Limits touch nearly every aspect of our lives, from the number of miles we can drive on a tank of gas to the number of years remaining to us before we die. More abstractly, the idea of limits is integral to all thought and knowledge. To put it simply, we live in a world of limits. 

But while some limits are a matter of circumstance, others come about as the result of choice. In higher education, for instance, many debates revolve around what some would argue are self-imposed limits. Indeed, Heterodox Academy was founded to push back against limits on open inquiry and viewpoint diversity on many college campuses. 

Several of the pieces in this new issue of inquisitive examine these limits to heterodoxy, including an essay by Tony Banout fittingly titled “The Paradoxical Limits to Heterodoxy.” In this thought-provoking piece, Banout argues that even though heterodoxy, with its commitment to truth-seeking, is inherently challenging to orthodoxy, it also “believes its own orthodoxy.” Hence the paradoxical limit. 

In another essay, Abhishek Saha asks whether there should be limitations on academic freedom. Perhaps most pertinently, he wonders whether scholars should be shielded from censure or worse when they speak outside their academic discipline, ultimately concluding that they should be protected because the enterprise of scholarship often requires engaging in broad latitudes of inquiry and that breakthroughs often come from looking in unexpected places. 

A number of pieces in this issue also look at the modern limits of institutional trust, albeit from different angles. Jason Steffens examines the general public’s loss of trust in higher education thanks in part to some scholars’ tendency to oversell or even lie about their research, often in the service of political advocacy. Likewise, Thomas S. Huddle reviews a new book, The Weaponization of Expertise, in which the authors contend that the expert class (many of whom are academics) has lost the public’s trust by often disguising “nakedly political judgments as expertise.”

We also take a detour into the personal with a new essay by Krystal Stark that explores the challenges of living between her old life as a disadvantaged youth and her new one as a privileged academic. “I was present but never fully accepted: too poor in background to be welcome in elite circles, too educated to be at ease in the communities I left behind,” she writes. 

Finally, Nicole Barbaro Simovski looks at the limits of instructional privacy in light of the growing number of states that now require faculty to make their course syllabi public. While Simovski questions some of the political motives that underlie these state requirements, she argues that transparency in course syllabi as well as all other aspects of teaching will ultimately improve the quality of instruction.

If you enjoy this issue and haven’t already done so, please subscribe to inquisitive. And consider pitching us an idea for our fall issue, which will be focused on the theme of “trust.”