Heterodox Academy has just celebrated its 10th anniversary. It has grown and changed a lot since 2015, in part because the academic and political worlds have been in constant flux. I thought it might be useful to tell the story of HxA as a play in three acts, with the action driven in part by the changing threats to free inquiry.

Act 1: Calling Out the Absence of Viewpoint Diversity

Our play opens in January 2011. I am on a stage in San Antonio, Texas, addressing a thousand social psychologists at the annual convention of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. I tell my colleagues about my fruitless search for a conservative social psychologist, and explain how the absence of viewpoint diversity is reducing the quality and reliability of our research. I warn that we should be wary of creating a hostile climate for conservatives. Doing so is unjust and counterproductive, and it might someday come back to bite us. 

Nothing bad happens to me. The academy was relatively open back then, and it used to be considered a virtue to be “provocative.” My talk provoked a lot of discussion, and a few other social psychologists came to me and said they wanted to study this issue with me. Ultimately, our collaboration turned into a major article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences titled: “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science.”

The article got a lot of attention and motivated two scholars in other fields to send me their own papers on their own fields. Chris Martin, a grad student in sociology at Emory University, had noticed the same dynamic in his field and wrote an article titled “How Ideology Has Hindered Sociological Insight.” Nick Rosenkranz, a law professor at Georgetown University, sent me his law review article titled “Intellectual Diversity in the Legal Academy.” Nick pointed out that half the judges in the U.S. were appointed by Republicans, yet Georgetown Law grads had little idea how those judges thought about the law.

In April 2015, Nick and I decided to join forces to call attention to this problem and study it across multiple disciplines, with a special focus on the social sciences. Nick came up with the name “heterodox academy,” which we thought was delightful for two reasons. First, “heterodox” is an obscure word with Greek roots, and our effort aimed to be a purely scholarly endeavor, not a public change campaign. Second, the name captured the main reason why viewpoint diversity is needed–because it breaks up orthodoxy. 

We bought the website name and invited Chris into the collaboration. Chris had the energy and skill to run the site as a blog with some informational pages attached. Participation was only open to scholars who were actively studying the ways that politics and ideology were shaping research and scholarship. We went live with our first post on September 10, 2015, titled Welcome to Heterodox Academy. Here’s an excerpt:

"Welcome to our site. We are professors who want to improve our academic disciplines. Many of us have written about a particular problem: the loss or lack of “viewpoint diversity.” It’s what happens when the great majority of people in a field think the same way on important issues that are not really settled matters of fact. ... Can research that emerges from an ideologically uniform and orthodox academy be as good, useful, and reliable as research that emerges from a more heterodox academy? … So please, browse our site. Learn more about the problem, and, whatever your politics or viewpoints, become part of the solution."

Our goal was and has always been to make the academy better, not to attack it. But in the months after that post went live, the academy changed all around us.

Act 2: The Rise of Cancel Culture

At around the same time, I was by coincidence working on a second strand of inquiry with my friend Greg Lukianoff, who had noticed that something was different about the students who began arriving on campus in 2013. They were more likely to see books, words and speakers as threatening and to try to get professors and fellow students punished for their words and ideas. They also were more anxious and more prone to making the sorts of cognitive distortions that Greg had observed in himself, prior to being successfully treated for depression. 

Amidst these trends on campus, newly super-viral forms of social media were making it very easy for anyone to damage anyone else’s reputation. This was the beginning of what came to be known as “cancel culture.” We wrote up our report about these changing cognitions and conditions in an essay in The Atlantic titled “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Our article happened to be published in September 2015, so it was being widely discussed just as HxA launched on September 10th of that year.

But at the time, the two issues had seemed to me to be unrelated because the one being addressed by HxA concerned a long-running trend among the faculty while the other was about an odd new trend among undergraduates. Over the next few weeks, however, the two trends merged to create a climate of fear on campus.

There was a series of explosive incidents, mostly at elite institutions, and usually in response to something a professor or student had said in an email or social media post. The most widely known such case occurred at Yale University when students objected to an email sent out by child development expert Erika Christakis arguing in favor of free expression in wearing Halloween costumes, even if it is mildly “obnoxious.” Some students responded by publicly berating her husband Nicholas (a sociologist also on the Yale faculty) and issuing a long list of demands to the president of Yale, including that the couple be fired. 

A wave of similar student protests, with long lists of demands, spread across the country for the rest of the 2015-2016 academic year. So did the trend of shouting down speakers who questioned ideas that were important on the left. Ideally, the faculty and administrators should have been able to engage with the students, listen to their concerns, and challenge them when they made factual mistakes or asked for changes that would have severely damaged the mission of the university. 

Yet this rarely happened, in part because of political homogeneity among the faculty and staff; it is risky to challenge your own side during a culture war. But it was also driven by the fact that nobody wanted to be the next victim during what would become a years-long social-media-fueled witch hunt. 

Lamentably, videos of these shout downs and other antics spread across the internet, triggering widespread revulsion among ordinary Americans. On social media, many asked: “Where are the adults in the room?” I believe that these videos are the main cause of the rapid decline in public support for higher education, which began right after 2015, and which left us with fewer defenders when we came under attack in 2025. 

I don’t have space here to describe the full evolution of HxA during the cancel culture era. Let me just say that as cancel culture accelerated and professors increasingly found themselves “teaching on eggshells,” there was growing interest among faculty in joining HxA. We opened up membership to any professor, administrator or Ph.D. student. 

In the fall of 2017, we hired our first executive director, Deb Mashek, who transformed us from a blog into a real 501(c)(3) organization working to improve higher ed. Deb piloted us through the tumultuous period that ran for the rest of Donald Trump’s first term, the COVID lockdowns and the killing of George Floyd, which gave rise to an immediate intensification and spread of cancel culture to other epistemic institutions such as journalism, media and museums. As Andrew Sullivan had predicted in 2018, we were all living on campus now.

As cancel culture accelerated and professors increasingly found themselves “teaching on eggshells,” there was growing interest among faculty in joining HxA.

In 2022, HxA reorganized and hired John Tomasi as its first president. John teamed up with Michael Regnier, who came on board as our new executive director. Together, they have grown the organization further, expanded our scholarly production via the Segal Center for Academic Pluralism and, most importantly, fostered the creation of 82 HxA Campus Communities. The latter are independent groups of HxA members who give each other strength and ideas as they work to improve the intellectual climate on their campuses. 

It is John and Michael who are guiding us into our third act, when the most visible threat to free inquiry has, with the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, shifted from left to right.

Act 3: The Great Reversal

There’s a version of Newton’s second law that applies to culture wars: For every action, there will be a disproportionate and opposite reaction. Recent Democratic administrations had taken executive actions that pushed universities toward policies favored by the left, as with the Obama administration’s infamous “Dear Colleague” letter of 2011, which eliminated due process protections for anyone accused of sexual misconduct on campus.

So when Trump returned to the White House in 2025, it was not surprising that he would undertake a series of executive orders and actions that aim to push universities to the right. Are these steps healthy correctives to the excesses and injustices of the cancel culture era? In some ways, yes. John Tomasi recently pointed out that many of the Manhattan Institute’s recommendations for university reform are already in HxA’s Four-Point Agenda for Reforming Colleges and Universities, such as eliminating political litmus tests and adopting institutional neutrality. 

But where some of us in the HxA community become alarmed is when the enforcement mechanisms create the fear of significant punishment for any perceived infraction, with no due process protection. The frequent threats made to immediately cut off a university’s already-budgeted grants, at the discretion of Trump administration officials, means that many of us now walk around with the sword of Damocles hovering over our heads. 

I don’t want to speak for our diverse HxA community, but I can say that I personally choose my words extra carefully nowadays, lest something I say or write triggers the ire of the administration or its allies and leads to devastating effects on my university. I welcome the reduction in fear from the cancel culture of the left, which peaked in the early 2020s, but I do not celebrate if the replacement is cancel culture from the right, and with no end in sight. 

* * * * * 

These are difficult times for universities, and for America. The threats to free inquiry never disappear, but they change over time. I am so pleased that while HxA has changed as the world has changed, it has always stayed true to its founding principles.

We are professors who want to improve our academic disciplines and our universities by promoting a culture of free inquiry and fearless scholarship. This mission drives everything we do today and everything we will do tomorrow, even as the world changes.