heterodox: the blog
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+ Essay (Opinion Piece)How Much Do We Actually Care If Professors Reflect America?
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+ Essay (Opinion Piece)How Politics Undermines Understanding of Vaccine Hesitancy
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+ Essay (Opinion Piece)Difference and Repetition in the Viewpoint Diversity Space
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+ Book SummaryScience Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth
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+ Research SummarySocially Distant: How Our Divided Social Networks Explain Our Politics
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+ Essay (Opinion Piece)You’ve Been Mandated to Do Ineffective Training. Now What?
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+ Heterodox PedagogyTo Tease Out Heterogeneity and Combat Polarization, Make Some Topics *More* Controversial
It has long been a talking point on the right that leftist professors are ‘indoctrinating’ college kids (an elaboration on why many quite reasonably hold this belief is available here). However, a number of recent studies suggest that this…read the full blog
+ Essay (Opinion Piece)Callosal Failure: One Hundred Years of Viewpoint Diversity Activism
Callosal disconnection syndrome, more colloquially known as ‘split brain syndrome’ occurs when the connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain are disrupted or severed. The condition often makes it difficult for people to…read the full blog
+ Book SummaryRefashioning Futures
“Political discussion possesses a character fundamentally different from academic discussion. It seeks not to be in the right, but also to demolish the basis of its opponents social and intellectual existence… Political conflict, since it is from…read the full blog
+ Research SummaryResistance as Sacrifice: Towards an Ascetic Antiracism
Although often described as an outcome, inequality is probably better understood as a process — one sustained largely as a result of how systems and institutions are structured and reproduced, and the ways in which people act and interact…read the full blog
+ Essay (Opinion Piece)Seizing the Means of Knowledge Production
“The appeal to ‘social justice’ has by now become the most widely used and most effective argument in political discussion. Almost every claim for government action on behalf of particular groups is made in its name, and if it can be made to…read the full blog
+ Heterodox PedagogyHow Universities Have Been Part of the Problem (And Can Be Part of the Solution) for America’s…
The United States has seen great increases in how many of us take part in higher education. The percent of Americans who’ve completed four years or more of college has grown nearly sevenfold just since 1940. Illiteracy rates have plummeted. We…read the full blog
+ Essay (Opinion Piece)For Better or Worse, Universities Help Shape Local and Regional Politics
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,…read the full blog
+ Essay (Opinion Piece)‘Viewpoint Diversity’ is About Much More than Politics
Most within academia seem to associate black and Hispanic Americans with the left. This is understandable in a sense: Black voters have gone Democrat by roughly a 9: 1 margin for some time now. Hispanics have consistently sided with Democrats at a…read the full blog
+ Research SummaryActually, Students Seem Substantially Less Free Than the General Public
That is, in the very institutions that are supposed to be places for understanding and formulating responses to social problems, people feel especially uncomfortable discussing pressing social issues. Indeed, they were less comfortable discussing…read the full blog
+ Essay (Opinion Piece)Community and Campus II: A Longitudinal Extension
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”…read the full blog
+ Essay (Opinion Piece)Misunderstanding Heterodox Academy
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.read the full blog
+ Research SummaryAcademic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship
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…read the full blog
+ Essay (Opinion Piece)Vox’s Consistent Errors on Campus Speech, Continued
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…read the full blog
+ Essay (Opinion Piece)Vox’s Consistent Errors on Campus Speech, Explained
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…read the full blog
+ Essay (Opinion Piece)Why Should We Care About Ideological Diversity in the Academy?
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,…read the full blog
+ Research SummaryData on How Ideological (Under)Representation Compares to (Under)Representation Along the Lines of…
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…read the full blog
+ Essay (Opinion Piece)Three Strategies for Navigating Moral Disagreements
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…read the full blog
+ Research SummaryThe Media Bubble is Real — And Worse Than You Think
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’…read the full blog
About heterodox: the blog
We want to publish your heterodox perspectives on higher education, academic research, teaching and learning. The HxA Blog is a platform for contributors to advance our mission, share ideas, and model constructive dialogue on higher education relevant issues.
We welcome original submissions from authors across disciplines and from a range of perspectives through our submission form. All published content must follow the HxA Way, a set of values that fosters robust and constructive engagement across lines of difference. Contributors are compensated for accepted pieces.
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