Free the Inquiry

An HxA Conference 2024 Report

Photo by wes lewis on Unsplash

The Setting

I attended the Heterodox Academy 2024 Conference in Chicago, June 6-8, and the emphasis was on “action.” The HxA staff designed a conference to show how HxA is living out its principles, its credo, in the still-emerging world of “heterodoxy” in the actual practices, initiatives, and behaviors, of HxA members, and others, on campuses across the United States, Canada, and some European and Asian countries.   The conference was an intellectually invigorating experience, for reasons similar to those which I wrote about previously on this substack in reference to the Inaugural Pluralism Summit in September 2023 (sponsored by the Mercatus Center), which offered a comparable experience.    

The common elements between this year’s HxA conference and the Pluralism Summit include:

• An appropriately sized attendance (HxA’s attendance this year was 420) in one location;

• Many opportunities for networking and conversation;

• Stimulating speakers and presenters in a variety of formats: keynotes, panels, “on-stage” conversations;

• A pressure-free environment relating to identity issues (no mandatory preferred pronouns or Land Acknowledgements); and

• Real interest in scholarship and inquiry around contested and controversial issues.

Living out the core HxA values of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement was the guiding ethos of the conference, and it was manifested in respectful listening, thoughtful questioning in Q & A following presentations, and discussions carried on in hallways and other venues beyond concurrent sessions or keynotes.   And everywhere, a key conference theme of “Free the Inquiry” was present, on lapel buttons and in the presentations and questions and discussions themselves. 

The range of topics ranged from the quite large (a panel of university Presidents conversing about free expression on their campuses, sponsored by the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression); to very specific pedagogical strategies and tools (such as the Constructive Dialogue Institute’s “Perspectives” online tool to encourage students to speak and share their ideas instead of self-censoring).  Across this range of topics in keynotes, “on stage” conversations, and concurrent sessions, common themes emerged:  

• promoting a range of viewpoints in both scholarship and teaching, where students and faculty alike learn to speak and write freely in open way and learn how to share their perspectives with evidence, and to revise them through ongoing inquiry with others;

• following the HxA precept of “Make Your Way with Evidence” and being willing to test theories, ideas, and hypotheses with new methods of inquiry and investigation;

• challenging groupthink and sacred cows and nostrums in the academy and elsewhere;

• enlarging connections with partners on campus, and beyond campus, in order to advance common values of academic and intellectual freedom; and

• sharing knowledge with other HxA members for the greater good.

The range of topics covered in the concurrent sessions alone illustrate what HxA is attempting to do in working with the grassroots activities of its members. Sessions included research on trigger warnings and microaggressions (and their under-evidenced, questionable basis); cancellations or punishments meted out to scholars for research on controversial topics such as youth gender medicine; the infiltration of accrediting bodies’ standards with social justice mandates; viewpoint diversity in Ethnic Studies; data-informed instructional design in STEM fields; campus culture in the ongoing protests relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; faculty members’ impact on academic policies; the Kalven Report and upholding institutional neutrality; faculty hiring practices; and women in heterodoxy.

I was fortunate to serve on two panels: one, on the developing of the HxLibraries Community as a potential model for other HxA members considering forming a new community; and two, on the Open Inquiry Toolkit Project on intellectual virtues and information literacy, which I co-developed with HxLibraries co-moderator Sarah Hartman-Caverly and technical writer and web designer Christina LaRose as a grant project in 2023/24.   I note the emerging interest in virtues such as intellectual humility as a foundation for academic inquiry, as was evidenced in other concurrent sessions at the conference.  

Highlights of the Conference

Among all of these conference opportunities, I found numerous sessions very rewarding and can describe only a few of them here to give some sense of the richness of the conference:

• The Morning Plenary of first day: Jonathan Haidt and Musa al-Gharbi in an “on-stage” conversation.  Haidt is of course well-known as co-founder of the Heterodox Academy and for his scholarship on moral foundations in The Righteous Mind, his co-authoring of The Coddling of the American Mind, and his more recent research on social media and smartphones and mental health effects in The Anxious Generation.   Al-Gharbi has been an HxA Writing Fellow, and has coordinated HxA’s Writing Fellows Program, is the author of the just-published We Have Never Been Woke.  Haidt and al-Gharbi discussed more of their intellectual journeys and careers and the paths they’ve taken in becoming influential public intellectuals.

• The panel presentation given by Simon Cullen on his award-winning and very popular “Dangerous Ideas in Science and Society” course at Carnegie Mellon, which teaches students to overcome self-censorship and gain confidence even about very controversial topics, using argumentation mapping through visualizations and a chatbot tool.

• A panel presentation given by HxLibraries’ member Ed Remus and his History faculty colleague Josh Salzman on their Viewpoint Diversity panels in redesigned courses at Northeastern Illinois University, to examine controversial topics such as the 1619 Project, and the history of mass incarceration, through the four scholarly viewpoints drawn from progressivism, socialism, liberalism and conservatism.

• The preconference given by Cory Clark, Director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at Penn, which creates competing teams of researchers (mainly in the social sciences) to develop hypotheses around contested questions, develop agreed-upon methods and data collection protocols, and eventual public sharing of results through publication, in order to reduce polarization about controversies in behavioral/psychological sciences.

• The opening keynote by HxA President John Tomasi in which he looked back at HxA’s short history and the current state of higher education around a cluster of issues, particularly the declining trust in higher education across the political spectrum, with the broad public.   He also discussed emerging developments relating to academic and intellectual freedom and promising developments for the future flourishing of higher ed, and the potential role for HxA’s almost 7,000 members to promote that flourishing.  

• A closing session on “Where is the University Going?” featuring on-stage panelists Nadine Strossen (Fellow at FIRE); Jacob Howland (Provost at the University of Austin); Amna Khalid (Carleton College); Cary Nelson (faculty at University of Illinois), and Stanley Fish (humanities scholar and currently Visiting Professor at New College/Florida). 

The Awards!

HxA gives at its conferences several awards to individuals or groups within HxA who’ve done innovative work or projects that most clearly support HxA’s mission.  The Open Inquiry Awards given at this conference were for: Leadership; Exceptional Scholarship; Teaching Excellence; Courage; and notably, our HxLibraries community received the inaugural Community Excellence Award. I was very pleased to receive this award, with special thanks to co-moderator Sarah Hartman-Caverly and on behalf of all members of HxLibraries.  We’ve done well since the group started in 2020, with numerous symposia, the Heterodoxy in the Stacks substack, the Open Inquiry Project, with connections made with other HxA communities, and with ongoing conversations during Happy Hours. HxA President John Tomasi told the attendees how much he appreciates and respects the work we’re doing.   Thanks to all members, and we look for more involvement from everyone in HxLibraries and HxA!

Concluding Thoughts

Academic conferences are often performative rituals with pre-ordained ideas and conformist practices that do not advance real inquiry or freedom of expression, and are too often exercises in anointing the familiar, the “safe”, and the confirmatory.  The HxA 2024 Conference was definitely “heterodox” in taking on currently controversial matters in higher ed and in creating venues and conversations where “freeing the inquiry” and ongoing questioning were possible, and in fact encouraged.   At its best moments, the conference created moments where risk-taking and openness to new and unexpected ideas were vibrating in the air.  This elevation of wide-ranging, frank, and open discussion is, of course, what the academy should be about at its best as well, shorn of prestige markers, identitarianism, and self-censorship.  

In reflecting on this conference, and others that strive to recreate what the academy should aspire to, I have identified these dynamic features that however fragile they may be in the moment, point toward some deeper foundations for professional discourse in the academy.   First, “freeing the inquiry” opens up psychic space for those involved to bond and create social capital together—interactions that enrich individuals’ intellectual lives but also create new ideas, strategies, and ongoing questions through networks of practice and building a relational culture together.  The positive relationships developed over time create the “glue” that expands individual talents and enables new networks and associations with a multiplier effect in a wider range of settings and with other colleagues, with potential ripple effects.  

Second, “freeing the inquiry”, juxtaposes scholars, teachers, and inquirers in highly interdisciplinary ways so that the quality of integrative complexity is present, in the same way that Philip Tetlock addressed that aspect of cognitive complexity decades ago.   Bringing highly different styles of thought together, to both differentiate dimensions of a highly complex problem (e.g., reconciling academic freedom with a socially just academy, or restoring trust in experts and institutions in a highly polarized political environment), and then integrate those dimensions of thought to understand the nuances, the contingencies, and the uncertainties—that should be a crucial aspect of “freeing the inquiry” among scholars, teachers, or thinkers in any profession.   Integrative complexity is an appreciation for formulating some provisional answers resulting from considering multiple perspectives within the academy, but finding more energy—and intellectual humility-- from not knowing, from unlearning old habits of mind, and for ongoing questioning.

Finally, the “free the inquiry” theme at this conference means a collective thought experiment in turning over hypotheses and questions about the future of higher education and how it might thrive anew, through respectful contestation with a new generation of students, early career scholars, and  seasoned public intellectuals who look both inside their own experience with the recent behaviors, norms, and practices of scholarship and teaching, but also outward to the changing perceptions of the wider public about higher education, what its mission should be, how it should serve society in a liberal democracy.   The collective thought experiment begun at this HxA conference is based on the guiding principles of the association, but will be realized more by testing those principles in practice more intensively on campuses, and learning collectively across the landscape of higher education.  

“Freeing the inquiry” will become a touchstone for years to come for HxA, and more evidence of it will surely be visible at the HxA 2025 Conference in New York City.  

Craig Gibson is Professional Development Coordinator in the Libraries at The Ohio State University; Faculty Fellow for Mentoring in the Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning there; and Co-moderator of the HxLibraries Community.