Professors Vowing to Resist Intellectual Intolerance
As students are fighting back against liberal bias in their colleges, encouraging news is coming from hundreds of faculty members as well! A project called Heterodox Academy, founded in 2015 by New York University Professor Jonathan Haidt [HI-DT] and Georgetown Law Professional Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz [ROE-ZEN-KRANZ], is finding new steam in 2018.
More than 1,500 professors across the country have now signed on to Heterodox Academy’s mission to support “viewpoint diversity” and “Free inquiry” on campus. Haidt and Rosenkranz are recruiting like-minded professors to fight back against what they call “the near absence of political diversity” in many academic fields. “Our goal,” their statement reads “is [to] attain enough diversity – and enough room for diverse viewpoints to be aired without fear of consequences – that orthodoxies get disrupted and the normal processes of debate and disconfirmation can work their magic.”
Professors are signing on to the pledge at a very encouraging rate. It reads, in part, “I will support viewpoint diversity in my academic field, my university, my department, and my classroom. Rutgers professor Lee Jussim [JUS-IM] attributes the rapid growth of this group to “a lot of academics, professors, and graduate students who, regardless of personal politics, reject what has been a rising tide of intolerance and biased scholarship.”
California State’s professor emerita Loretta Bruenning [BROO-NING] says she joined Heterodox because of the increasing “authoritarian culture” on campuses. Students are trained to “filter facts to fit socially acceptable conclusions and back up their conclusions with veiled aggression. They don’t learn to analyze information honestly.”
Phyllis Schlafly knew well the dangers of victimhood culture, microaggressions, and safe spaces. Free speech has become nearly extinct today on college campuses. Janice Fiamengo [FEE-A-MEN-GO], of the University of Ottawa, agrees with Phyllis, going so far as to say “I don’t think it is an exaggeration,” she said “to say that without true viewpoint diversity, students do not learn how to reason at a high level.”
Heterodox Academy gives us a hopeful glimpse that college faculty are catching on to just how badly students suffer at the hands of authoritarian, liberal indoctrination. It’s time to take back colleges for free speech and intellectual freedom.
