A little heterodoxy before the holiday
Reminder to register for our conference, a presentation on why merit-based science really should be uncontroversial, and more.
Have you gotten your tickets for our upcoming Censorship in the Sciences conference yet? Join us January 10-12 for three days of excellent keynotes and panel discussions including:
The War on Truth — And How to Win It | Friday, January 9th at 8:40am
Speaker: Jonathan Rauch
Your Paper was Retracted. Were You Censored or Just Wrong? | Friday, January 9th at 10:50am
Speaker: Ivan Oransky
Is Compelled Speech a Form of Censorship? | Saturday January 10th at 2pm
Panelists: Abigail Thompson and John Wilson
Chair: Bob Moranto
How “Soft” Censorship in Media and Academia Helped Make the U.S.A. Youth-Gender-Medicine-Outlier | Sunday January 12 at 1:30pm
Speaker: Jesse Singal
And much more! View the whole schedule here and check out more conference details here. This conference is open to the public and we also offer a student rate.
If you’ve already bought your ticket, we’re looking forward to having you. We’ll be sending around an email in the next few weeks with more details on parking, campus access, and hotel suggestions.
Know someone who might be interested in the conference? Please forward this email to them!
Merit Based Science is Effective and Fair
Heterodox Academy member Anna Krylov, USC Associates Chair in Natural Sciences and Professor of Chemistry, gave a recent presentation at USC’s Quantitative and Computational Biology retreat, on how the previously banal idea of merit-based science has become so controversial.
Interesting USC News and Research
USC Student Rocket Club Shaters World Altitude Record
Hollywood Reporter ranks USC Thornton School of Music 2nd in the World
USC Dornsife’s Percival Everett wins National Book Award for ‘James’
Masks affect how kids — and parents — read emotions, USC brain research finds
Academe’s Divorce from Reality
An excellent recent opinion piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education by William Deresiewicz lays out how unpopular academia’s favorite ideas are with the public, even with the segments of the public which academics insist they are advocating for:
Survey findings tell the same broad story. A Marist poll this year revealed that 57 percent of Latinos surveyed are in favor of deporting all illegal immigrants. A Pew poll showed that 75 percent of Black respondents and 85 percent of Latinos are in favor of voter ID laws. After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions, Gallup found that 52 percent of Black and 68 percent of Latino adults supported the decision.
Another Pew poll, consistent with earlier findings, showed that only 4 percent of Latinos use “Latinx,” and that of those who have heard of the term, the vast majority reject it. And then there are perhaps the most important data points of all. Donald Trump increased his support among Black, Latino, and Asian voters from 2016 to 2020, then increased it again from 2020 to 2024 (he also got a majority of the Native American vote). The light was blinking. Now it’s solid red.
Whether academics will listen, rather than just doubling down on “educating the public” so that they finally recognize the brilliance of their ideas, is another story…
A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives
At our first ever campus event, sociologist Musa al-Gharbi spoke about how the left-leaning biases of academics and journalists have led to very bad, often hilarious, reporting on and scholarly misinterpretations of Trump voters and voters in general.
His post-election Substack essay analyzes and rejects many of the most popular theories now touted in the media and by academics about why Trump won, including:
Racism:
Meanwhile, Harris did quite well with whites in this cycle. She outperformed Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden with white voters. The only Democrat who put up comparable numbers with whites over the last couple decades was, incidentally, another black person: Barack Obama in 2008. Exactly what one would expect if racism was driving electoral outcomes, am I right?
Sexism:
So let me put it bluntly: Democrats lost in 2024 because Harris performed extremely poorly with women. Going all the way back to 1996 (when the partisan gender divide kicked into high gear), there has been only one Democrat who performed worse with women than Kamala did: John Kerry in 2004.
Billionaires moving to the right:
In fact, Trump and Musk weren’t the only billionaires rooting for the GOP this cycle. According to Forbes, more than 50 other billionaires also threw their weight behind Trump. So far so good for the preferred narrative. But here’s the twist: even more billionaires — 83 to be precise — supported the Democratic nominee. Kamala had 60 percent more billionaire backers than Donald Trump did. And billionaires like Oprah and Mark Cuban hit the campaign trail serving as surrogates for Harris in much the same way as Musk supported Trump.
And much more! We recommend purchasing his book (available on Kindle) for a little long-weekend reading.
For additional weekend reading, check out Heterodox Academy’s new journal inquisitive.
From the department of “oh no, who could possibly have predicted this?”
Have a great Thanksgiving! 🦃
If you have suggestions for things you’d like us to cover, feedback on our newsletter, or want to get more involved with Heterodox at USC please contact us at heterodox.usc@gmail.com. Fight On!