A Report On The Hxa Meetings

I didn’t take many photos of the Heterodox Academy meetings, as there was a lot going on and food was more of less an afterthought. It’s the tenth anniversary of the organization, so there was a bit of celebration.  So let these snaps give you a small flavor of the meetings.

They were held in the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge, where we all stayed. It was where the meeting was held as well as where we stayed. Given the debilitating heat, there was almost no need to go outside (it was, I’m told 104° F one day, and that’s without the humidity factor.)

What is the Heterodox Academy? (Its acronym is HxA). Here’s what it says about itself:

Heterodox Academy’s mission is to advance open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement across higher education – the foundations of our universities as truth-seeking, knowledge-generating institutions. HxA empowers members to organize on their campus and within their disciplines, educates academics on the importance of our principles, and advocates for policies to protect open inquiry across higher education.

. . . . Our vision is an academy in which a vibrant community of inquirers investigate a broad range of questions about the world by bringing diverse perspectives to bear, thereby enlivening the pursuit of truth, knowledge, and progress.

And yes, all kinds of dissenting views were presented: by no means did all the speakers agree with each other. (I, for example, took some flak for maintaining that some of the humanities, like art, music, and literature, are not really in the business of “seeking the truth”; their considerable virtues lie elsewhere.) And there was one fellow, draped in a keffiyeh, who gave a 25-minute talk why institutional neutrality was bogus, and that universities should speak out, as institutions, when there is palpable evil in the world—not just when those issues affect the university itself. I think his keffiyeh carried what he saw as palpable evil, but the only example he gave involved a university funding the experiments of Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz. There were no examples from the present, and I wanted to ask what other issues universities should speak out against.

There was an ample “light breakfast” buffet the first morning, complete with fruit, yogurt, all kinds of Danish, and bagels with cream cheese. And, of course, coffee and tea. As I’d eaten little the night before, I managed to make it into a heavy breakfast. I had a bagel with cream cheese and chives, a muffin, a fruit Danish, a banana, and coffee.

Two of the bigwigs in the organization.  First, Jon Haidt, whose efforts (with others) led to the foundation of HxA in 2025:

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. In 2014, along with political psychologist Philip Tetlock, social psychologist Lee Jussim and others, Haidt published the paper “Political diversity will improve social psychological science”. 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. Haidt says he was also contacted by Chris Martin, a sociology graduate student who had published a similar paper about a lack of ideological diversity in sociology. Haidt, Martin, and Rosenkranz formed “Heterodox Academy” to address this issue.

Here’s Jon, all duded up in a tuxedo, about to give the introductory talk. The theme was that HxA is needed more than ever now that universities face attacks from many sides, including the government,

John Tomasi, the current President of the HxA, also in a tux.

I took very few pictures of the speakers, but since Luana was on a panel, I took a photo of the whole panel, called “STEM Strikes Back: How Elevating STEM Voices Can Restore the Academy’s Reputation – and How to Get Them in the Room”. Left to right:  Moderator Wayne Stargard of the MIT Free Speech Alliance, Ian Hutchinson, (a physicist at MIT), Luana Maroja (evolutionary biologist at Williams College), and Frank Laukian (Bruker Corporation and Harvard Univerity).  There were many panels like this with free discussion (I was on one the last day), other panels in which each member gave a 25-minute talk followed by audience Q&A, and individual talks. All events were followed by audience Q&A: after all, this is the Heterodox Academy.

I believe the panels and talks were taped, and will appear later on the Heterodox Academy YouTube channel. As Jim Batterson points out below, John Tomasi’s plenary talk is already online,

John McWhorter, who was on my panel, photographed at a dinner for speakers held at Henry’s End, a small restaurant not far from the hotel.

The menu for the speakers’ dinner. It was fancy. I ordered the corn crab cakes with tartar sauce, the blackened New York strip steak, and Persian lime pie (see below), washed down with rosé.

The corn crab cakes, filled with lump crabmeat and kernels of corn. Dipped in tartar sauce, they were excellent.

I sent my steak back because I asked for it rare and it came out medium. By the time I got a new one (still not rare, but better), I had forgotten to photograph it. Since it was blackened, though, it wasn’t very photogenic, resembling a slice of a tire.

The Persian lime pie, which was really a pudding. It was toothsome:

I walked home from Henry’s End when it was about a hundred degrees, and of course got lost following the directions on my phone. It took me 25 minutes to get back to the Marriott on a purported 10-minute walk, and I was drenched when I arrived. Oy, did a shower feel good!

Finally, a hot chicken sandwich with fries (mildly spicy), which I had for the one lunch not provided by the venue. Of course I had sweetened ice tea to wash it down.

Dave’s Hot Chicken was only half a block away from the Marriott, so was not much of a slog in the horrible heat.

Besides that one mishap, though, I had a good time at the meetings and made some new friends, including Alice Dreger, whose work I much admire (read Galileo’s Middle Finger). Alice is also heterodox, and has gotten a lot of flak.

If I had time I’d tell you how I got into it with the four other members of our panel, all of whom took umbrage at my contention that although the HxA’s mission is to foster the emergence of truth from a clash of diverse viewpoints, “truth” as defined by the OED as “Something that conforms with fact or reality,” could be apprehended only using evidence, which limits its apprehension to “science construed broadly”: those areas where questions can be addressed with empirical evidence. Much of humanities, I maintained, cannot find truth, for that’s not really the mission of areas like music, literature, or art.  What is the “truth” of a painting by Jackson Pollack.  You can imagine the hackles that rose when I said such things.  More hackles rose when I argued that, at bottom, all views and systems of morality are based on preference. But that latter contention happens to be true.

What can I say? I was being heterodox, which is our mission.  Here’s the panel: