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 political conservatives were under-represented in social psychology and that this hinders research and damages the field's credibility. In 2015, Haidt was contacted by Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, a Georgetown Universitylaw 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. Haidt and Rosenkranz formed "Heterodox Academy" to address this issue. Initial funding for the group came from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation and The Achelis and Bodman Foundation. 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 and the 2015–16 University of Missouri protests, coincided with an increase in membership. Membership was initially open to tenured and pre-tenure professors, but has been expanded to adjunct professors, graduate students, and postdoctorals. The group has a selective membership application process which is partly intended to address imbalances toward any particular political ideology. In July 2017, the group had 800 members internationally. As of February 2018, around 1,500 college professors had joined Heterodox Academy, along with a couple hundred graduate students. In 2018, Debra Mashek, a professor of psychology at Harvey Mudd College, was appointed as the executive director of Heterodox Academy. In 2020, the organization had around 4,000 members.
Programs and activities
In 2016 and 2017, Heterodox Academy published an annual Heterodox Academy Guide to Colleges, a ranking based on "political conformity and orthodoxy". 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. Heterodox Academy operates an online platform named "Open Mind" that seeks to reduce political polarization in schools and workplaces. The organization also administers a "Campus Expression Survey", designed to allow professors and college administrators to survey their students' feelings about freedom of expression on campus.
Ideology and reception
Heterodox Academy formally describes itself as non-partisan. In 2018, the group's website described its mission as encouraging political diversity to allow dissent and challenge errors. According to Vox's Zack Beauchamp, Heterodox Academy advances conservative viewpoints on college campuses by playing into or presenting the argument that such views are suppressed by left-wing bias or political correctness. Commenators such as Beauchamp and Chris Quintana, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, have disputed Heterodox Academy's assumption 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.
