JUNE 9, 2026, NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Heterodox Academy (HxA), a non-partisan, non-profit membership organization committed to building cultures of open inquiry on campuses, today announced the winners of its annual Open Inquiry Awards.

At a moment when universities must lead reform from within, HxA's Open Inquiry Awards recognize exemplary individuals, groups, and institutions who are doing just that — building cultures of open inquiry across the academy and serving as models that others can learn from, be inspired by, and emulate. This year's honorees have done critical work across all facets of academic life, from the classroom to the research lab to the president's office.

HxA is pleased to announce this year's Open Inquiry Award winners:

• Sian Leah Beilock is receiving the inaugural 2026 Presidential Stewardship Award from Heterodox Academy for her institutional leadership at Dartmouth, including launching Dartmouth Dialogues, which engaged more than 15,000 community members in its first year.
• Christi Hein is receiving the 2026 Teaching Award from Heterodox Academy for her work integrating free speech and civil discourse into the classroom and across Colorado Mesa University, from founding its Free Speech and Civil Discourse Committee to training students, faculty, residence assistants, and athletes in the practice of disagreement.
• Eitan Hersh is receiving the 2026 Leadership Award from Heterodox Academy for his effective leadership in launching and directing the Tufts Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education and building durable institutional structures for cross-ideological dialogue.
• Lee Jussim is receiving the 2026 Exceptional Scholarship Award from Heterodox Academy for decades of scholarship advancing knowledge of stereotype accuracy, scientific integrity, and the dynamics of ideological bias in social science.
• Tarek Masoud is receiving the 2026 Courage Award from Heterodox Academy for modeling what he calls 'polite but rigorous inquiry' into contested ideas about the Middle East, one of the most polarizing conflicts in American academic life today, even when the personal and institutional costs have been considerable.
• HxSociology, led by Jukka Savolainen, is receiving the 2026 HxA Community Excellence Award from Heterodox Academy for elevating the discipline's most consequential debates, from Florida's removal of sociology as a core general-education course to the field's struggle with ideological conformity.

“This year's Open Inquiry Award winners show us what it looks like to do the hard work of open inquiry — not just to believe in it, but to build it, teach it, and defend it,” HxA President John Tomasi said. “From the classroom to the president's office, these honorees are creating the conditions for free inquiry to flourish. At HxA, we are proud to celebrate scholars and leaders who model the kind of principled engagement that higher education so urgently needs."

Launched in 2018, the Open Inquiry Awards recognize those who do exemplary work promoting HxA's core values in higher education. HxA's membership includes more than 8,500 faculty, administrators, and graduate students across hundreds of colleges and universities in the United States and abroad. More information about the awards and past winners can be found on the website.

*Shown in photo from left to right, top to bottom: Sian Leah Beilock, Christi Hein, Jukka Savolainen, Tarek Masoud, Eitan Hersh, and Lee Jussim.

About the Winners

Sian Leah Beilock

Presidential Stewardship Award

For the university president who has most effectively exercised institutional leadership to protect and advance open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement across their campus.

Dr. Sian Leah Beilock is the 19th President of Dartmouth.

Since her arrival in 2023, she has positioned Dartmouth as a global leader on critical issues including cold weather climate and the energy transition, affordability for middle-income families, and mental health and wellbeing. Under President Beilock, Dartmouth launched the "Dartmouth Dialogues" initiative to foster conversations and skills bridging political and personal divides. In 2024, she led Dartmouth's adoption of a first-of-its-kind policy of ‘institutional restraint’ — promoting freedom of expression for all Dartmouth community members. 

Under her leadership, Dartmouth has become the only Ivy League institution to earn a "green light" rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Beilock has also been a prominent national voice on these issues, publishing in The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and other major outlets, and joining a panel of university presidents at HxA's 2025 Annual Conference on principled leadership in higher education.

A leading cognitive scientist focused on performance under pressure, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Sciences & Letters. She has authored 120 papers and two critically acclaimed books, Choke and How The Body Knows Its Mind, and her 2017 TED talk has nearly 3 million views.

Beilock has earned wide recognition as a distinctly outspoken voice among university leaders. Among other outlets, the Chronicle of Higher Education has profiled her as a president who has leveraged her communication skills in a time when most presidents are trying to stay under the radar. She's characterized as representing a "new breed" of college president willing to publicly critique her own sector, "I think there’s a responsibility for folks to speak up, to talk about what we think we can do better, and try and effect that change."

Christi Hein

Teaching Excellence

For the educator who has most effectively integrated open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, or constructive disagreement into the classroom and/or curriculum.

Christi Hein is a longtime educator at Colorado Mesa University, where she has taught American Government, Constitutional Law, State and Local Government, and several Pre-Law courses. She holds a Juris Doctorate from Ventura College of Law and master's degrees in Education: Teaching and Leadership and in U.S. History.

She is receiving the Teaching Award for her sustained work integrating free speech and civil discourse into the classroom and across CMU. Hein was the founding chair of CMU's Free Speech and Civil Discourse Committee, where she and her colleagues spoke at new freshman events, created professional development opportunities for faculty and staff, and trained student organization leaders, resident assistants, athletes, and others in the principles of civil discourse. Working with the CMU Civic Forum, she helped launch the Dignity in Dialogue Speaker Series, which has hosted national figures including former ACLU president Nadine Strossen. She has taught a Free Speech and Civility course at CMU, and is a member of HxA's Speakers Bureau, where she presents on "Free Speech & Civility: How to Have Both on Your Campus." She recently presented “Teaching Across Differences: Free Speech and Civility” to more than 80 education majors at the State University of New York at Cortland through the Galpin Institute for Civic Engagement, leading discussions on viewpoint diversity, civil discourse, and the role of the First Amendment in today’s classrooms.

Her colleagues note that Hein "has created a comprehensive and replicable model for integrating free speech and civil discourse into both curriculum and campus culture," and that "her work reflects the highest ideals of teaching excellence: transforming students, equipping future educators, and strengthening the foundations of a free and pluralistic society."

Eitan Hersh

Leadership Award

For the person who has most effectively championed the principles of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in the academy and beyond.

Eitan Hersh is a Professor of Political Science at Tufts University and the inaugural director of the Tufts Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education (CEVIHE). His research focuses on US elections and civic participation, and he is the author of Politics is for Power (Scribner, 2020) and Hacking the Electorate (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

He is receiving this award for his effective leadership in launching and directing CEVIHE, an initiative based in the Tufts Office of the President that was announced in September 2025. The Center grew out of Hersh's popular "American Conservatism" course, where he observed strong student demand for cross-ideological conversation. The Center, which works on curriculum, research, and campus cultural change, hosts a weekly lunch series, reading groups, film screenings, and headline events bringing speakers with diverse perspectives to campus. The Center has selected its inaugural class of 25 freshmen fellows for the 2026-2027 school year and has begun hiring postdoctoral faculty to teach full-credit courses on contested issues across different Tufts departments.

His colleagues note, "Many scholars advocate for viewpoint diversity; fewer design systems that reliably produce it. Many educators facilitate classroom discussion; fewer do so with the methodological discipline required to sustain genuine disagreement without devolving into performance, polarization, or groupthink. Hersh does both, and he does so in ways that are scalable and adaptable across disciplines and campuses."

Lee Jussim

Exceptional Scholarship

For the academic who, through research or another form of scholarship, has best advanced knowledge of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, or constructive disagreement.

Lee Jussim is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University, where he leads the Social Perception Laboratory. His research focuses on stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination; political radicalization; and the identification and reform of suboptimal scientific practices in social science. He is a founding member of Heterodox Academy.

Jussim is receiving the Exceptional Scholarship Open Inquiry Award for decades of scholarship advancing knowledge of stereotype accuracy, scientific integrity, and the dynamics of ideological bias in social science. His 2012 book Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (Oxford University Press) received the 2013 PROSE Award for best book in Psychology, and his foundational work has helped establish stereotype accuracy as one of the largest and most replicable findings in social psychology. He is a co-author of the landmark 2015 paper "Political diversity will improve social psychological science" (with Jonathan Haidt, Philip Tetlock, and others) and of "In Defense of Merit in Science," published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. Through his widely-read Unsafe Science Substack, his work with the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, and his founding involvement with the Academic Freedom Alliance, he continues to be a leading voice for empirical rigor and intellectual freedom in the social sciences.

HxA's 2025 Leadership Award recipient and longtime collaborator, Anna Krylov, said, "Lee is known for his fearless work on research integrity; the radicalization of academia; and the corruption of science by politics, foreign interests, and censorship. Through his rigorous scholarship and public-facing writings, he has greatly contributed to fighting orthodoxies and promoting free inquiry in his own field and beyond."

Tarek Masoud

Courage Award

For the person who has demonstrated consistent courage in pursuing truth, and embodies bravery in championing the principles of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in the academy despite social and professional costs.

Tarek Masoud is the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and serves as the Faculty Chair of the Kennedy School's Middle East Initiative. His research focuses on political development in Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority countries.

He is receiving this award for modeling rigorous, civil engagement with one of the most polarizing conflicts in American academic life today, at significant personal and institutional cost. Masoud is the convener of Harvard's Middle East Dialogues, a series of in-depth conversations with leading scholars, intellectuals, and public servants — including figures such as Jared Kushner, former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, Dalal Saeb Iriqat, Robert Malley, and Alan Dershowitz — designed to expose students and the public to varied and often deeply contested perspectives on the region. In hosting the series, Masoud has often faced intense criticism, yet has insisted that "we have to subject these ideas — and all the ideas that we encounter — to polite but rigorous inquiry."

His colleagues note, "Professor Tarek Masoud is a courageous optimist. Courageous, because he has consistently brought heterodox, often controversial speakers to Harvard's campus to engage in rigorous public conversations; optimistic, because he believes that Harvard's students can handle — and indeed hunger for — a culture of open inquiry."

HxSociology (Jukka Savolainen)

HxA Community Excellence

For the Heterodox Community or HxA Campus Community that has done the most to advance or sustain open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in their discipline, academic setting, region, or campus.

HxSociology is the sociology HxCommunity within Heterodox Academy, moderated by Jukka Savolainen, professor of sociology and criminology at Wayne State University.

HxSociology is receiving the Community Excellence Open Inquiry Award for its work to advance open inquiry and viewpoint diversity within the discipline of sociology. Under Savolainen's leadership, the community convenes meetings and discussions for sociologists concerned about ideological conformity in their discipline and supports a growing network of scholars committed to restoring sociology as a rigorous social science. Savolainen has been a visible public voice on these issues, writing in the Wall Street Journal that he has watched his discipline "morph from a scientific study of social reality into academic advocacy for left-wing causes," and arguing for structural reforms that empower scholars committed to empirical rigor and intellectual diversity.

A member of the community notes that Savolainen "has been seminal in organizing the HxA sociology community into an active and potentially disruptive (in the best way) force within the discipline of sociology," adding that he is "truly committed to creating a community of scholars who are interested in changing the field for the better according to the HxA way."