Why Heterodox Academy Failed

Nathan Cofnas

The purge of heretical scholars and ideas in academia is intensifying.1 Many job applications now require loyalty oaths to woke orthodoxy in the form of “diversity statements.”2 In the humanities and social sciences, large numbers of faculty are being hired to engage in what is effectively leftist activism.3 Simply ranting about how much you hate conservatives, Christians, or straight white men can be considered “scholarship” and the basis for a distinguished career. Entire departments devoted to ideology-driven fields like gender studies have been established to promote “social justice” and provide sinecures to activists.4 Academic papers that undermine the woke narrative are being retracted,5 and journals are adopting implicit or explicit polices to ensure that crimethink is never published again.6 Many undergraduate and graduate programs have stopped asking for standardized test scores and are increasingly making admissions decisions based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and ideological conformity.

Seven years ago, Heterodox Academy (HxA) came on the scene to promote “ideological diversity” in academia.

So what happened? HxA got taken over by leftists.

Because wokeism is based on demonstrable lies, it can only survive if people are prevented from telling the truth. It is inherently incompatible with open inquiry. Wherever there is wokeism—and it is metastasizing to every major institution in our society—there is censorship, intimidation, and groupthink.

There is an epidemic of cowardice among opponents of wokeism, and not only in academia.

I would think that tenured university professors would be willing to speak the truth, but apparently not.

He gets to this core issue:

Wokeism is built upon an ideological certitude about the origins of inequality: all groups have the same distribution of innate potential, and all differences favoring whites or men are due to past or present white racism or sexism. The whole ideology stands or falls on this empirical claim. Therefore, the greatest taboo in our society is to consider alternative explanations for inequality, particularly those that implicate natural differences in the distribution of traits among racial groups.

There are group differences. If you are unwilling to even admit the possibility that they are innate, you will never get at the truth.

I thought that HxA was run by well-meaning scholars who genuinely wanted diverse views. Maybe that is impossible in today's climate.

I don't know why he writes "wokeism" instead of "wokism". I don't know any other English words with that "eism" ending.

Here is a definition:

The four intellectual pillars of wokeism are:

Anti-white racism disguised under the euphemism social justice.

Rejection of traditional morality, which is primarily carried out by the promotion of sexually deviant lifestyles such as homosexuality and transgender. In a truly surreal inversion of reality, they paint traditional morality as immoral by charging it with being homophobic, transphobic, and similar terms.

Environmentalism based on the notion that it is desirable and possible to arrest climate change.

Intense hostility toward Christian religion, which they negatively paint as patriarchal, intolerant, and oppressive.

And the Woke demand that you conform to its views, or they will destroy you.

Here is a Black woman professor who demands that all Blacks get bereavement leave when someone like Tyre Nichols dies. She says she needs counseling for racial battle fatigue, and she says she is not joking.