Heterodox and Loving It

Stepping off a plane at Chicago O’Hare last week, part of me wondered what the hell I was doing there. I knew where I was headed—to the downtown Marriott on the “Magnificent Mile” for the latest conference of Heterodox Academy (Hxa), that motley crew of public-spirited academic misfits battling for diversity of discourse in higher education whom I’d only just joined. But I wasn’t sure what to expect or if I’d quite fit in.

I’m not an academic, after all, and no longer work for a college or university. I may be a journalist of sorts, but unaffiliated with industry stalwarts like Inside Higher Ed or The Chronicle of Higher Education. Yet since launching this Substack I’ve been embroiled in the fight to somehow salvage some kind of freedom of speech and thought on campus, and especially among the fancier places.

Even so, I’d had to finesse my way into the organization over several email back-and-forths to snag the conference’s member rate: the application committee seemed unsure what to make of me, and it was only after namedropping that I’d crossed paths with their President John Tomasi at Brown that they’d finally relented. In fact, I’d silently been cheering on Heterodox Academy practically from its beginning, but at the time keeping my powder dry to protect my perch as a longtime reporter and flack at Columbia University. Quietly, I’d been chiseling away at a manuscript and what eventually became The Ivy Exile, not yet ready to stick my neck out.

But times have changed! And unlike the countless academic gatherings I’d organized, promoted, run and/or covered over the years, which had become sheer muscle memory, this time it wasn’t my job to remain a fly on the wall. Indeed, it was prime time for professional networking, and breaking old habits of keeping as invisible as possible. That became a real challenge in being surrounded by all these luminaries I’d admired for years—not only superstar public intellectuals like Jonathan Haidt and Musa al-Gharbi but many more names I recognized, such as the eminent-but-embattled anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss (who gave me a copy of her new book!). “Everybody seems so famous,” as Miley sang, and even those not so famous tended to be pretty damn impressive.

The majority of academic panels I’d ever been involved with had a typical consistency: a milquetoast moderator with bog-standard views, a generic talking head on much the same page, and a more charismatic activist to ease the banter to its inevitable conclusions. At times, if one lucked out, there was occasionally a fourth sort of character, a colorful outsider making things more interesting. The Hxa conference was like several hundred of those all convened in one place.

From FIRE’s 25^th Anniversary party on a nearby rooftop the night before kickoff to the bustling array of sessions, dialogues, and conversations, it was an endlessly stimulating few days that left me far less gloomy about the future of higher education than I’ve felt in years. Here was a community of academics genuinely committed to curiosity, intellectual rigor, and the life of the mind, which was way more of a novelty than it should have been after a decade plus in higher education. Why isn’t that the norm, one must ask: why does it have to be “heterodox,” and considered more than a little unseemly across broad swathes of academia, instead of a set of values that should be self-evident and universal?

There was a distinct air of optimism at the conference, a widespread sense that after a chilling decade of illiberalism the wind is finally in free thinkers’ sails. Society has moved past “peak woke,” many suggested, pointing to major universities shifting to institutional neutrality, abandoning DEI litmus tests, and reembracing standardized testing. Sanity is creeping back in, they hope.

But I’m not so sure. A big part of my role at Columbia was soothing, placating, and appeasing various donors and alumni, lulling them to complacency with honeyed platitudes even as nothing changed. The gestures that colleges and universities have been making are encouraging and necessary, but they’re just that: gestures, amid a PR nightmare and unprecedented donor mutiny in this nailbiter of an election year, as public confidence in higher education plumbs new depths. Regardless of what the hoi polloi thinks, though, the reality is that the grantmaking structure is substantially intact, the personnel are almost all the same, the incentives to cut corners remain overwhelming as ever, and the dogmas of crusading technocracy still dominate our institutions. With the demographic cliff encroaching and higher education set to stagnate or contract, it is likely the troublesome heterodox types who will be last hired and first fired.

If academia can be salvaged, it will be a grueling game of inches for decades at least. The rot runs deep. But to the extent that might be possible, it will be in large part thanks to many of the folks I just met in Chicago.

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Next: Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

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