How Heterodox Academy creates a safe space for bad ideas

In March of 2019, during a rally, Donald Trump threatened to execute an executive order requiring “colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research funds” (Shepardson & Johnson 2018). The details are foggy on exactly what this order would require of universities, as with many other policies that Trump has come up with on the fly. Regardless, it echoes a large contingency of voices that raise concerns about whether academic freedom is threatened by disciplinary orthodoxy, social justice movements, and identity politics at universities. These critics, who range from conservative to liberal, suggest that a left-wing political homogenisation amongst university faculty is a threat to the freedom of inquiry which should form the basis of the university.

One such organisation that concerns itself with political bias in academia is Heterodox Academy. Heterodox Academy (or HXA) is an organisation formed by social psychologist Dr Jonathan Haidt in 2015. It advocates for a greater diversity of viewpoints within universities. The website publishes a blog and podcast on the topic of free speech on university campuses and the political bias that Haidt accuses ‘moral tribes’ of bringing about. On its website, HXA summarises the problem that it seeks to respond to:

“The surest sign of an unhealthy scholarly culture is the presence of orthodoxy. Orthodoxies are most readily apparent when people fear shame, ostracism, or any other form of social or professional retaliation for questioning or challenging a commonly held idea” (Heterodox Academy 2019b).

Those who are familiar with the debate around political diversity in academia will be able to immediately infer that HXA is suggesting that it is right-wing viewpoints which face undue discrimination and rejection. HXA positions itself as an apolitical organisation with members from across the political spectrum, although the polling statistics that they proudly provide show a large bias toward conservative, centrist and libertarian positions (Heterodox Academy 2019a). Despite HXA’s claim of non-partisanship, their agenda aligns much more closely with conservative interests.

It is not necessarily evident that the left-wing bias that HXA claims to be ubiquitous is real, or that it is a problem for academic freedom, or that it is caused by the moral tribalism that Haidt suggests. Some commentators have pointed out flaws in the statistical analysis used by HXA to support their claims, arguing that a small number of outlying cases of right-leaning academics facing hostility are being used to create a moral panic (Beauchamp 2018; Sachs 2018)  and that counter-examples of left-leaning academics being disciplined also exist (Richardson 2018). Of course, such arguments assume that quantitative methodology is appropriate for establishing such a problem in the first place. With each case of alleged discrimination against right-leaning academics and their ideas taking place in different institutional contexts, lumping all cases together as a single number does not capture the nuances and causes of each case.

Even if HXA’s claims of left-wing bias are to be taken at face-value, the viewpoint diversity that HXA advocates for is a deeply flawed idea with potentially bad consequences. HXA is making the same error that media organisations make when they invite equal numbers of both climate scientists and climate change deniers onto a panel in order to create an ostensibly good-faith balance in the discussion; one side is backed by rigorous research which represents the vast majority of people in their field, the other is a fringe idea backed by moneyed interests. When the two ideas are presented as being two equal sides with roughly equal merit, it does a disservice to observers by creating the illusion of political balance. In reality, the debate would be skewed towards the climate change deniers by their relative over-representation and by granting them legitimacy.

Likewise, HXA’s advocacy for greater viewpoint diversity works under the faulty belief that widely accepted conclusions in academic fields are generally left-wing constructs and conservative criticisms are barred from debate because of left-wing ideological tyranny. According to HXA logic, it is a duty of those who believe in freedom of inquiry to foster an environment in which ideas that are usually taboo in leftist academic spaces can be raised freely. But ‘teaching both sides’, to borrow from creationist/intelligent design lingo, gives the false impression that both sides of a debate are of equal merit, when the reality may be that one side is maligned for good reason.

It is telling that many articles featured on the website bring up Charles Murray, the author of the infamous Bell Curve, often without reference to the actual controversy and implications surrounding his work.[1] HXA enthusiastically defends those who peddle ideas that pose a genuine danger to the politically vulnerable, and in turn, to condemn those that seek to have those views silenced. This is at the same time that they remain silent on counter-examples like that of Tommy J Curry, a black professor from Texas A&M University who was the target of racist harassment and threats from the far-right after his philosophy work on race came under scrutiny by right-wing media. The president of Texas A&M University distanced the school from Curry in a statement to donors and investors rather than defending Curry’s academic freedom (Kolowich 2017). It seems likely that HXA would have taken up Curry’s case had he been a conservative, but perhaps it veers too far away from the narrative they purport.

Apart from the bad implications of the HXA mindset, university academics by no means find themselves in the left-wing paradises that this discourse would have you believe. There are a number of ways in which university institutions actually function to uphold a social order which is to the benefit of conservative interests. Heterodox Academy does not voice any concern for these well-documented issues, though they are a pre-eminent concern for academics, especially ones early in their careers, and they have implications for the kind of research that is able to be funded.

The increasing privatisation and application of free-market logic to the neoliberal university recreates and perpetuates capitalist structures of power that reinforce the status quo. In particular, this is a status quo that actually benefits a right wing political agenda across the typical left-right spectrum (Berg, Huijbens & Larsen, 2016; Lund & Tienari 2019; Phipps 2018). The institutional programs that are touted as evidence of a sinister regime that is antithetical to the classical liberal value of free speech (such as compulsory consent training at the ANU and other universities) function as lip service to the progressive demands of students and staff without having to challenge the neoliberal structure (Wilson, Marks, Noone et. al. 2010). Despite institutionally enforced changes and progress, universities remain a place in which hierarchical divides are maintained and widened.

Universities are one of the keys sites in which intergenerational wealth and privilege is passed down, to the exclusion of those who are not blessed from birth with the social and material resources necessary to make it into, and succeed in, university. It is where kids are sent by rich parents to learn to embody a middle class or upper class disposition (or habitus), and where they learn how to continue to gain material wealth (Bourdieu 1984; Bufton 2003).

There may be some cases of conservative academics who do not feel free to express their opinions, but there are many, many more academics who are limited in their ability to freely research what they choose by the precarity of their casual positions, devoid of stability or benefits, which have been brought about by the ongoing privatisation and neoliberalisation of the university (Brown, Goodman & Yasukawa 2010; Kehinde 2017).

The HXA website touches briefly on issues of ensuring that research appeals to and shows responsibility towards donors and other sources of funding, but it fails to acknowledge that this funding model typically benefits a neoliberal corporate agenda rather than a left-wing one. These neoliberal market models, when applied to academia, pose a severe limit to what an academic can actually choose to research (Lynch & Ivancheva 2015). This is a much greater threat to free inquiry and viewpoint diversity than moral tribes that form orthodoxies. What is the point in fostering viewpoint diversity if that diversity still exists within the suffocating limits of marketised academia?

Besides, it’s not as if there are no existing efforts within academia to challenge academic orthodoxies. Efforts to decolonise disciplines and methodologies work to re-centre the production of knowledge away from tacitly accepted approaches which arose from Western epistemologies. Being limited to Western-viewpoint-centric research approaches is a kind of orthodoxy that is limiting to the kinds of questions and answers that can come about in academic research, and such limitations have played a complicit role throughout the ongoing history of colonialism. Instead, decolonised research methods centre Indigenous epistemologies (Smith 2005; Smith 2012).

One example of an effort to decolonise a discipline is a de-canonised syllabus for first year anthropology courses published on Footnotesblog.com, in which typically ‘canonised’ texts are substituted for works in which Indigenous voices and perspectives are treated as integral (Buell, Burns, Chen, et. al. 2019). This project is a rebellion against academic orthodoxy in its most basic form. Although decolonisation efforts in academia have the power to transform the knowledge that is generated by challenging academic orthodoxies, HXA would be unlikely to find these efforts constructive to their cause because the orthodoxy that is being challenged by Indigenous epistemologies is not crossing between the traditionally defined political lines of left/right. Instead, they serve what HXA would see as leftist identity politics. (As an aside, perhaps an organisation that uncritically espouses the term ‘tribalism’ to refer to a primitive and irrational form of social organisation could do with a dose of postcolonial thought.)

The kind of moral panic that HXA promotes has real consequences. Our institution came frighteningly close to becoming a safe space for the HXA paradigm when the Ramsay Centre’s Western civilisation degree almost found a foothold at the ANU. The degree was directly positioned as an attempt to counter the alleged prevailing ambivalence towards so-called Western history, canon, and culture in university education. This is exactly the kind of orthodoxy-challenging effort that HXA espouses as being necessary for the future of free inquiry in universities. The Ramsay Centre website actually states that they support HXA, making the link between the two explicit (The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation 2018). Critics of the Ramsay Centre and the Western Civilisation degree know all too well that it is not a project oriented towards open debate between multiple perspectives, but rather a propaganda mission with all the dog-whistling vernacular of the anti-multicultural, colonial-apologist right. Tony Abbott, who serves as a Ramsay Centre board member, stated in an op-ed in Quadrant that “the key to understanding the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is that it’s not merely about Western civilisation but in favour of it” (Abbott 2018). Apparently, viewpoint diversity is compatible with brazenly teaching a particular ideology, so long as that ideology is controversial  by a majority of scholars. The Ramsay Centre is a tangible example of how something presented as an attempt to fix a political bias can actually privilege the right.

The Western Civilisation degree was ironically (for HXA) rejected at ANU when the university administration was unhappy with the amount of oversight that the Ramsay Centre would have over staffing and coursework decisions. The Ramsay Centre would have reportedly had the discretion to ‘sit-in’ on classes, implying that they could check on whether lecturers and tutors were being suitably celebratory of the West (Manne 2018). How heterodoxical.

Though the spectre of viewpoint diversity, regardless of a viewpoint’s merit, has been kept at bay at ANU for now, the first cohort of Western Civilisation degree students are due to commence study at the University of Wollongong in 2020. HXA, as well as the entire discourse surrounding left-wing bias in academia, continues to be a real encroaching threat to free inquiry. Trump’s executive order is only one recent manifestation.

The reality of what HXA wants, taken to its logical conclusion, is a university faculty in which feminist theorists are given equal weight to those who would claim that women are biologically inferior; an academic journal where postcolonial scholarship is presented alongside defences of colonialism; a degree where a student can learn about cultural relativism in one semester and a course that presupposes the superiority of the West the next. HXA would fail to see the problem here. After all, if an idea is bad, would it not simply lose its value in the free marketplace of ideas? Some HXA proponents might see this characterisation as uncharitable, but I suspect that many more will genuinely see this vision of the future as a positive heterodoxical conclusion. This is precisely the problem.