As an organization, Heterodox Academy is growing increasingly focused on highlighting not just problems, and what is going wrong – but also solutions, and what’s going right, who is doing it well, and how. Consequently, many of us were thrilled reading Jeffrey Sachs’ recent Niskanen essay highlighting positive trends on campus (although an implication of..
In a recent book, Land Grant Universities for the Future, Stephen Gavazzi and Gordon Gee analyze polling data from land grant universities and their host communities and find that institutions of higher learning tend to be “islands of blue” which mirror state capitals and major urban areas, inside “vast seas of red” – i.e. the..
Around this time last year, I had the honor of sharing the stage with former UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks for a dialog on academic freedom. While the event was billed as a “debate” between us, it turned out that we held a lot more in common than we differed on the core issues. And..
Over the past year, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay & Peter Boghossian published a series of hoax papers in humanities journals oriented towards the “critical study” of gender and sexuality. Their plot was discovered midway through, forcing them to go public prematurely. In a journal-length essay explaining their methods, findings, and intentions, “Academic Grievance Studies and..
Let me start by saying that in some respects, it is a strange debate between Beauchamp, Yglesias and I: In the highly-polarized political environment in which we find ourselves, it seems to be a standard assumption that if someone is criticizing one position, it must be because they personally hold the opposite view themselves. For..
The Free Speech Project (FSP), based out of Georgetown University, attempts to document “incidents in which Free Speech has been challenged or compromised in recent years, and collect analysis from various points of view of the struggle to sustain First Amendment Values.” This is a great initiative. In fact, Heterodox Academy recently ran a post..
However, a good deal of our efforts up to now have been focused on promoting ideological diversity, and more narrowly, political diversity. This is in large part because, while the value of other forms of diversity have become widely accepted, ideological diversity — and political diversity in particular — are not respected in the same way.
However, a question has come up time and again regarding the relative scale of these challenges: how does the lack of, say, political diversity measure up when compared to underrepresentation by race, gender or sexuality? To get at this question, we can compare rates of faculty identification across different identity measures.
We in America and Western Europe, and by now many other places in the world, have this idea of people as fundamentally rational. On this account, our profound cognitive abilities are designed to help us discover objective truths about the world through logical argument and empirical observation. Contemporary research in cognitive science, psychology and related..
In a recent article for the Times Higher Education I pointed out how the lack of ideological diversity among social researchers not only undermines the extent to which research is trusted, funded or utilized, but also undermines researchers’ “capacity to understand phenomena, predict trends, or craft effective interventions.”
A recent study by Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty, published by Politico, suggests that journalistic outlets face many of the same challenges as academic institutions:
The concept of microaggressions gained prominence with the publication of Sue et al.’s 2007, “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life,” which defined microaggressions as communicative, somatic, environmental or relational cues that demean and/or disempower members of minority groups in virtue of their minority status. Microaggressions, they asserted, are typically subtle and ambiguous. Often, they are inadvertent or altogether unconscious. For these reasons, they are also far more pervasive than other, more overt, forms of bigotry (which are less-tolerated in contemporary America).
The authors propose a tripartite taxonomy of microaggressions:
Microassaults involve explicit and intentional racial derogation;
Microinsults involve rudeness or insensitivity towards another’s heritage or identity;
Microinvalidations occur when the thoughts and feelings of a minority group member seem to be excluded, negated or nullified as a result of their minority status.
The authors then present anecdotal evidence suggesting that repeated exposure to microaggressions is detrimental to the well-being of minorities. Moreover, they assert, a lack of awareness about the prevalence and impact of microaggressions among mental health professionals could undermine the practice of clinical psychology—reducing the quality and accessibility of care for those who may need it most.
