Everyone wants an open environment where all members of the academic community can express their ideas honestly. But increasingly since 2014, we have heard reports that students and professors are self-censoring, learning to “walk on eggshells.” Is this happening in your classroom, or at your university or high school? If so, then it is vital to know: which students are reticent to engage and why? Are students primarily afraid of the professors, or of other students? Is it happening in all departments, or only in a few? We’ve designed a tool to provide good data on these questions. 

Until recently, the ongoing debate over the state of free expression and open inquiry on college campuses suffered from a paucity of empirical data about the views of current college students. In 2016, Gallup, the Knight Foundation, and the Newseum Institute conducted a landmark study on free expression on campus. In 2017, Gallup and the Knight Foundation collaborated with the American Council on Education, the Charles Koch Institute, and the Stanton Foundation to update key trends and ask about new developments in First Amendment issues on campus. Heterodox Academy is proud to partner with these organizations to make these data available for analysis using an easy, intuitive, and accessible visualization tool. 

HxA is currently launching a research initiative to develop a toolkit of metrics and interventions. To that end, numerous research studies will be undertaken in the coming months and years. In support of the Open Science movement and in an effort to be transparent in our aims for and expectations from this research,  HxA will house a list of preregistered hypotheses for studies conducted by HxA and independent research collaborators, and will preregister those hypotheses using the Open Science Framework.