Anna’s cancellation story does not stop there. Her new outsider status gains her an invitation to a fashionable “dissident soiree,” at which canceled scenesters and edgy podcasters privately sympathize with her plight. She is courted by a publicist who wagers that “cancellation was about to become cool.” Above all, she becomes comically obsessed with the writings of Ayn Rand, raving about the ultra-libertarian author’s crap prose and ghoulish ideas with all the intensity of an extroverted teenager who has just found God. If Anna had previously been an orthodox member of the literary mainstream, her subsequent revolt against orthodoxy ends up being no less conformist. 

Academia, too, has lately witnessed a similarly conformist revolt against conformity. Over the last decade, a new and vigorous “heterodox” movement has emerged, with its own scathing diagnosis of the failures of mainstream academe. Beyond advocating greater viewpoint diversity within existing institutions, heterodox figures have established new institutions that aim to compete with the traditional university system, and launched new fields that attempt to challenge progressive ideologies. These efforts are now a few years old, and assessment of their record is timely. 

As to their success, there are reasons to be doubtful.  

The heterodox critique points at an undeniably real set of problems. In the current ideological climate on campus, scholars can feel pressure to distance themselves from texts, authors, and arguments that could be seen as “problematic.” Ideas once confined to the activist fringes of the social sciences have spread to the humanities and hard sciences writ large. And as the ideological climate on campuses tilts ever more progressive, so, too, has the makeup of the people who teach there. Conservative scholars now make up an ever-tinier share of the academic teaching workforce, vastly outnumbered by those with liberal, progressive, and Left-wing views. Public confidence in the value of universities is declining sharply, in part reflecting the sense that academia refuses to even consider the opinions of half or more of the electorate. 

More from this author

Welcome to mystery-box liberalism

By Edmund King

Of course, there are many ways to be heterodox. On an administrative level, one may advocate for greater pluralism within existing academia. Parallel to established academic structures, organizations like the Heterodox Academy work towards this goal. On a scholarly level, one may produce work that investigates developments in progressive ideologies through the lens of established disciplines and fields. In recent years, several excellent books have taken such an approach, including the groundbreaking work of Jonathan Haidt, Yascha Mounk’s 2023 book, The Identity Trap, and Musa Al-Gharbi’s thought-provoking 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke. At its best, work like this can demystify developments inside academia, both for those on the outside and also for those within, who have been quietly searching for explanations for the rapid ideological changes of the past 10 years. 

But the heterodox movement hasn’t focused simply on fixing what is broken. At its most ambitious, it has aimed to put academia back on track by creating whole new institutions. The most prominent example is the University of Austin, or UATX, conceived by the hawkish journalist Bari Weiss and the tech billionaire Joe Lonsdale, among others. Announcing the new school in 2021, its founding president, Pano Kanelos, observed that “many universities no longer have an incentive to create an environment where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized.” (Kanelos has since departed the institution, as have a number of faculty and advisers.)

If other universities were no longer in the business of seeking the truth or promoting a diversity of ideas on campus, then UATX would do this. Newly founded scholarly outlets like the Journal of Controversial Ideas work in parallel to the new institutions, playing host to key debates within the community. There have lately been attempts to establish new academic fields to hold mainstream scholarship to account. The University of Buckingham’s Centre of Heterodox Social Science, for instance, aims to incubate what it terms “critical wokeness studies.” 

These new developments pose an existential question: if mainstream academia has been “captured,” does the future of real scholarship lie beyond the established institutions? But actually creating these new institutions — rather than merely sloganeering about the dire need for them — is proving more difficult.

The first obvious challenge is that of scale, resourcing, and critical mass. Compared to established brick-and-mortar universities, “heterodox” startups like UATX and the Jordan Peterson Academy are tiny. They can’t offer anything approaching the range of courses or the in-person research facilities of a traditional university, nor indeed can they provide secure employment for academics. Even when the seriously rich invest in heterodox institutions, as in the case of UATX, these kinds of disparities persist.  

The diffuse focus of the heterodox community compounds these challenges. The Journal of Controversial Ideas has a much wider subject remit than traditional academic journals — after all, there are controversial ideas in every discipline. But this diluted focus makes quality assurance difficult to achieve. If one has a controversial idea about (say) geriatric psychiatry, one needs to engage with other experts in the field to assess its validity. Heterodox scholars in other fields simply don’t have the knowledge to comment fruitfully on such an idea. One can be “heterodox” in relation to other scholars in one’s field. That “heterodoxy,” though, has no automatic relevance to heterodox work being done in another field. “Heterodox studies,” in other words, isn’t a coherent concept. 

To succeed, modern academic fields need to have a critical mass of scholars working in specific areas. Without this, expertise is too thinly spread. Even in areas in which heterodox expertise is more concentrated — for example, the study of Left-wing authoritarianism or the new “critical wokeness studies” — this problem still rears its head. What if expert reviewers can’t be found? What if the field lacks researchers who are expert in specialist research methods? All new fields face challenges, but they are easier to navigate within established institutions with adjacent expertise and generous funding. Potentially, heterodox startups might work with existing academia to develop capacity, but burned bridges and skepticism about the worth and relevance of traditional academic networks can make this more difficult.  

To be fair to those in the heterodox movement, one might regard the issues of scale and resourcing as inevitable growing pains along the path to maturity. Traditional academia, after all, is centuries old, and the task of building alternative institutions will take more than a day. While it is true that the heterodox movement’s resource base may well expand in the future, deeper questions remain about its foundations and likely trajectories. 

In the best academic fields, incentive structures promote careful and rigorous scholarship. To achieve standing, one must convince expert peers of the value of one’s work. What about the scholarly foundations of the heterodox movement? Owing to its weakly institutionalized profile and the popularity of anti-woke writing on platforms such as Substack and X (formerly Twitter), the field can end up being dominated by the attention-economy logic of those platforms. Often, thinkers pioneer new ideas on Substack (rather than academic journals) and publish heterodox or “anti-woke” books with popular rather than academic presses. This is consistent with the movement’s zeitgeist. After all, they say, traditional academia is broken. 

Suggested reading

How the Right sold out

By Sohrab Ahmari

But what about these new platforms? Audiences on Substack and X aren’t experts; they yearn for anti-woke red meat. In the heterodox community, the surest way to advance is to provide this (and to do so often). In turn, this skews incentives within such networks and gives excessive influence to “anti-woke” celebrities with slim academic credentials but undeniable skills in self-promotion and churning out repetitive content. 

In the heterodox space, Gad Saad, with his 1.2 million X followers and more than 360,000 YouTube subscribers, is hard to miss. Saad is a genuine academic, a marketing professor at Canada’s Concordia University. However, the kind of work for which he is best known, such as 2020’s The Parasitic Mind, simply doesn’t meet the same standards of evidence that would be demanded of him in academia. The Parasitic Mind claims that “an epidemic of idea pathogens are spreading like a virus and killing common sense in the West.” It is hard to know where to start with such a claim. What is an “idea pathogen”? Is it a virus or just “like” a virus? Is this not all just a simile or an analogy masquerading as a scientific concept?  

A reluctance to gatekeep and a desire to maintain a “broad church” mean that heterodox conferences and festivals can end up being dominated by these sorts of figures. This, in turn, can have a detrimental effect on the reputation of heterodox scholarship within mainstream academe. Any movement that can’t find a way of excluding figures who produce consistently low-quality work — no matter how popular they might be on social media — is going to face uncomfortable questions. Historians of science use the term “rogue scholars” to refer to academics who attempt to port their credentials from their actual areas of expertise to fields in which they are decidedly not experts. Without proper standards, the problems of rogue scholarship can proliferate, undermining scholarly credibility.

Funders can present similar problems. Whatever the issues with publicly funded research, such a model guarantees neutrality (at least, in theory). When funders are rich individuals or conservative political foundations, however, this breaks down. What if heterodox scholars take positions contrary to those of funders? There may be formal guarantees of independence, but these can disintegrate in the heat of the culture war. 

Recent developments at UATX are instructive. Following President Trump’s return to power in 2024, management has made extremely aggressive attempts to position the university on the Right — including enforcing compulsory oaths in anti-communism, anti-Islamism, and anti-identity politics; and dissenters have been pushed out or left of their own accord. 

These developments gesture to wider problems of coherence. Who is in, and who is out? Does heterodoxy actually represent an independent political position, or is it implicitly an anti-progressive (and thus, for all intents and purposes, conservative) force? Trump’s proposed new “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which would effectively compel universities that receive federal funding to comply with his administration’s policies, illustrates the dilemma. The compact draws on some of the language used by the heterodox movement in directing both universities and their employees to adopt a strict position of viewpoint neutrality in relation to “societal and political events.” 

Superficially, recognition at this level looks like victory of sorts for the heterodox movement. However, such a strict and all-encompassing definition of neutrality would obviously impede the academic freedom of those who want to speak out on these issues. This is a problem compounded by the controversial actions currently being taken by the Trump administration. Some of these actions — such as ICE detentions of international students pursuing graduate degrees in the United States — are highly relevant to contemporary academia. These are surely issues that it is appropriate for universities and their staff to take a public position on. Academic freedom, in other words, cuts across party political lines. Enforced viewpoint neutrality can look very much like an attempt to preemptively muzzle critics. 

Suggested reading

What’s the point of the University?

By Wessie du Toit

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, there was much talk about an “ideological realignment” as figures from the Left and Right came together in common cause against perceived illiberalism in progressive-dominated institutions. However, as the case of UATX shows, these coalitions have proved hard to sustain. Temporary Left-Right alliances tend to be unstable. Some associated with the heterodox movement have been unable to withstand the various pressures and incentives at play and have ultimately aligned themselves with the wider establishment Right, rather than maintaining their own independence. Others have taken their contrarianism in extreme and conspiratorial directions. Many scholars who entered heterodox circles in the late 2010s did so in protest against what they saw as the politicization of their fields by the progressive Left. Now, they face a heterodox movement that increasingly seems to have trouble distancing itself from a different brand of politics.

Ironically, the heterodox movement is now characterized by some of the same problems it once took issue with in activist and mainstream academia. In heterodox circles, cancellation has become its own form of “lived experience,” and researchers make regular appeal to their own experiences of it, with these accounts having their own wounded and subjective character. 

Naturally, scholars will have private views on politics, but the airing of these subjective traumas merely brings us back to the heterodox movement’s own objections to “grievance-studies” disciplines and subjectivity-centering concepts like standpoint epistemology. When such complaints begin to dominate the literature and overshadow analytic and empirical motivations, one has simply adopted a new flavor of the subjective and politicized “woke” academia one claims to be rejecting. 

In both Britain and the United States, the recent political success of Right-wing populist parties hostile to universities poses its own challenge to the heterodox movement. When it emerged in the mid-2010s, the movement was able to raise a credible challenge to what appeared at the time to be a progressive stranglehold on the institutions. But time has moved on and progressives are no longer in the ascendancy. As we have seen, the second Trump administration has targeted American universities on unabashedly ideological lines. In Britain, Reform UK promises to reduce undergraduate places in British universities and, mirroring Trumpian policy in America, proposes to cut funding to universities that undermine free speech. The heterodox movement needs to ask itself whether it is prepared to offer critiques of these sorts of policies. Has the movement been offering a sincere and constructive internal critique of academia, or has it simply served to provide a set of talking points that could ultimately justify Right-wing cuts to university funding and attacks on academic independence? 

Lexi Freiman’s Anna rejects woke orthodoxy only to fall victim to the new moral certainties she finds in Ayn Rand. Contrarianism, in other words, can become its own kind of straitjacket. Similarly, the heterodox movement risks losing sight of its early principled stance against the politicization of academia. This is a shame. Certainly, there is great potential for heterodoxy within existing academia. As heterodox critics have demonstrated, established academia certainly does have major problems with conformity and groupthink. At its best, the movement has worked as an internal check against these tendencies. Scholars associated with heterodoxy have produced genuinely insightful work examining some of the most pressing issues in contemporary academia. A new AI-powered discussion tool, for example, Simon Cullen’s “Sway,” aims “to foster rigorous, evidence-based dialogue among students on controversial topics” and model the kind of free exchanges we all want to see taking place in class. 

However, there is reason to doubt that any of this provides a basis for a genuine alternative to academia. Without more, the heterodox movement risks becoming a parody of the academy it decries. 

Abundance progressives and pro-growth conservatives are right to reject the hostility to science, industry, and entrepreneurialism of “de-growthers,” who dream of an economic stationary state in the near rather than distant future. Such a stationary state existed for most of human history, when long periods of economic and technological stagnation meant that powerful individuals and states could increase their wealth only by plundering the weak. The explosive growth and once-unthinkable technological advances of modernity have vindicated the 18th-century British writer Jonathan Swift since he wrote in Gulliver’s Travels: “Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”

But we can reject mindless anti-growth ideology without mindlessly embracing growth for its own sake. Yes, we need growth — but good growth, not bad growth. To understand the difference, don’t look to the Silicon Valley overlords who are increasingly determining the shape of politics on both sides of the political spectrum.

Good growth leads to, and sustains, countries with strong middle classes and workers and families with decent wealth, leisure, and the power to bargain with their employers. Bad growth maximizes gross domestic product at the expense of individual autonomy, social solidarity, and other fundamental elements of a decent human society.

As an economic metric, GDP is compatible with both good growth and bad growth. Because it measures output per hour worked, it can be improved in a good way — improving the productivity of each worker, lowering the prices of goods and services for society as a whole, and allowing workers to earn the same income with less effort, assuming they can bargain effectively with employers to share in the profits.

More from this author

Confessions of a Heritage American

By Michael Lind

But GDP can also be boosted in bad ways by expanding the hours worked in a country without boosting individual worker productivity. In a modern industrial society, in which the majority of adults must toil for wages, GDP can be raised by cutting social-insurance benefits to compel the elderly to have much longer working lives, or by legalizing child labor. Abstract GDP would go up, but few people other than some employers and capitalists would be happier.

It’s also possible to expand GDP without increasing productivity by flooding a country with migrants. Excessive immigration may lower wages in various occupations, immiserating natives and immigrants alike, even as GDP improves in numerical value because of the population-driven ballooning of the workforce. Conversely, birth rates that outstrip productivity growth can impoverish a country, even as its GDP rises because more workers mean more work hours.

In a good society, work must be balanced with time for family and community and recreation.  Members of a society with a healthy work-life balance would be rational to choose somewhat less growth in personal income and the national economy — if the higher-growth alternative requires sacrificing essential social values.

Edith Cresson, the Prime Minister of France from 1991 to 92, is (barely) remembered today for asserting that a quarter of men in Anglo-Saxon countries are homosexuals who aren’t interested in women and that the Japanese were “little yellow men” who “sit up all night thinking how to screw us”. Whatever may be the case with Anglo-Saxon men, the Socialist premier was right to defend the work-life balance of the French against East Asian cultures of overwork, however chauvinistically: “I said they were working like ants. We cannot live like that, in minuscule apartments with a two-hour journey to work like animals. Work and work and work and producing children to work like animals. We want to keep our social security, our holidays, and live like human beings.”

Long work hours have been correlated with low fertility rates, and East Asia has some of the lowest birth rates in the world. In 2024, South Korea won the dubious honor of being the country with the lowest fertility in the world for six years in a row — 0.75, far below the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a national population without mass immigration. In response, South Korea has imposed a 52-hour work week — compare that to the 35-hour work week in France and 36 to 40 hours a week in Germany. Likewise, Japan since the Seventies has suffered from an epidemic of karoshi — stress-related death by overwork.

Which brings us to Silicon Valley. The tech tycoons who have emerged as the dominant oligarchy in 21st-century America have contradictory views of work and life in the future.  Many predict that automation will eliminate most jobs, making it necessary to create a universal basic income that allows citizens to enjoy a minimal level of subsistence without working at all.

Other tech leaders, however, want to import the East-Asian model of overwork and fanatical schooling to the United States (and the West more broadly). According to Elon Musk, who despises labor unions and laws protecting American workers, Chinese factory workers “won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They’ll be burning the 3am oil. So they won’t even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, initially appointed by President Donald Trump as co-director with Musk of the ill-fated Department of Government Efficiency, has claimed that East- and South-Asian students are superior to American students. In an X post that likely doomed his political career, he wrote: “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers…. More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of Friends. More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin’. More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall’.”

Ramaswamy is confused. Individual Indian-Americans excel in many areas, but national productivity is the result of well-designed economic, legal, and political institutions, not overwork by particular individuals. That explains why India, with the longest work hours among the top-10 economies (49 hours or more per week), is much poorer than the United States (38 hours) and Canada (32.1 hours). Indeed, thanks to their productivity, countries with high per-capita GDP in general have lighter workloads.

Not content with opposing organized labor and wage-and-hours laws, many of today’s techno-libertarians dream of carving up democratic nation-states into “freedom cities” or “charter cities” — privately owned cities free to create their own regulations without interference by the countries in which they are geographically situated. This is the revival of an old and very bad idea, formerly embodied in the United States in early-industrial-era company towns and mining towns policed by private detectives — and symbolized today by the high-tech despotism of city-states like Singapore and Dubai.

If the new city-states were bottom-up democratic versions of Athens or Florence, the idea might be appealing. But the tech oligarchs have something more sinister in mind — top-down autocracies in which privileges bestowed on workers by investors and managers replace civil rights in a given territory.

Curtis Yarvin, treated as a guru by some tech executives, has popularized the acronym RAGE (Replace All Government Employees) and called for a “Butterfly Revolution” to centralize “absolute sovereignty” in a corporate state with a dictator-CEO. And foreshadowing Trump’s appointment in 2025 of Musk to head DOGE, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney in 2014 called on then-President Barack Obama to appoint Google boss Eric Schmidt as CEO of America, terminate all federal employees, turn federal power over to the tech industry — then resign.

Symbolizing the convergence of libertarianism with the libertine drug culture in Silicon Valley and the Burning Man festival, Peter Thiel has funded a project to promote private “seasteads” unregulated by nation-states, which might allow medical experiments on human beings that are banned elsewhere: “Could you have something where you use psilocybin” — the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms — “or MDMA” — better known as the rave culture drug ecstasy — “as an antidepressant drug? Or could you get new medical treatments where you break the FDA monopoly on medicine worldwide?”

A comment on X by a Thiel protégé, Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, suggests the danger of replacing liberal, constitutional democracy with the tyranny of an all-powerful tech-industry Wizard in a private charter city of Oz: “If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law. We will try and quickly hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others. Our society needs balance. It’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.”

Public executions and deregulated experimentation on human beings, combined with technological innovation as a goal in itself — it is hard to imagine a better example of bad growth.

Then there is the Freedom Cities Coalition, which calls for states to cede land to new private corporate governments exempt from selected federal and state laws and regulations, no doubt including labor laws. President Trump, who in his second term has largely abandoned his working-class voters in favor of tech plutocrats like Musk and Ramaswamy and David Sacks, has called for 10 such post-national, privatized corporate zones on the soil of the United States.

In this dystopian fantasy, America’s federal lands — divided in the 19th century by Lincoln and his allies into homesteads for free family farmers who were considered to be the bulwarks of bottom-up democracy — would now be given over to capitalists and managers to create special economic zones like those in China that host Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, which has had to install “suicide nets” to prevent overworked and underpaid workers from jumping to their deaths from their dormitory towers.

Suggested reading

Silicon Valley strongmen want to lead the West

By David Patrikarakos

In Honduras, experimental corporate-controlled charter cities like Prospera, which drew more than $100 million in investments from tech libertarians including Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Adam Draper, were seen as so menacing by locals that the Honduran government has repealed the laws that enabled their establishment.

Undeterred by the popular rebellion against Prospera, libertarians bankrolled by tech plutocrats are promoting new, semi-sovereign company towns in places like the Presidio in San Francisco and Guantanamo Bay.

In the “Immigration and Workforce Strategy” section of its Orwellian proposal for a Guantanamo Bay Charter City, the Charter Cities Institute proposes using it as a probationary detention center for potential immigrants to the United States: “this model also introduces a phased approach to immigration: Individuals demonstrate their skills and reliability in Guantanamo Bay before transitioning to the US mainland.”

The new Guantanamo Bay charter city would combine Dubai’s indentured-servant workforce with the pleasing façade of a Potemkin village: “by controlling the narrative — weekly media updates, tours for foreign dignitaries, and televised speeches from the new city — administration officials can shape the story of ‘America’s frontier spirit, revived.’”

A humane and enduring society doesn’t resemble a mining boom town or a slave plantation or a nightmarish “freedom city” of the kind promoted by ketamine-dosing, harem-collecting, neurodivergent tech oligarchs. Technological innovation and economic growth are means to an end, not ends in themselves. Good growth is economic growth that balances desirable technological progress and economic innovation with equality of condition and worker bargaining power. Bad growth increases GDP at the cost of the powerlessness of most citizens in the workplace, as well as the voting booth.

Edith Cresson inadvertently spoke for all human beings, French and Japanese and Hondurans and Americans alike. We are not ants.