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.

Continue ReadingHeterodox Academy Celebrates its Five Year Birthday

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 . . .]

Continue ReadingRediscovering Connection at your Local Park

The Woke Temple Tacks Away From Clown Graphics, But Maintains Laser Focus

For the past year or so, The Woke Temple has carefully summarized the preachings of Wokeness using brightly colorful graphics decorated with clowns. I think this approach was often effective at getting the point across. What better way to ridicule the preachers of Wokeness than by refusing to take them seriously? The Woke Temple combined this packaging with text that carefully and accurately restated Woke teachings straight from the books of Robin DiAngela, Ibram Kendi and others. This tactic reminds me of a quote by Isaac Asimov. “Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” This allusion to religion is apropos here in that the Woke flock seem to be under the influence of something very much like a fundamentalist religion. Exhibit A is the ubiquitous Woke teaching that either you proclaim that you agree with Woke preachings or they will declare that you are a bad person, a "racist."

As the Woke Temple has colorfully illustrated over the past year, people who are Woke claim that the best way to address racism is to enthusiastically judge people based on the color of their skin, a tactic that pisses on the central teaching of Martin Luther King. This the far Left's equivalent of saying that the threat of COVID is going away while death rates are dramatically increasing. It is that absurd, yet this absurd set of teachings has now been embraced by HR Departments, Government agencies and schools throughout the United States. I can't think of a clearer example of a hostile work environment and I hope lawsuits start flying to stop these practices. Contrary to the claim of Joe Biden, these sessions are not effective ways to address "racial insensitivity" or to encourage "self-esteem."

We need to consider creative approaches to nullify Woke preachings because engaging in conversation does not work. People who have embraced Wokeness are impervious to contrary evidence and reasoning because once these ideas take root, they nullify the ability to think, evaluate contrary evidence and self-critically discuss teachings. Somehow, these Woke proclamations parasitically invade the thought processes of smart and good-hearted people, taking them emotional hostage.  Once a person becomes Woke, they would rather do anything--anything--than be called "racist," even by the proudly racist people who preach Woke principles.

Recently The Woke Temple has modified its tactics. The clowns are gone and the look is streamlined and straight-forward.  Perhaps it will be more effective in getting the message across to more people.  I hope so.  We need all the help we can get. Here's the latest graphic from The Woke Temple:

Continue ReadingThe Woke Temple Tacks Away From Clown Graphics, But Maintains Laser Focus

A Thanksgiving Message

We are not in "normal" times, but there is so much for many of us to be thankful. If you are looking for these good things, you will find them everywhere. Those who are looking only for problems and imperfections will miss most of the good things. On this Thanksgiving I find myself thinking of those countless people who strive daily to reach out to each other in reassuring and civil ways. Doing this takes many forms, including simply offering friendly greetings and encouragement (at a distance) to oftentimes randomly encountered fellow humans. But it also includes visiting your loved ones who are shut-in, living alone, hanging on, waiting to get to the other side, who suffer from the loud dull pain of social isolation.

I repeatedly think of the millions of people who have worked so hard to developed digital tools that have allowed so many of us to connect to each other. Thanks to incredibly smart people, my elderly mother and sisters have had a weekly Zoom visit each Sunday that has turned out to be a highlight of each week. I also feel deep appreciation for those many thousands of health care workers (including a recent graduate nurse named JuJu Vieth--my daughter) and STEM experts who have worked around the clock to nurture the onslaught of COVID patients and to give all of us extraordinarily sudden hope that a vaccine might be around the corner. We will get through this as a people. That's a given. It's time to raise the bar a bit, though, and aim to get through this in non-divisive ways that make each of us proud to be fellow Americans.

Continue ReadingA Thanksgiving Message

Would you Invite a Poisonous Snake to Run Loose at Thanksgiving Gathering?

I will not be attending any indoor holiday gatherings this year. I'll refrain for the same reason that I don't bring poisonous snakes to family gatherings. Imagine that it's one year ago, before COVID was a thing. Assume that your extended family invited you to a big holiday celebration. You mention to your family that you will be bringing your pet poisonous snake and letting it run loose in the house during the celebration. Your family is aghast. You reassure them: My snake is shy. It will probably slither under a couch and stay there the entire time. In fact, there is only a 1% chance that the snake would bite one or more people. There's only a 1% chance that people bitten by the snake would die and only another 5% of people who are bitten would have long-lasting residual physical complications.

What would your family say? How is this risk any different than the risk of COVID other than the dangerous being visible rather than invisible?

I've seen the stats. 38% of Americans plan to attend Thanksgiving gatherings with 10 or more people. I understand that we are intensely social animals and that the social isolation triggering depression and probably killing people. I know that there are still some lingering questions about exactly how contagious and how dangerous COVID is in various environments. That said, I won't be attending any indoor gatherings this holiday season. Instead, I'll be attending two short scaled-down family outdoor gatherings at a distance (it's supposed to be about 50 degrees where I live). I'm not willing to send anyone I love to the hospital in order to eat turkey in a warm room. Not when there are alternatives to visiting indoors, including Zoom. Not when the hospitals are almost filled and health care workers are stretched hard to handle this onslaught.

Have a safe holiday season!

Continue ReadingWould you Invite a Poisonous Snake to Run Loose at Thanksgiving Gathering?