Heterodoxy Isn't The Thing. It's The Thing That Gets Us To The Thing.
Heterodox Academy 2024 Conference Day 1
I’m a member of Heterodox Academy, and I’m attending their 2024 conference right now in Chicago. Heterodox Academy is an organization dedicated to promoting the values of constructive disagreement, viewpoint diversity, and open inquiry. These values are important to me and have been nearly my whole life. They are part of why I became an academic—to search for truth wherever it may lead. In recent years, in various disciplines, these values have been attacked through sometimes successful attempts to get academics fired for their speech and research. I joined this group to find support in the midst of these attacks and to contribute to the mission of ensuring the next generation of scholars can teach and research a plurality of perspectives.
This is the first of several posts chronicling Heterodox Academy’s 2024 Conference.
Heterodoxy Isn’t The Thing. It’s The Thing That Gets Us To The Thing.
I want to share my first reactions as I joined my colleagues to learn about and discuss heterodoxy—that is, viewpoint diversity. As I scanned the room, looking for a place to sit, I realized that I know very few people here—except the famous people (and Erec and Amy—hi!). Sitting in the conference keynote, it struck me that, in a sense, I don’t care about heterodoxy. I care about linguistics. I care about writing. I care about rhetoric. I care about teaching my students to succeed in their communication endeavors. But viewpoint diversity is the best way I know to be able to serve my students and my field well. So heterodoxy is the value that enables me to achieve my personal and scholarly goals.
But even so, I still felt a bit out of sorts. This issue of viewpoint diversity is the proper domain of philosophy and political science; but I’m a linguist. You see the problem. What the hell do I know about this issue? All I know is that I live it. I have seen the need for heterodoxy in my own practice and in the wider world of academia. It’s in every attempt to silence a teacher because their material is doing “harm” to the students. It’s in every reading removed from curriculum because its writer or message didn’t align with a particular viewpoint that is considered the “correct” one. It’s in the Twitter pile-on I was a target of and in every pile-on I watched in real-time happen to colleagues—some of whom were from marginalized groups but didn’t “tow the line.” I feel heterodoxy in my bones because it’s in the water here in the academy. Or rather, it should be. Some academics treat heterodoxy like it’s a “poison” they need to “purify” the academy of. But I am and have been trying to preserve heterodoxy because heterodoxy is and ought to be the natural state of the academy. It ought to be in the water here. And I got a Ph.D. just to make sure.
But even so, heterodoxy isn’t the thing. It’s the thing that gets us to the thing. What does that mean? It’s a riff on a quote from an AMC drama called Halt and Catch Fire, a fictional history of the digital revolution in the 1980s and 1990s. In the first episode, the prophetic salesman Joe makes his pitch to a hardware engineer: “Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.” What does he mean? Computer engineers think computers are the coolest thing. But that’s not what the rest of us think. We think the coolest thing is what computers enable us to do: form communities, share our thoughts, find information, entertain ourselves, and keep up with our friends and family. Computers are the thing that gets us to the thing we actually desire. We don't use computers to use computers. We use computers to accomplish our goals.
In a similar way, heterodoxy is not the “thing” in the academy. The “thing” is the disciplines. Many academics join the academy to contribute to, advance, and teach in their disciplines because the disciplines give society something. Useful knowledge. Truth. Ideas we can put into practice and make our lives better—in practical, meaningful ways. That’s why I’m here. That’s what I’m trying to do.
But heterodoxy is the thing that gets me to the thing—it’s what enables the search for truth within the disciplines. So I care about heterodoxy as well.
Nevertheless, in my conversations with colleagues here, I find myself coming back to my “thing.” My discipline of linguistics. I just had a great conversation with a constitutional law scholar, and we found wonderful intersections between law and functional linguistics. I swear to God, I even pitched a functional linguistics idea to improve Supreme Court jurisprudence. It was mildly insane, but THAT’S what I want to talk about. I want heterodoxy, but only because I want linguistics—in all its wonderful, multi-faceted, contradictory, and complicated glory. It is what I love. And the scourge of the academy, it seems to me, is a movement to deny that love. To shove that love into some predetermined structure informed by theories that are powerful at this particular time. But I like my love wild and free. That’s what the academy means to me. Unbridled love of the things I care about.
I am a nerd. What can I say?
Degrees of Espionage
During the first keynote address, President Tomasi announced an initiative for members to share knowledge of committees that were forming at our universities that are dedicated to study free inquiry, constructive disagreement, and viewpoint diversity. The initiative is clear that we are not to share “privileged or confidential” information about these committees. However, he also suggested that Heterodox Academy might reach out to members of these committees, unsolicited by these members, to share some of the resources the organization has developed to support work on these issues. I have little doubt this comes from a good place, but it felt like espionage. I will not be participating in this project. And I think it is ill-advised. And if you thought Heterodox Academy (HxA) was a group dedicated to group-think, think again. We disagree, often. That’s the whole goddamn point.
Why do I think this is ill-advised? Because it smells like the “long march through the institutions.” This was the project of many people influenced by Marxist theory1 to shape policy by joining institutions of power in various societies and advancing Marxist perspectives and policy within them. It was a kind of subterfuge and espionage, and it has been moderately successful. I even think some of the products of the project are good—namely the forms of social safety nets that have developed in liberal democracies, like Social Security and the American Labor Movement.2 But I don’t think that the “long march through the institutions” is an especially honest or honorable approach to advancing policy. How do you advocate for policy in an honest and honorable manner? You do it out in the open. You do it in a way that people can see and can disagree with. Because this alternative method of working in the background threatens the trust and faith people have in the academy and other institutions. And the collapse in faith in the academy was literally one of the first points in President Tomasi’s talk. And I took a picture just to make sure.
If HxA wants to advance its values (which I agree with, by the way), it shouldn’t use its members to ostensibly “spy” on their universities’ committees. It should use publicly-available information to reach out to administration officials through established public channels (e.g. Presidents’ emails) to inform these officials in an open manner about HxA’s resources regarding this topic. And then the administration can make its own decisions. But going directly to the committee members through unsolicited emails is likely to seem to the public as using backchannels to make policy—the proverbial smoke-filled back-rooms. And those smoke-filled backrooms, while instrumentally effective methods, also raise suspicions of subversion. Even if HxA thinks the academy ought to be adopting these values, there are many people within the academy who disagree. And if we stand for “open” inquiry, then we ought to practice what we preach. We ought not to “sneak” the values in to committee members who are not looking for them. We ought to go above board and share the information with university leaders—not just committee members—so that everyone in each university community can have a say on whether they want those values and how they should be enacted.
I have been a member of HxA since 2020, and I kept in the shadows for fear of losing my job. I thought it wise at the time, and perhaps it was. But this moment, this kairos, demands more courage. That’s why I am writing this now.
I am open to being wrong here—truly. I wouldn’t be the first time, and it won’t be the last. But I did a whole thing last summer about how institutions work and why faith in them has collapsed. I feel confident (though not certain) that I have a valid point here, and I hope that HxA will consider a more open approach to advancing the sharing of its resources.
Last Word
President Tomasi’s keynote ended with a point worth sharing. Heterodox Academy is dedicated to creating a “truly inclusive university dedicated to the search for truth.” And I cannot agree with this more. If the search for truth is to succeed, it MUST be “truly inclusive.” It needs people of all backgrounds—of all genders, sexes, races, religions, social classes, and abilities. It needs Marxist perspectives. It needs Critical Race Theory perspectives. It needs liberal perspectives. It needs conservative perspectives. It needs libertarian perspectives. It needs religious perspectives. It needs atheist perspectives. Without these perspectives, we cannot truly reach consensus. And we need consensus because it is the liberal democratic basis of governance and scientific research. The alternative is forms of authoritarianism, and those are bad news.
In my graduate training, in my research, in my teaching, and in my life, heterodox ideas shaped who I am and what I do. I am better for having worked through heterodox ideas. And to deprive others—my colleagues and my students—of that same benefit is to claim more certainty than I have and to renounce the principles that I believe ground the search for truth. And perhaps most importantly, to deprive others of heterodoxy is too steal something of great value from their lives: an education.
I am not claiming a monopoly on truth. Far, far, far, far from it. I am not certain. That is the whole point of heterodoxy—we are not certain, so we must be open to argument and critique to refine our perspectives through interacting with other perspectives. As the scripture says, “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” I do have reasonable confidence in my claims. And in open societies, a person (first) stands among their equals and speaks their mind to be judged by their peers. And that is all I aim to do here in this post, in this conference, and in my work. Because that’s, to me, what heterodoxy is all about.
And that includes me—my school of Systemic Functional Linguistics is explicitly a Marxist project. I am an avowed liberal (my Marxist sparring partners will attest to this), but I find much of Marxist thought very compelling and useful, namely as a tool for understanding how social class shapes our lives and institutions.
Speaking as an American, but I’m a fan of a lot of socialized medicine that’s present not only in Europe and in the Middle East as well—that was my experience in Qatar, at least.