article evaluating the psychological literature on micro-aggressions and his 2017 article about revoking the Goldwater rule. Scott is an Association for Psychological Science fellow, and he has published numerous studies in personality psychology, social psychology, political psychology, and clinical psychology. He also has an interest in debunking popular myths. His popular books include Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience and 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology.
Timeline:
1:06 The history behind Scott’s micro-aggressions critique
7:01 Two big weaknesses in research studies
15:23 Real-world implications
20:05 Reactions to the article
26:05 The Goldwater Rule, and revoking it in 2017
You can learn more Scott Lilienfeld at his website.
A gated copy of his paper on micro-aggressions, entitled “Microaggressions: Strong claims, inadequate evidence” is here.
And it is summarized in this
The Greater Male Variability Hypothesis – An Addendum to our post on the Google Memo
In this addendum we focus on the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis - the idea that men are more variable than women on a variety of abilities, interests, and personality traits - and the possibility that males are overrepresented in the upper and lower tails of such distributions. This hypothesis was first proposed by Ellis over 100 years ago, in 1894. It is also the hypothesis that Lawrence Summers was referring to in 2005 when, at the National Bureau of Economic Research Conference, he weighed in on the gender gap in STEM professions. Read more →
I Don’t Care if Amy Wax Is Politically Incorrect; I Do Care that She’s Empirically Incorrect
I was one of the 33 members of the University of Pennsylvania Law School faculty to sign a letter criticizing Amy Wax’s (joint with Larry Alexander) op-ed and subsequent comments regarding the decline of bourgeois culture and its role in America’s perceived social ills. Was this the predictable response of a morally squishy, politically correct, ivory tower academic lefty who is unwilling to endorse unspeakable truths for fear of being bounced from faculty cocktail parties? I can understand this presumption, but, in my case, I prefer going to my kids’ football games to chatting about Derrida over wine and cheese anyway... [I believe that] Wax’s arguments come up lacking when judged by rigorous empirics. Read more →
In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values
Since 2015 we’ve seen an increase in petitions and movements to denounce professors. Typically a professor says or writes something, then a group of students protests. The students demand that the professor be censured or renounced by the university administration, or by his or her colleagues. The event is amplified by social media and by secondary, agenda-driven news outlets, pressuring other professors to take sides and declare themselves publicly. (There is a different script for pressure from right-wing sources off-campus).The two highest profile cases so far involved Erika and Nicholas Christakis, at Yale, and Bret Weinstein, at Evergreen. We also had the case of Rebecca Tuvel, a philosopher at Rhodes College, in which the pressure campaign did not come from students but rather from other professors. In all of these cases the professor in question was on the left politically, and had said something that most professors did not find offensive. As far as I can tell, most professors outside of the immediate conflict zone supported the accused professors, thought it was inappropriate to subject them to punishment of any kind for what they said or wrote, and thought that these denunciation campaigns ultimately reflected badly on the academy.Now, in late August, we have a case that may play out differently because the professor in question is a conservative who has made a conservative argument about poverty and culture. She made the argument a few days before the events in Charlottesville. Students at Penn have demanded that the university denounce her, and many of her colleagues did so. Read more →
Weekly Roundup of Heterodoxy—September 1, 2017 Edition
At Heterodox Academy
UPDATED: The Google Memo: What Does the Research Say About Gender Differences? by Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt
Praising the UC Berkeley Chancellor Statement on Free Speech by Jeremy Willinger
Elsewhere on the Web
A Conversation with Mark Lilla on His Critique of Identity Politics by David Remnick, The New Yorker
The Academic Spirit is Alive and Well at MU by Justin B. Dyer & Jeffrey L. Pasley, The Kansas City Star
Why I’m Leaving the American Political Science Association by Bruce Gilley, Minding the Campus
Universities are Unpopular Because of Bad News from Ivy League Schools by Kim Wilcox, chancellor of the University of California, Riverside, Newsweek
Some Thoughts and Advice for Our Students and All Students by scholars at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale
Free Speech on Campus? Not for Adjunct Faculty, It Seems by Kellie Bancalari, USA TODAY
... Read more →Praising the UC Berkeley Chancellor Statement on Free Speech
New UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ issued a powerful statement on the value of free speech on campus to students, faculty, and staff. Many points echo both the mission of Heterodox Academy and the sources we use as inspiration. Read more →
Weekly Roundup of Heterodoxy—August 25, 2017 Edition
At Heterodox Academy
The Implications of Charlottesville by Jonathan Haidt
Introducing BridgeUSA: Our Student Partners by Roge Karma, co-founder of BridgeUSA
The Most Authoritative Review Paper on Gender Differences by Sean Stevens
Rick Shweder on Multiculturalism and Diversity | Half Hour of Heterodoxy #8
Elsewhere on the Web
When ‘free speech’ becomes a political weapon by Jennifer Delton, Washington Post
Colleges grappling with balancing free speech, campus safety by Maria Danilova and Jocelyn Gecker, Washington Post
Universities can do more to curb hateful speech by Noah Feldman, Chicago Tribune
Auburn University ‘Critical Conversations” series kicks off Sept. 1 by Kara Coleman, Opelika-Auburn News
Universities can learn from conservatives’ love of humanities by Elliot Kaufman, National Review
Read more →
The Most Authoritative Review Paper on Gender Differences
By Sean Stevens (HxA Research Director) and Jonathan Haidt (HxA Director)
This blog post is a supplement to our main post: The Google Memo: What Does the Research Say About Gender Differences? Please do read at least the introduction to that post before continuing.
As we have scanned the literature to find the major meta-analyses and the most authoritative review articles, we have found one review article that stands above all others, in part for its depth and scope (it is 41 pages long), but especially for its authorship. It was written by a group of psychology’s top experts on these topics, a group that was put together to ensure a diversity of opinion among the authors. The first author is Diane Halpern, a professor emerita at Claremont McKenna College, former president of the American Psychological Association, and the author of the book Sex Differences... Read more →
The Implications of Charlottesville
Like everyone else, I’ve been thinking a lot about the events in Charlottesville last week, and President Trump’s comments about those events. I taught at UVA for 16 years and I lived a few blocks East of Emancipation Park (back when it was called “Lee Park”). I share in the horror felt by my friends and former neighbors that neo-Nazis, the KKK, terrorism, and death came to our lovely town.... To explain why I thought “very fine people” could be a turning point, I wrote an essay for The Atlantic in which I analyzed the whole affair through the lens of my research on moral psychology—specifically the psychology of sacredness, taboo, and contamination. I showed how the psychology of sacredness could explain why the alt-right would march to defend a statue, why UVA students would risk their lives to defend another statue, and why the President’s delays and equivocations in condemning white supremacists are likely to have longer-lasting effects than his previous taboo violations. ... What are the implications of Charlottesville for universities, and for those of us who believe that viewpoint diversity is a good thing, and who believe that we need more of it on many campuses? There are many, and its going to take us a while to work them all out. I have no time to write this week, but I just wanted to raise a few points briefly, as markers for future posts. Read more →
Introducing BridgeUSA: Our Student Partners
While we may have different areas of focus and different constituencies, BridgeUSA and Heterodox Academy (HxA) share the same fundamental goal: to bring about the vision of a truly heterodox university. Read more →
Mission
To increase viewpoint diversity in the academy.
Featured Posts
- The Google Memo: What Does the Research Say About Gender Differences?
- HxA Membership Surpasses 1,000 Professors
- HxA releases updated Guide to Colleges
- Announcing the Viewpoint Diversity Experience
- Van Jones’ excellent metaphors about the dangers of ideological safety
- Why progressive professors should join HxA, especially now
- HxA top ten blog posts from 2016
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