Psychologist and emotion researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett distinguishes between provocateurs who are part of a consistent campaign of bullying, and controversial researchers whose ideas are offensive. She argues that only the former are violent.

In a response to Barrett, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue that it’s a bad idea to tell students that any kind of speech is violence.

Social psychologist Mark Leary describes the association between polarization and extreme confidence in the rightness of one’s views.

In Professors in the Political Cross Hairs, The Chronicle of Higher Education features 10 articles about internet outrage against academics. Of these 10 articles, two are new articles about Texas A&M philosopher Tommy Curry—the first (paywalled) article covers Curry himself, and the second has an interactive table showing news stories about Curry in partisan and nonpartisan media.

Claremont McKenna College suspended five students who led the attempt to shut... Read more →

Neal Hutchins, professor of higher education at the Univ. of Mississippi, predicts that the Wisconson State Assembly’s campus speech bill will have a chilling effect on protest because it mandates penalties against student who disrupt speakers, giving institutions little discretion over this issue. FIRE has come out against this provision, and the ACLU has opposed a similar provision in a North Carolina bill.

Johns Hopkins University received $150 million for an interdisciplinary initiative to foster the discussion of controversial political issues. The gift establishes the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute, which will have a new building on campus and employ 21 scholars each year.

At the National Association of College and University Attorneys, a five-person panel, which included two law professors and Greg Lukianoff, discussed how students interpret the First Amendment. Panel members also discussed why students today may be less tolerant of opinions that make them... Read more →

I interviewed political science professor and HxA member April Kelly-Woessner (Elizabethtown College) about whether political tolerance is declining, why conservatives opt out of academic careers, and whether tolerance is lower among people who don’t attend college.

Megan McArdle writes about the partisan rift in explanations for why college has become more expensive, contrasting the liberal explanation that points to declining state support with the conservative explanation pointing to the student-loan industry, and exploring the evidence for each view.

The next dean of Harvard Law School will be John Manning. As Karen Sloan at Law.com notes,  “Manning’s appointment is notable in part because his conservative background stands in contrast to most of his Harvard Law colleagues and that of his two immediate dean predecessors—Minow and current U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.” Kagan brought Manning to Harvard Law in 2004 amid a hiring campaign to boost ideological diversity.

In Wisconson, Pat Schneider at The Capital Times... Read more →

I talked to sociologist George Yancey about his work on anti-Christian prejudice and race relations for episode #2 in our interview series.

In The Atlantic, Oliver Bateman explains The Young Academic’s Twitter Conundum. Although Twitter has now become the de facto networking tool for young academics, a professor’s tweets can be a professional liability.

Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, follows up on his WSJ op-ed, “The Opening of the Liberal Mind,” by responding to the praise and criticism he received, and illustrating what Wesleyan is doing to improving viewpoint diversity.

I interviewed Jon Zimmerman, historian and education scholar, about his new coauthored book The Case for Contention. This conversation is the first in a series of video interviews that we’ll publish on our YouTube channel and feature on our blog.

Jon Haidt was interviewed about Heterodox Academy by Ted Eismeier of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).

At the Chronicle, Michael Vasquez uncovers the funding from Turning Point USA that is surreptitiously funding many conservative student-government campaigns. The article is paywalled but here’s a comment by political scientist Henry Farrell and a similar article by sociologist Amy Binder, author of “Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives.”

Kumble Subbaswamy, chancellor of the Univ. of Massachusetts-Amherst, writes about the 850-year legacy of the Authentica habita, which through its imperial protection for traveling scholars in the Holy Roman Empire created the foundation for the modern idea of academic freedom.

Members of Kenyon College’s faculty... Read more →

On Monday, we opened membership to doctoral students, post-docs, and adjunct professors.

Middlebury College announced last month that it had disciplined over 30 students for their behavior at the Charles Murray talk. This week the college disciplined 11 more students. Although details are fuzzy, at least one student was placed on probation.

Thomas Fuller of the New York Times interviewed five conservative students about political life at Berkeley.

Several articles addressed the backlash to Rebecca Tuvel’s Hypatia article comparing transracial and transgender individuals. Suzanna Walters, the editor of a similar journal, Signs, read the full Tuvel article and evaluated the backlash. HxA contributor Mene Ukueberuwa also blogged about the Tuvel article here.

At the Stanford undergraduate student senate, student Hamzeh Daoud ’20 proposed the creation of senator-monitored “brave spaces” for conversations about contentious political issues.

A comprehensive campus free speech bill was signed into law in the state of Tennessee. Among... Read more →

We are opening membership to all professors with a Ph.D. (or equivalent) and a permanent college or university appointment, post-docs, and graduate students in three days, on Monday, May 8!

We launched the Viewpoint Diversity Experience to help instructors and professors foster political tolerance at colleges and universities. Here’s a blog post by Jonathan Haidt and Caroline Mehl explaining why we created it.

In Six Ways to Create an Empowering Environment, HxA member and management professor Rajshree Agarwal (Univ. of Maryland) suggests some ways to defuse negative partisanship.

Yet again, the percentage of first year students who are political moderates has shrunk compared to the previous year. The between-gender ideology gap is also at its highest since 1966, with 41% of women and 29% of men identifying as liberal or far left.

Jesse Singal wrote in New York Magazine about the modern day witchhunt against Rhodes College philosophy professor Rebecca Tuvel.

HxA member John... Read more →

At Inside Higher Ed, Jeremy Bauer-Wolf covers Harvard’s Open Campus Initiative, an incipient student organization whose purpose is to “offer ideological diversity for the student body where it is believed to be lacking.”

At the sociology blog Orgtheory, Heterodox Academy member Fabio Rojas argues that allowing Charles Murray to speak at Indiana University is consistent with the aims of the research enterprise.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy talked about her new book on the usefulness of “privilege,” a construct that pervades academic and non-academic conversations. The book is titled The Perils of “Privilege”: Why Injustice Can’t Be Solved by Accusing Others of Advantage.

Bryce Edwards has a comprehensive review of the state of free speech and liberalism at New Zealand’s universities.

Rita Cheng, the president of Northern Arizona University, was met with protests and demands for resignation when she criticized safe spaces, suggesting that they diminish a student’s ability to develop... Read more →

In The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools, HxA member Jonathan Zimmermann, professor at U Penn, and Emily Robertson, associate professor emerita at Syracuse, argue against the elision of controversial topics. Here’s a lecture by lecture by Zimmermann on the same topic.

Chapman university published a dialogue between two of its professors—HxA member Vernon Smith, a libertarian, and Peter McLaren, a Marxist humanist—to show that “fervent but respectful dialogue” can occur between political opponents.

In Middlebury: My Divided Campus, Allison Stanger recounts how her invitation to Charles Murray was an attempt to debate him—to “grill him face-to-face”—the protesters at Middlebury deemed his mere presence unacceptable.

In this Wall Street Journal interview on campus orthodoxy and Heterodox Academy, Jonathan Haidt digs into the alt-religion underpinning the Middlebury incident and similar violent protests.

Also writing about Middlebury, HxA member Flagg Taylor, associate professor at Skidmore College, writes about... Read more →

Sam Abrams, one of our members, has an article in The American Interest about ideological homogeneity on campuses threatens the ideals of liberal education.

Stanley Fish argues that free speech is not an academic value, in line with his previous book on the topic. Heterodox Academy members Glen Geher has a response.

Yale released a set of activism and advocacy guidelines, addressing previous questions about whether Yale affiliates are bound by rules when they make political statements. These guidelines aim at clarifying existing policies.

Alumni of Queen’s University in Canada are pushing for Queen’s to pass a set of free speech principles as a response to the lack of viewpoint diversity on campus.

Flemming Rose considers how extremism is fostered by ideological self-segregation on both the left and right.

Jonathan Haidt was interviewed by the associate book editor of the Wall Street Journal, Bari Weiss, to... Read more →

At Princeton University, professors Robert P. George and Cornel West published the statement “Truth Seeking, Democracy, and Freedom of Expression.” Of the 364 current signatories, a majority are American professors, and the roster includes Roger Scruton, Sir Angus Deaton, Peter Singer, and Mary Ann Glendon.

Professor Allison Stanger, who invited Charles Murray to Middlebury, published her reflections on the angry mob at Middlebury.

Frank Bruni, who appeared alongside Jon Haidt on the Charlie Rose Show last week, published an op-ed on the “dangerous safety of college” highlighting Heterodox Academy, which also comments on the events at Middlebury.

From Heterodox Academy:

Heterodox Academy congratulates Northwestern University, home of Laura Kipnis and former home of Alice Dreger, where the student government passed a series of resolutions in favor of viewpoint diversity and freedom from censorship.

We also published a piece on our quickly expanding membership, motivated by... Read more →

John Etchmendy, former provost at Stanford, recently spoke on the educational challenges ahead, noting that intellectual monocultures may be more damaging to universities than external threats:

But I’m actually more worried about the threat from within. Over the years, I have watched a growing intolerance at universities in this country – not intolerance along racial or ethnic or gender lines – there, we have made laudable progress. Rather, a kind of intellectual intolerance, a political one-sidedness, that is the antithesis of what universities should stand for. It manifests itself in many ways: in the intellectual monocultures that have taken over certain disciplines; in the demands to disinvite speakers and outlaw groups whose views we find offensive; in constant calls for the university itself to take political stands. We decry certain news outlets as echo chambers, while we fail to notice the echo chamber we’ve built around ourselves.

This results... Read more →

Aaron Hanlon, English professor at Colby College, was a conservative during his undergraduate years, and has advice for today’s conservative students: don’t see yourself as victims, learn how to convince people who disagree with you, avoid comparing disagreement with suppression, and seek out highly credentialed conservative speakers instead of provocateurs like Milo.

Speaking of Milo, the Chronicle covers how the president of the University of Washington, Ana Mari Cauce, handled requests to disinvite him.

Also in the Chronicle, University of Pennsylvania lecturer Rafael Walker argues that cancelling controversial speakers hurts students by creating echo chambers.

FIRE published its bias response team report, which is the result of a survey of the mandates given to universities’ and colleges’ bias, and the definitions of bias that are used by various institutions.

Catherine Ross, professor of law at George Washington University, argues that we ought to start teaching the principles of... Read more →

In American Universities Must Take a Stand, Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, exhorts universities to take a stand against the Trump administration’s immigration policy and its authoritarianism more broadly.

At Slate reporter Isaac Chotiner has conversation with pro-Trump English professor Mark Bauerlein of Emory University about what he thinks about the Trump administration now.

Conservative and libertarian groups have proposed a campus free-speech bill which would prohibit disinvitations and speech codes at public universities.

The debate around Betsy DeVos’s nomination as Education Secretary revolved around K-12 education, but the Washington Post considers how her leadership will affect US higher education.

On our blog, we published:

Protests at Berkeley have dominated this week’s education news, but evidence suggests that a group of anarchists from outside the Berkeley campus were responsible for the violence, and they attacked Berkeley students who were protesting peacefully.

Michael Hout, a junior at U Mass-Amherst, writes about how the culture of ideological purity among campus liberals led him to distance himself from the College Democrats and co-found The American Moderate.

David Wheeler at The Atlantic has an essay about Donald Trump’s decision to tap the president of Liberty University to lead a task force within the U.S. Department of Education.

The New York Times has a profile of Hillsdale College, “a ‘shining city on a hill’ for conservatives.”

And the College of Charleston can be a case study for the tension between academic freedom and “crudely partisan” class discussions.

On our blog, we published:

What can governments do to protect free speech on campus? Stanley Kurtz has a proposal for state-level legislation, which will be presented at The Heritage Foundation on January 31.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have released Frequently Asked Questions for Faculty in the Wake of hte 2106 Election, a faculty cheat sheet to resist threats to academic freedom. The guide, described in this press release, can be found here.

On our blog, we published:

In “Who’s Really Limiting Free Speech,” Donald P. Moynihan argued against the common conception that it is primarily the left that limits free speech on campus. Letters in response to Moynihan’s Op-Ed are here.

In The Hill, law professor Shannon Gilreath writes about how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (“AAA”) of 2016 can help protect Jewish students on campus while also protecting freedom of speech.

Our recent blog posts at Heterodox Academy include:

A research paper by Heterodox Academy member Sam Abrams shows that conservatives professors are at least as happy with their career choiceas their liberal counterparts, and possibly even happier.

Joshua Dunn, also a member of Heterodox Academy, has an editorial in Education Week arguing that policymakers will take academic research more seriously when academia has more political diversity.

Philanthropy Roundtable hosted a discussion between Jonathan Haidt and FIRE president Greg Lukianoff on free inquiry in higher education.

Seeking to impose limits on college speech, Arizona lawmaker Bob Thorpe (R) has proposed banning any state university events, classes, and activities that could promote racial resentment. His bill targets things like a “privilege walk” exercise and the “Whiteness and Race Theory” course at Arizona State.

And in Washington, state senator Michael Baumgartner (R-Spokane) announced he will be proposing a bill to block universities from engaging protests targeted at the state of Israel.

Professor Mike Spivey describes his experience serving as the lone conservative on a post-election panel at the University of Puget Sound.

In response to Nicholas Kristof’s piece about echo chambers on campus, Elizabeth Lehfeldt published an open letter in which she argues against mis-representations of what college campuses are like today.

Jonathan Gold writes about teaching in the post-truth era.

Catherine Rampell, opinion writer at the Washington Post, notes that the campus right also shuts down free speech.

Shortly after the election of Donald Trump, I spoke to my class about the need to respect political diversity, which is part of the human condition, without falling into the trap of false equivalence, in which all political parties are considered equal. This essay “To My Undergraduate Class on the 2016 Election” is a fuller version of the lecture I delivered.

Two Princeton professors at opposing ends of the political spectrum, Robert George and Cornel West, discussed the meaning of a true liberal arts education in an AEI-sponsored discussion. You can find the video at AEI and a review of Robert George’s explanation for the silencing of conservative views in academia at Conservative Review.

Norman Uphoff, professor of government and agriculture at Cornell, reflected on his career as a heterodox professor fighting an uphill battle against a mainstream scientific community.

At Inside Higher Ed, Colleen Flaherty reviewed arguments for and... Read more →

In a Yale Daily News survey of undergraduates, three out of four respondents agreed that Yale does not provide a welcoming environment for conservative students to share their opinions on political issues. Nearly 95 of self-identified conservatives said that Yale does not welcome their opinions.

“My Halloween email led to a campus firestorm — and a troubling lesson about self-censorship.” writes Erika Christakis. On the first anniversary of the Yale Halloween dustup. Christakis reflects on what she learned about the Yale community, and explains her choice to resign her Yale position.

This week’s blog posts at Heterodox Academy:

Law professor Geoffrey R. Stone covers the history of threats to free speech, and opines on how recent campus controversies should have been handled.

Science writer Maria Konnikova contests the purported findings that personality traits cause political attitudes.

In a letter to new students, the University of Chicago dean John (Jay) Ellison declared that the university does not support trigger warnings or condone safe spaces. Jesse Singal explains the national context behind this letter. You can find other praise and criticism here.

At Heterodox Academy, we published a post on susceptibility to ideology and an invitation to become America’s first Heterodox University (see related coverage at The WaPo and the Chronicle).

In The Atlantic, Emily Deruy describes about selective segregation on campus in light the now retracted course at Moraine Valley Community College that was exclusively for black students.

Exemplifying how not to improve viewpoint diversity, Milo Yiannopoulos collected money for a promised college scholarship for white males but deposited all the money in his personal account.

I was interviewed about heterodoxy and viewpoint diversity by The Best Schools, a guide to higher education.

The British site Spiked Online published a satirical fresher’s guide to free speech on campus.

Ravi Iyer, the executive director of civilpolitics.org, wrote about which attitudes change and which attitudes remain the same after debates about the tension between free speech and sensitivity to minorities.

In the past week, we published a blog post about a possible connection between a rise in campus protests and the drop in alumni donations.

The Chicago Tribune has an editorial about free-speech battles at DePaul University, where the former president, the Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, staked out a free-speech position while also apologizing for the consequences of certain speeches.

Today’s New York Times has a report on how alumni donations have been waning in the wake of college protests. Although their analysis only draws from 35 small, selective liberal-arts colleges, they find a general decline in the number of donors from 2015 to 2016.

The New York Times also reviewed the history of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), from its founding in 1999 through the current decade.