What is inquisitive?

For two years, inquisitive was Heterodox Academy's quarterly magazine for people who wanted to think differently about open inquiry. Each themed issue paired essays, book reviews, historical pieces, and field-specific guides into a "small plate" of ideas, giving writers like Barbara Oakley, Tom Ginsburg, Stuart Buck and dozens more room to wrestle with the hardest questions in higher education from something other than the usual direction. That approach — rigorous, independent, and a little oblique — is what made inquisitive worth reading, and it's what we want to carry forward.

The print edition has now closed with its final issue (September 2026). But the writing continues: inquisitive lives on as a home for contributed essays on HxA's Free the Inquiry Substack, with new pieces starting this fall. We're not running an open call right now, but if you're an HxA member with something compelling to say — a unique angle on open inquiry you haven't seen anywhere else — we'd like to hear from you (reach out via our contact form).

In the meantime, browse our full catalog and subscribe to Free the Inquiry to keep reading.

About Heterodox Academy

Heterodox Academy empowers members and universities to build cultures of open inquiry on their campus. We equip faculty, administrators, and staff with the tools, research, and community support they need to promote viewpoint diversity, constructive disagreement, and the free exchange of ideas — the core conditions for the truth-seeking, knowledge-generating work universities exist to do.

For more than a decade, this has been principled, bottom-up work that is now and gathering incredible momentum. As university leaders confront a crisis of public trust, they are increasingly turning to HxA as principled non-partisan allies in building new norms around open inquiry. Our thousands of members at more than 2,000 institutions are at the center of that change, leading reforms in their classrooms, departments, disciplines, and on their campuses.