In a previous HxA post, I demonstrated that there seems to be a longstanding relationship between the ideological skew of colleges and universities, and the political leanings of the communities they are embedded in. Over the last 30 years, university faculty have shifted dramatically leftward – and so have the communities hosting elite private universities,..
It is often said that the academy is dominated by the left. There is certainly a sense in which that is true. In terms of ideological self-identification, for instance, students, faculty and administrators trend decisively left (in ascending order of political homogeneity). However, this narrative is also a bit simplistic. First, because ideological self-identification is..
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:
All HxA blog content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, No-Derivatives 4.0 International License. Syndication guidelines here.
