Heterodox Academy Celebrates its Five Year Birthday

Earlier this evening, I attended the five year celebration of Heterodox Academy (HxA). The lineup of illustrious speakers included:

  • Jonathan Haidt (Psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business)
  • Jeffrey Sachs (Political Scientist at Acadia University)
  • Randall Kennedy (Harvard Law Professor)
  • Nadine Strossen (Former President of the ACLU)
  • Nicholas Christakis (Sociologist and Professor at Yale)

What is HxA's main concern?

We see the following threats to Open Inquiry within the academy today:

Across the political spectrum, we see protest and backlash against scholars that threaten a preferred narrative.

Expanding bureaucracies at many colleges and universities subject ever more of campus life to administrative oversight — and encourage people to resolve disputes through reporting, investigations, and academic reprisals rather than good-faith debate and discussion.

Concerns about placating donors, ensuring high enrollments or positive course evaluations can distort research and pedagogy — especially for the growing numbers of contingent faculty whose careers and livelihoods can be threatened by a single upset student, donor or colleague. Contingent faculty are statistically more likely to be women, people of color, and other equity seeking groups whose numbers are underrepresented in tenure track positions.

Many fear losing the esteem of, or being ostracized by, one’s peers for saying the “wrong” thing. Even in the absence of formal sanctions, social and professional isolation can make academic life difficult — and many prefer to self-censor rather than risk it. This is a significant concern among students, faculty, and administrators: our 2019 Campus Expression Survey found that roughly half of students, regardless of their political ideology, agreed that the climate on their campus prevents people from saying things because others may find them offensive.

What does HXA propose as a solution to this problem?

To improve the quality of research and education in universities by increasing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.  We aspire to create college classrooms and campuses that welcome diverse people with diverse viewpoints and that equip learners with the habits of heart and mind to engage that diversity in open inquiry and constructive disagreement.

We see an academy eager to welcome professors, students, and speakers who approach problems and questions from different points of view, explicitly valuing the role such diversity plays in advancing the pursuit of knowledge, discovery, growth, innovation, and the exposure of falsehoods.

Heterodox Academy (HxA) is a nonpartisan collaborative of thousands of professors, administrators, and students committed to enhancing the quality of research and education by promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in institutions of higher learning. All of our members embrace a set of norms and values, which we call “The HxA Way.”

All of HxA's members embrace the following statement:

I support open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in research and education.

HXA proposes the "HxA Way" as the best way to support open inquiry. The four elements of the HxA Way are:

  1. Make your case with evidence.
  2. Be intellectually charitable.
  3. Be intellectually humble.
  4. Be constructive.
  5. Be yourself.

Who would have ever thought we would need an organization to help us learn how to talk to each other on important issues at colleges and universities?  Well, we do.  That's why I joined HxA tonight in my capacity as a law professor.  I'm looking forward to getting increasingly involved in all the HxA does.

Note: There is some overlap in the concerns and missions of HxA and FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). If you support one of these organizations, you will probably also support the mission of the other.

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Helen Pluckrose Discusses the Need to Push Back Against Critical Social Justice Activism (Woke-ness)

Earlier this year, British author Helen Pluckrose, also the Editor-in-Chief of Areo Magazine, co-authored a new book, Cynical Threories, with James Lindsay, who is the creator of the anti-woke website New Discourses.  The long title to their book is also their compact thesis: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody.  

Pluckrose was recently interviewed by Jason Hill of Quillette. The topic was the brand of postmodernism embraced by modern Critical Social Justice activists. In recent years CSJ's version of postmodernism has been increasingly employed as a political strategy by the Woke Left.  What is "postmodernism"?  Pluckrose offers these four characteristics:

  1. Objective knowledge is inaccessible and what we consider knowledge is actually just a cultural construct that operates in the service of power.
  2. Dominant groups in society—wealthy, white, heterosexual, western men—get to decide what is and isn’t legitimate knowledge and this becomes dominant discourses which are then accepted by the general population who perpetuate oppressive power dynamics like white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism, and fatphobia.
  3. The critical theorists exist to deconstruct these discourses and make their oppressive nature visible. This results in the breakdown of boundaries and categories through which we understand things like emotion and reason, fact and fiction, male and female.
  4. [Critical theorists] also produce a profound cultural relativism and a neurotic focus on language and language policing as well as a rejection of individuality and humanism in favor of identity politics. This is a problem because of the resulting threats to freedom of belief and speech, the divisive tribalism and the rejection of science, reason and liberalism.

Hill asked Pluckrose why it was necessary for Lindsay and Pluckrose to write Cynical Theories at this time? Pluckrose offered this response:

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How to Write a Great Book: Make Sure the Title Begins with the Word “The.”

I'm reviewing my large personal library of book. A powerful thought suddenly dawned on me. Many of the titles of the most excellent books in my library begin with the word "The."  Therefore, if I ever try to publish a book, I will make certain the title begins with the word "The."  This is free advice for everyone else out there.

You're welcome.

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Rediscovering Connection at your Local Park

The Internet is an amazing tool that offers us easy ways to connect with each other with very little effort. This magic technology also allows social media sites to pummel us with videos of people bullying each other and physically fighting each other in public places. The triggering "excuses" for these flare-ups are countless. It's often about masks, but many of these videos focus on the bizarre propensity of many people have to divide others into political and “racial” tribes.

In some of these videos people violently assault each other. I recently viewed a video of two families arguing on a store parking lot. Somebody apparently accidentally bumped somebody else, then the situation quickly and needlessly escalated to the point where guns were drawn. I cringe when I see this insanity. A couple of these disheartening videos show up on my feeds every week, posted by people whose motives are often unclear. Some of these videos involve police officers but the great majority do not. Often, every one of the people featured in the video is ill-behaved. Other videos involve unprovoked violence, however, and many of those incidents culminate in physical injuries to an innocent person. Watching too many of these videos plants a false intuition that we are watching typical human beings doing typical things.

Is there a silver lining to these displays of anger and violence? Is it important to sometimes document our human frailties and cruelties? Should we occasionally hold some of these videos up like mirrors to force ourselves to acknowledge the risk that our anger can dangerously escalate into brutality? Can we use some of these videos as teachable moments, showing what can happen when we fail to show restraint and kindness?

Even if there is such a silver lining, it can’t be healthy to watch a steady stream of these videos showing so many people being so shitty to each other. It seems to me that too much exposure to these videos numbs us to the pain and suffering of others. At some point, our in-group tendencies can completely anesthetize our empathy for "the other." Once we cross that line where we no longer care about the pain of others, these videos serve mostly as conflict pornography. For years, Hollywood has been peddling gratuitous violence as entertainment. Movie and TV studios too often stoop to the lowest level of profitable "entertainment." The proliferation of smartphone camera social media videos suggests that there’s no longer any need for Hollywood to continue paying highly trained writers substantial money to concoct their stylized ballets of violence.

In this age of COVID-19, many people are feeling trapped in their homes. Many of us are also transfixed to our screens on which we exposed to far too many videos of people acting badly. Slouching on the couch to watch strangers being mean to each other can’t be harmless. Aren’t these videos causing permanent social damage? And aren’t there better things to do with one's time?

Almost every day, I walk through glorious Tower Grove Park, near my home in St. Louis. On almost every walk I see people from many different demographic and ethnic groups. They show up in the park with their own styles of clothing, music, food, games and language, even now as the weather is turning colder. It is an especially beautiful thing to behold the families at play, parents and their little children. [More . . .]

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