The Heterodox Academy Community Campus at the University of Toronto (Hxa UofT) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit membership organization of faculty, staff, and students committed to advancing the principles of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement to improve higher education and academic research.
HxA UofT will reinvigorate the norms of academic freedom, free expression, and open inquiry across the university.
Our Commitment
Our commitment to heterodoxy within the academy is a response to the rise of orthodoxy within scholarly culture that leads people to fear shame, ostracism, or any other form of social or professional retaliation for questioning or challenging a commonly held idea.
Our Vision
We aspire to create college classrooms and campuses that welcome diverse people with diverse viewpoints and that equip learners with the habits of heart and mind to engage that diversity in open inquiry and constructive disagreement.
We see an academy eager to welcome professors, students, and speakers who approach problems and questions from different points of view, explicitly valuing the role such diversity plays in advancing the pursuit of knowledge, discovery, growth, innovation, and the exposure of falsehoods.
Our Story
Heterodox Academy was founded in 2015 by Jonathan Haidt, Chris Martin, and Nicholas Rosenkranz, in reaction to their observations about the negative impact a lack of ideological diversity has had on the quality of research within their disciplines. What began as a conversation among social researchers about the challenges facing their disciplines and institutions, grew into a community of thousands of faculty, staff, and students.
Our Solution
Heterodox Academy was founded in 2015 by Jonathan Haidt, Chris Martin, and Nicholas Rosenkranz, in reaction to their observations about the negative impact a lack of ideological diversity has had on the quality of research within their disciplines. What began as a conversation among social researchers about the challenges facing their disciplines and institutions, grew into a community of thousands of faculty, staff, and students.
Our Campus Chair
Meet the leader building the HxA at UofT Campus Community:
Scott Davies
Professor, Department of Leadership,
Higher and Adult Education
At HxA UofT, we are concerned that our university, like many others in North America, is experiencing an erosion of longstanding norms of constructive disagreement and tolerance of a range of viewpoints. In particular, we are disturbed by an emerging practice in which our administration is requiring faculty and staff to essentially declare their loyalty to certain doctrines as a price for teaching and for conducting research. Multiple personal experiences, as well as surveys of Canadian academics, suggest these requirements are hampering academic freedom and free inquiry at our institution and at others.
The HxA approach for fostering constructive disagreement and viewpoint diversity aligns with our goal to build a Campus Community that will provide a forum for UofT’s current HxA members and other like-minded faculty members to meet and discuss their views. This includes regular workshops and information sessions with internal and external speakers to develop strategies for dialogue among faculty by appealing to open-minded persuasion and evidence. Ultimately, we aim to present our ideas to the administration, with the goal of ensuring that its policies support and nurture viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement across UofT.
Do you believe in open inquiry?