Heterodox Academy

I was a senior editor at Sundial.

I was basically a co-founder of the Heterodox Academy, Columbia Community, the Columbia chapter.

And I'd been doing that for a while.

And I had noticed and I was and I should say I was, you know, friends with and in constant communication with the people at Bridge USA that that the chapter of that club at Columbia's campus with the Platypus Marxist Society.

Last year, their conference hosted Claire Fox as a keynote speaker after having participated in the Jordan Peterson ARC conference, which Investment Bank, the Garton Funds, something I've researched, written about extensively.

Moving on, the Heterodox Academy, which was founded again before the COVID era in 2015 by Jonathan Haidt, a famous co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, which interestingly is along the same kind of theme as the Hayes and Eccleston book that I just mentioned.

Billionaire lawyer Nicholas Rosenkranz, based in the US, their partnership with Yale, Stanford, and Harvard alongside all the usual corporate foundations and Hollywood pose inevitable questions as to its authenticity.

Generally the themes from their articles incidentally are that during COVID lessons were learned from the government's mistakes.

Well, I haven't been working on infidelity projects these days.

Now my work focuses on research that's relevant to higher education, especially in my current role at Heterodox Academy.

Maybe someday I'll pick up the thread on infidelity research.

I am also doing a project on... ideal preferences and how they matter for relationship outcomes.

I was wondering if those 13 were the basis of your original 14 and his work.

He has a number of organizations, but one of them is Heterodox Academy, I want to say.

And he has a thesis, too, that like the two tribes, like a gross oversimplification.

He found that there are 13 tribes.

Uh, she also co-taught Election 2020 and Election 2024, uh, with a professor from an opposing political viewpoint, uh, before 500 students.

Uh, she was also co-chair of the, uh, Heterodox campus community at UVA, one of the largest in the nation, uh, and awarded Hetero- Heterodox Academy's 2024 Leadership Award.

She's also a new board member for the Freedom Forum, a national organization dedicated to making sure that the First Amendment protects everyone's right to express themselves freely and join with others to make their views known.

This diversity of voices and perspectives strengthens our nation.

In fact, we, we just bumped it up to 13.

[laughs] Okay.

And, uh, and so the idea is, um, th- that this could be a model across the country, and if we're the only organization in higher ed, uh, th- with boots on the ground at a university, but we also have national in our name, we are partnering with, this gets to the first part of your question, uh, Heterodox Academy, Citizens and Scholars, uh, Constructive Dialogue Institute, um, all those national organizations that are in this space.

Uh, so yesterday Heterodox Academy took dec- uh, de- debate across the curriculum, made a case study, and sent it out nationally yesterday.

I mean, I got my PhD in 2013, but I had been teaching basically through grad school from when I entered it and continued to teach through 2015, 2016.

When I started at Heterodox Academy, in my experience would be there were definitely things I started to avoid towards the end because it seemed like it wasn't worth, it's not worth getting into.

It's going to set off.

Someone in, you know, at Rutgers University, you got classes of two, three, 400 people.

Since then, he's continued his work with Rutgers and other places as well.

In 2016, he became the Heterodox Academy's first director of research, where he developed the campus expression survey and then five years later in 2020, joined FIRE as a senior research fellow to run the college free speech rankings.

For two decades, Sean's research has been focused on the understanding of how moral convictions produce motivated reasoning within the political domain, how this motivated reasoning can distort research in the social sciences, and how motivated reasoning can lead to political intolerance and create obstacles to political compromise.

And he joins me today to talk about the free speech on campus, the latest survey of students, and what higher ed leaders can do in today's political environment.

With that postdoc, I worked with Professor John Krasnick, one of the leading survey methodology people out there.

So that's where that strength comes from in my background.

And then after that, I started as the first research director of Heterodox Academy.

And then in 2020, I moved over to FIRE to spearhead the college free speech rankings, which is what we're here to talk largely about today.