Heterodox Academy

In 2011, Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, gave a talk at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in which he argued that American conservatives were underrepresented in social psychology and that this hinders research and damages the field's credibility.^[4][5] In 2015, Haidt was contacted by Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, a Georgetown University law professor, who had given a talk to the Federalist Society discussing a similar lack of conservatives in law and similarly argued that this undermines the quality of research and teaching.^[5] Haidt was also contacted by Chris C. Martin, a sociology graduate student at Emory University, who had published a similar paper in The American Sociologist about the lack of ideological diversity in sociology.^[6][7] Haidt, Martin, and Rosenkranz formed "Heterodox Academy" to address this issue.^{[6][8][9][10][11]} Initial funding for the group came from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation and The Achelis and Bodman Foundation.^[5] The Heterodox Academy website was launched with 25 members in September 2015. A series of campus freedom of speech controversies, such as those surrounding Erika Christakis at Yale University and the 2015–2016 University of Missouri protests, coincided with an increase in membership.^[5]

Membership was initially open to tenured and pre-tenure professors, but has been expanded to a range of other faculty ranks (including career/full-time as well as adjunct/part-time), and even non-faculty positions such as graduate students and postdoctorals. Initially, the group had a selective membership application process which is partly intended to address imbalances toward any particular political ideology.^[5] In 2017, Heterodox Academy had about 800 total members.^[5][12] By 2018, about 1,500 professors had joined, along with a couple hundred graduate students.^[3]

In 2018, Debra Mashek, a professor of psychology at Harvey Mudd College, was appointed as the executive director of Heterodox Academy, a position which she held until 2020, after which an interim executive director was appointed.^[3][13][14] In 2020, the organization had around 4,000 members.^[15] John Tomasi, a political philosopher at Brown University, became the first president of Heterodox Academy in 2022. As of 2023, total membership was approximately 5,000.^[16]

In 2016 and 2017, Heterodox Academy published an annual Heterodox Academy Guide to Colleges, a ranking based on "political conformity and orthodoxy".^{[12][17][18][19]}

In June 2018, Heterodox Academy held an inaugural Open Mind Conference in New York City, featuring several academic guests recently involved in campus free speech issues, like Robert Zimmer, Lucía Martínez Valdivia, Allison Stanger, Alice Dreger, and Heather Heying.^[20][21]

The organization administers a "Campus Expression Survey", designed to allow professors and college administrators to survey their students' feelings about freedom of expression on campus.^[22]

Heterodox Academy describes itself as non-partisan.^[13] In 2018, the group's website described its mission as encouraging political diversity to allow dissent and challenge errors.^[13]

In a study responding to Heterodox Academy's contentions of bias against conservative professors, Jeffrey Adam Sachs, a professor of political science at Canada's Acadia University, found that liberal professors were more often dismissed for their speech than were conservative professors.^[23] According to Vox's Zack Beauchamp, Heterodox Academy advances conservative viewpoints on college campuses by ignoring the data and arguing that such views are suppressed by left-wing bias or political correctness.^[24] In the same 2019 article, Beauchamp disputes Heterodox Academy's contention that college campuses are facing a "free-speech crisis", noting the lack of data to support it and arguing that advocacy groups such as Heterodox Academy functionally do more to narrow the scope of academic debates than any of the biases they allege.^[24]

• Chicago principles
• Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
• Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship
• Academic Freedom Alliance

• Official website