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:
I only attended the panel PCC(E) mentions above. And yes, it was steamy outside in a way seemingly only NYC and some Sth Asian concrete cities can inflict.
I was surprised that John McWhorter was so TALL. Sometimes we can know somebody well from their writings, podcasts and TV but be surprised by their size in real life.
Prof Coyne, whom I buttonholed afterwards to snatch a selfie with, I can report is normal size but we know how tall HE is from all the duck photos: he is a certain amount of ducks tall. I’d never seen McWhorter with ducks (a suspicious fact alone!).
hehhe
Anyway.. I met some nice people and the panel discussion was OK – PCC(E)’s contention about “truth” caused some waves, but nods from the STEM academic table I happened to sit at.
I came late (tried to pay the day rate but couldn’t find the organizers) so I just trespassed and ate a desert and iced tea for free.
Glad I went “all the way…”.. to Brooklyn! – a 30 minute trip. It is easy to become a digital recluse leaving the apartment only to walk the dog – even in America’s densest city. You look out and down and think “Well its all down there…” – and it is, I can see all of Sth Manhattan and Hudson Yards from here – but you HAVE to actually go and meet HUMANS more than just neighbors, neighborhood people and fellow dog owners.
D.A.
NYC
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
Interesting link. In 2020 I had not yet been going to this blog, something that came later. My quarantine experience was very different. I put the time to good, use, had an intellectual renaissance, and a lot of good exercise on the other edge of the continent.
I’d love to attend one of these someday.
Can I have a ‘get off my lawn’ moment, though? Why on Earth do men no longer wear cummerbunds? It just looks wrong.
Likely our age/stage Dr B, but that was the first thing I noticed in the pic. Maybe from a cotillion adolescence.
You’re showing your ages Jim and Dr. B.
The last time I saw a cummerbund in the wild was a few at my prom in 1988 and – while aesthetically excellent I agree – they were kinda out of date even then!
HA. Like us my friends!
best,
D.A.
NYC
Perhaps there should have been a panel on cummerbunds.
Very good. I am mystified that some would strongly object to the point that areas of the Humanities are not about finding Truth as the OED defines it. But maybe …?
1. Within those areas there are truths as we accept it, like the histories of this or that individual who is a figure in art and music. How did Pollack evolve his art from his earlier style to the style that he is best known for? What were his known influences? Those sorts of things are truths. These are things that are discovered through letters and interviews.
2. The term could be couched in different ways. There is historical and other kinds of factual truth, and there is the more subjective use like ‘my truth’, or ‘your truth’.
That baffles me too. I’d be interested to hear the objections.
I’ve noticed that some people think that, there being no Objective Truth in the arts, there is then no reason to have standards (those being just the whims of dead white male colonialists, and who’s to say Tolstoy was a better writer than Fannie Hurst?) Maybe some confusion there got some folks’ hackles up?
I wonder if we could regard the product of some arts as potentially useful imaginative starting points for more serious and structured scientific investigations. After all, a number of scientific hypotheses have started out as flights of fancy.
“All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion” (Tolstoy, Anna Karenina). Is this true? Is it testable? Might it lead to insights into family breakdown more generally? Or is it just a statement of the bleedin’ obvious with no empirical value at all?
The idea that there is no such thing as truth, or that truth is merely the perception or even whim of each individual observer, unrelated to evidence, is unfathomable to me, as i think it must be for most scientists. But this philosophy seems to be accepted by many (perhaps most) people these days. It bodes ill for science and society.
Speaking as a cognitive psychologist, the “more Conservatives” is not what we need if we aspire to be a science. The response to Liberal bias is not bias in the opposite direction but an apolitical attitude when it comes to the discipline. Leave politics at the “lab” door. You do not need to be Conservative to recognize and respond to Liberal bias, you just need to be objective, apolitical. Consider the issue of sex that Jerry often addresses. It is not Liberal bias on one side (a multiplicity of sexes) and a Conservative bias on the other (two sexes), although Conservatives might endorse the two sex view arguing that is what God intended. Jerry is acting as an apolitical scientist, which is what more psychologists need to do. Sure the problem right now is a left bias but a right bias would be just as bad, as would some prescribed numbers of both. We want to get rid of politics, not infuse it in the discipline. I would say the same is true for most (all?) academic disciplines that aspire to seek an objective truth. Biases (political, religious, whatever) hinder that process. Francis Collins wrote about how science strengthens his religious beliefs, but no matter what the intensity of those beliefs I doubt they affected his scientific activities on the Human Genome.
+++
Indeed, how can it be a “conservative” view that only two sexes exist; or that mammals cannot change from one sex into the other by verbal announcement; or that telescope-free, “indigenous” astronomy lacks a lot of information? Popular association of certain kinds of moonshine with the pop-Left style does not make the denial of moonshine into a political view. In the USSR, the science of experimental Genetics itself was for a time labelled “reactionary”.
+1 to both Mr. Clark and Mr. Gallant.
One thing I strongly favour about HxA is they take the oft-mouthed “marketplace of ideas” seriously. Even some hard-edged empirical truths have progressed contentiously, “one funeral at a time”. These days, with so much being us/them power politics, a lot of the absence of viewpoint diversity falls along political divides. Of course there are other viewpoint divides, but politics currently seems to subsume many of them.
I agree with you, but I think you’ll agree that cognitive biases being common to us all, it’s often harder for a Liberal to recognize Liberal biases, and vice versa. Is the answer political Affirmative Action? Probably not, but given the Left’s embrace of Social Justice via Postmodernism (“there is no objective truth, only narratives competing for hegemony”) universities need to find some way to correct course.
An injection of Hdx into academia is just what our university systems need. This would be an antidote to the post-modern singular ideology that has penetrated even into the sciences. How would this happen? I have no idea other than the vague notion that since Washington can steer budgetary priorities, they could allocate X amounts of National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) money in support of new Hdx programs at universities, and to make it easier to hire faculty into those programs. Older program areas that are a monoculture of thought would get less NEH funding, while Hdx programs would grow. The new Hdx programs would still have faculty with viewpoints that we often chafe about here, but meanwhile those faculty would have more centrist and even conservative faculty as colleagues.
Duck with Honey Ginger Sauce?
Anyway, sounds like a good meeting. Certainly an excellent cause. The food looks really good, even Dave’s hot chicken! It’s so easy to get lost in a big city. And it’s even easier to get lost when it’s 100 degrees outside.
Nice to have a Presidents’ panel, but I might like to hear from a panel drawn from the policy-making boards (visitors, overseers, corp) both public and private colleges. Particularly with the often tight connection between public college board members and their state Governnor.
Thanks for the update. I was taken with your summery of your own heterodox position, but, then I wasn’t there for the whole argument.
I liked this, about “truth”
Something that conforms with fact or reality,” could be apprehended only using evidence
— maybe evidence coupled with reasoned, clear argument –, so certainly maths could be involved and room also for certain branches of philosophy around logic and reason?