LAST MONTH’S ANNUAL CONFERENCE of the Heterodox Academy, a group founded ten years ago by psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt to support intellectual diversity in academia, had to confront a cultural and political landscape drastically changed from previous years. “HxA,” as the group styles itself, is known for taking on threats to academic freedom and intellectual openness from the progressive (or, if you will, “woke”) left. But this is 2025, not 2015. Not only is Donald Trump in the White House again, but his second administration is waging an aggressive attack on the universities in a crusade against academic “wokeness.” As one of the conference speakers, Wesleyan University president Michael Roth, wrote in a recent column in Wesleyan magazine: “Having worried about the soft despotism of shared opinion, we now have to contend with the hard despotism of ideological tests from Washington.”
Where does that leave HxA, which describes itself as having some seven thousand members and over seventy “campus communities” across the United States? That question was very much on the minds of many conference speakers and participants. Roth, speaking as part of a plenary session featuring four university presidents threw down the gauntlet when he forcefully argued that heterodox critiques of universities for “being too woke” were playing into the hands of the bad guys.
We are, he pointed out, living in a moment when “the federal government is trying to destroy civil society by undermining the legitimacy of colleges [and] universities” as well as a wide range of other institutions, from law firms to media organizations:
We can play nice and not say that and we won’t get investigated, or we can do our job, which is to call the indecent attack on our sector indecent, wrongheaded, lawless, authoritarian, fascistic—choose your words. But if you sit there and worry about the sociology department, or whether Near East Studies is really antisemitic, I think you’re doing the work of authoritarianism.
Criticizing fellow academics in this moment, Roth suggested, is akin to “saying [that] the problem in Ukraine right now is that there’s corruption in the mining industry.”
Roth’s co-panelists did not disagree with his assessment of Trumpian authoritarianism, but they also felt that academic institutions should be able to resist government diktat while also doing the necessary work of self-correction on such matters as viewpoint diversity and a culture of debate. More broadly, Dartmouth president Sian Beilock argued that the universities need to reassert their mission of seeking “knowledge and truth” rather than promoting social or political activism. (That doesn’t mean “playing nice” with the Trump administration: Dartmouth has signed on to an amicus brief supporting Harvard’s challenge to the evisceration of its funding.) Moreover, every conference attendee I spoke to, including liberal Democrats, strongly disagreed with Roth about the wisdom of holding back criticisms of left-wing academic orthodoxies.
For starters, does criticizing the excesses of left-wing academics right now really amount to helping the cause of authoritarianism? University of Utah family studies professor Nicholas Wolfinger thinks not. As he pointed out in an email after the conference, the Trump administration certainly doesn’t need to get ideological ammunition for its attacks on progressive academics by pulling arguments from liberal and centrist professors: It can get everything it needs and plenty more from right-wing propaganda sites like Campus Reform, which are always ready to rain fire whenever “an adjunct professor at South Alabama Technical College” makes some nutty statement about social justice.
Others emphasize that now is not the time to let an important secondary responsibility go lax. “Obviously, the Trump administration has caused great problems for open inquiry in many ways,” bioethicist and author Alice Dreger, a Heterodox Academy advisory council member and a self-described person of the left, told me in a telephone interview. “That doesn’t mean we don’t still have to fix issues that have existed for a long time within the academy: the narrowing of what’s allowed, not entertaining particular viewpoints, shutting them down before they’re spoken.”
As Wolfinger put it, self-criticism is simply “what healthy organizations do.” In that sense, Roth’s Ukraine analogy is off the mark: Ukrainians actually spend plenty of time criticizing corruption and other internal problems precisely because these problems often risk weakening and undermining the country’s ability to resist the Russian invaders.
In spite of this apparent consensus, Roth’s concerns are hard to put out of mind—especially given the way the news rises to meet them. Just two days after the HxA conference wrapped up, the story broke that University of Virginia President Bill Ryan was stepping down because the Justice Department had demanded his resignation as a condition of settling a civil rights investigation into the school’s diversity practices. Criticizing DEI programs at such a moment—even if they call out for such criticism—can indeed feel like taking the side of the bullies. Or, as William Paterson University sociologist Colleen Eren put it at the conference’s last panel in summarizing (and disagreeing with) Roth’s argument, allying oneself with “the barbarians at the gate.”
IN THIS CONTEXT, “heterodox” groups like HxA have struggled to keep their footing. It is perhaps telling that while Roth’s swipe at critics of “wokeness” rubbed many attendees the wrong way, so did Haidt’s opening-night remarks for going too far in the other direction. He suggested that progressive academics who had resisted calls for reform had only themselves to blame for Trump’s assault on the universities, while their critics were entitled to a “We told you so”—meant quite literally: Haidt invited the audience to join him in saying it out loud, on a count of three, a moment of shtick unbecoming of Haidt and inappropriate for the setting. The response came back somewhat meekly, with a rather thin chorus of voices rising briefly alongside an equally thin patter of applause. Several people would later tell me they found the moment distasteful. (There was one exception: the Trump-sympathetic retired English professor Mark Bauerlein. During a panel the second day, he waxed exultant about “the guilty pleasure of being able to say collectively, ‘We told you so.’”)
Haidt’s premise, Wolfinger told me in our email exchange, was just as flawed as Roth’s: The liberal skew in the universities long antedates twenty-first-century “social justice” progressivism and has been drawing conservative fire for well over a century at this point. (The American Association of University Professors, Wolfinger noted, was formed in 1915 in response to the firing of a left-wing Stanford economist.) What’s more, if “viewpoint diversity” means more Republican faculty members, achieving a balance would be virtually impossible, especially given the growing tendency of people with more education to vote Democratic. Even so, other HxA members were sympathetic to Haidt’s point. Absent the universities’ “woke” excesses, Rutgers psychologist Lee Jussim told me, Trump’s attacks on the elite universities would never have found any traction.
Counterfactuals are by definition unverifiable, of course. It is true that, as HxA president and former Brown University professor John Tomasi pointed out in his keynote address, public confidence in academic institutions has dropped dramatically in the last decade as a result of both partisan polarization and souring views on the quality and cost of higher ed. (While this drop has been especially steep among Republicans, the decline is also observed among Democrats and independents.) But even amid that falling trust, most American adults currently oppose Trump’s handling of issues related to college and universities, and close to two-thirds think the universities make a positive contribution to scientific and medical research and technological innovation.
In his keynote address, Tomasi memorably compared modern universities to sixteenth-century English monasteries whose loss of moral capital paved the way for their expropriation and destruction by Henry VIII. But while the analogy is certainly striking, it can also point in a different direction. Henry’s power grab was not motivated by the Catholic Church’s internal failings. Likewise, it’s hard to make, with a straight face, the argument that Trump would not have embarked on his power grab vis-à-vis elite academic institutions—or that the Trumpified Republican party would have opposed such a power grab—if the average liberal faculty member had been politically closer to Jonathan Chait than to Judith Butler.
THE DEBATE OVER woke vs. MAGA that took place over the course of HxA’s meeting was memorably attested during a plenary-session panel featuring Bauerlein and University of California-Riverside sociology professor Steven Brint, who debated government intervention and academic reform.1 Bauerlein attained some notoriety for accepting a role as a trustee of New College Florida during Gov. Ron DeSantis’s 2023 takeover and makeover of that formerly progressive college. The retired English prof came across, just as he did when I interviewed him that year, as someone with a genuine dedication to the traditional humanities and classical academic principles—and an equally genuine naïveté about the goals and strategies of some of his less-principled allies in the culture wars, whether it’s activists like Christopher Rufo or politicians like DeSantis. Bauerlein said with evident sincerity that he simply could not believe the Trump administration wanted to gut scientific research at top universities as opposed to simply curbing the universities’ abuses. (His “Maybe this is naïve” disclaimer elicited a ripple of laughter in the room.) He also suggested that actual moves to impose government-mandated ideological strictures on higher education, on the federal or state level, would be unpopular “and hence effectively held in check by public opinion.” But when someone noted that “public opinion won’t matter very much if an authoritarian government makes incursions into civil society,” Bauerlein testily replied, “Well, if you ask social and religious conservatives, they would tell you that authoritarian government has been intervening in their own small societies for a long time.”
Brint strongly pushed back against Bauerlein’s rosy picture of government intervention, stressing the devastating effect of cuts to science programs, the all-out assault on international students’ freedom of speech, and the likely loss of brainpower by American universities—as well as what he called “hints of Lysenkoism,” the anti-scientific Stalin-era Soviet orthodoxy, in the Trump administration’s attempts to “shutter and redefine what science is.” Despite these strong words, Brint willingly conceded that the critiques of progressive academic orthodoxies had a point—and he even allowed that “there could be some unintended positive consequences of all this agitation that’s being directed at universities by the Trump administration and some of the states,” namely the speeding up of reforms that had been happening anyway. But he also firmly rejected broad-brush characterizations of academia as being hopelessly mired in dogmatic progressivism—and, above all, he asserted that no one should give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt about its intentions, as Bauerlein wanted to do.
“HETERODOXY” CAN BE a many-splendored thing. The conference’s slightly overwhelming menu of content— six panels ran concurrently in nearly each time slot save four plenary sessions—offered a rare, and true, diversity of viewpoints. A panel on DEI, for instance, featured two nuanced critics of DEI programs as well as a scholar who discussed his research showing that racial and gender biases still need to be countered to allow women and minorities to fulfil their potential in the workplace. There were presentations on countering “postliberal” right-wing critics of free expression and on making the left-wing case for viewpoint diversity and open inquiry in the academy. There was even a “skeptics’ panel” featuring critiques of HxA’s own approaches to issues of intellectual freedom, such as the organization’s embrace of “institutional neutrality” on political issues.
Several panels and workshops also explored practical questions of teaching students the habits of dialogue across different perspectives as well as civil, constructive disagreement and debate—a “muscle” that Dartmouth President Sian Beilick argued many young people needed to build. A riveting panel examined a “Courageous Conversations” class on the Israel-Palestine conflict, which was taught at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill last spring—for spring break, participants traveled to Israel—and co-sponsored by the Nantucket Project, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting pluralism. In one exercise, the students, who included Zionist Jews and pro-Palestinian Muslims, had to write a paper and answer questions from the viewpoint of a figure on the opposite side from their own, such as Benjamin Netanyahu or Yasser Arafat. The results, said Nantucket Project co-founder Tom Scott, were transformative for both the students and the campus.
This is heterodoxy as it should be, and not “heterodoxy” as code for “anti-woke.” The authentic spirit came out, too, in HxA’s “Four-Point Agenda for Reforming Colleges and Universities,” unveiled by Tomasi on the first day of the conference; though somewhat short on specific action, it points in the direction of open inquiry, intellectual freedom and pluralism, and civil disagreement.
Nevertheless, that agenda clearly remains focused on academia’s internal problems—a focus that some HxA members believe is myopic at the current moment. “Heterodoxy itself needs, at this point, some refinement and recalibration,” Ohio State University faculty member Craig Gibson, a presenter at the conference, told me in an email afterward. Gibson believes that presenting a robust challenge to “the liberal monoculture of the academy” was once essential to the HxA project—but now, he wrote, “‘heterodoxy’ needs to place itself on a higher plane of truth-seeking, and truth-affirming, when faced with threats from the current administration to civil society, due process, and the liberal democratic order itself which makes institutions like colleges and universities possible.”
This is not to go as far as Michael Roth in suggesting that critiques of the illiberal academic left are now irrelevant or even harmful. Threats to intellectual freedom from the progressive left haven’t gone away: Just recently, Salman Rushdie withdrew as a commencement speaker at Claremont McKenna College in California after campus activists vociferously denounced his appearance on account of his harsh statements about pro-Hamas sympathies on the part of some pro-Palestinian protesters. (Pro tip: Folks, if you’re canceling Salman Rushdie, you are definitely on the wrong track.)
While it seems clear that academia’s internal problems with freedom of expression and intellectual diversity have little to do with Trump’s motives for his current power grab, these problems do make it harder for universities to stake out the moral high ground while defending themselves. A commitment to these classically liberal and pluralistic values must be consistent, as some progressives are realizing now. During a panel about critiques of free speech, Aeon Skoble, a philosophy professor at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts, noted that while “free speech was vaguely right-wing coded” a few years ago, “the shoe really is on the other foot” nowadays, and some of his colleagues who had been suspicious of his free-speech advocacy in past years compliment him for it today. Maybe that’s one of those “unintended positive consequences” Steven Brint mentioned in his exchange with Bauerlein.
Skoble’s free-speech advocacy is a good reminder that the values of the Enlightenment and of the American Founding, in recent decades often disparaged by the left, are essential to the defense of academic freedom—and of freedom more generally.
But there remains the question of how a group like HxA should deal with the new threats. “If we want our universities to be seen once again as institutions committed to knowledge-seeking, not ideological gatekeeping, we must embrace both forms of action: internal reform and external defense. This is not a zero-sum game,” HxA communications director Nicole Barbaro Simowski wrote in a post-conference column. That said, she went on to suggest that internal reform via the organization’s campus networks should remain HxA’s appropriate primary focus.
That’s their prerogative, but it’s worth saying that the “heterodox” professors may squander their supporters’ trust if, amid a very real assault on liberal democracy and civil society, they appear to be (in Roth’s pithy words) “talking about needing a better milkshake when the house is on fire.”
How Heterodox Academy will approach its mission over the next few years under Trump will show how well it can keep its priorities balanced.
Full disclosure: Brint is related by marriage to Bulwark staff writer Will Sommer.