“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” — George Orwell
In 2024, during a faculty meeting, one of the faculty members (now teaching somewhere else) deemed me a “heterodox.” Oh horror, I thought; I stand accused of heterodoxy. For context, this was during the petition drive organized by the Green Bay queer lobby to demand the university fire me for the disagreeable things I write on Freedom and Reason (see The Snitchy Dolls Return).
To clarify, a heterodox is somebody who dissents from the orthodoxy, i.e., the consensus opinion. The faculty member was informing me that my ideas stand outside the mainstream. It was an interesting take, since my views on the pressing issues of the day—criminal justice, child protection, equality, gender, immigration, women’s rights, and so forth—are orthodox from the standpoint of the general population.
As it turns out, I am rather mainstream. Indeed, at many points, when viewed from the outside, it is the university orthodoxy that is in fact the heterodox orientation. This is especially true not only of the humanities and the social sciences, but of administrative logic, with DEI programming and all the rest of it. The university has lost prestige—like Hollywood and the mainstream media—because the image of America it pumps out does not resemble the America normal people desire.
Most Americans believe that individuals should be judged on merit and not the color of their skin. They believe in borders and immigration law and enforcement, that the police and prisons play a vital role in public safety, that women should have exclusive spaces so men don’t overpower them, that children should be protected from sexualization, and that gender is binary and immutable. Most people will tell an academic that a woman is an adult female human, and roll their eyes when he condescends to tell them that “It’s complicated.” The academic is thinking most people are stuck in the past.
The common folk believes these things not because they are not well-educated (many of them are, in fact), but because the facts align with common sense, and the average man knows this intuitively. Most Americans have a sense of fair play (“equity” to be fancy with words). They are not going to indulge in overly complex theories, i.e., rationalizations, that attempt to explain away facts that are self-evident to them. Nor will they accept that their native understanding of justice is misguided. Because it’s not.
To presume that the opinions of the professoriate represent the orthodoxy is to announce that one lives inside a bubble where the academy is the universe, tightly circumscribed by the special laws of relativity our betters crafted with dense and verbose language—as if the space they inhabit is an island all to itself, where the islanders are free to create an alternate reality by speaking in tongues. That island has strong borders, by the way, and they are well policed.
Paradoxically, they have devised an interesting rule that makes it difficult to vote dissenters off the island: the institution of tenure. Still, the island can make it difficult for the dissident. In Japan, management uses passive-aggressive isolation tactics to encourage employees to voluntarily leave their positions. Strict Japanese labor precedents make direct termination for employees extremely difficult, prompting some firms to use gray-area tactics to bypass severance. There is a version of this on the island. The institution has ways of ostracizing and demoralizing dissidents. Colleagues a man has known for years turn cold, even when they had a social life together. There is no “university community.” It is a bureaucracy.
Because man is a social animal, passive-aggressive isolation takes its toll. In the case of the university, it is particularly demoralizing because—one would think— professional thinkers come together in one place to challenge orthodoxy. Critiquing belief systems is an endeavor that requires robust pursuit of the dialectic and the freedom to publish and speak without consequences. This becomes effectively impossible when ideology is elevated above reason and science. Academic freedom can be upended in a myriad ways short of blatant censorship.
It used to irk me a bit when people would say, “Those who do, do; those who can’t, teach.” I am no longer irked. It’s a truism that finds me searching out any elitism that may be lurking in my head and exterminating it. I have certain skills to be sure, and they benefit society as long as I keep them from ideological corruption, but my talents don’t make me better than anybody else. Most academics I know do not share this value. Decades inside the bubble have left no doubt about this. They think themselves the betters of the common man. And they generally hate the doers, even when their actions serve the interests of the worst among them.
I teach, and I love it. That academic associations, curricula, disciplines, and all the rest of it should keep me in a box—that I do not love. I never sought priesthood, and the cloistered milieu of the university is much like that, and it has been stifling. I have kept my integrity, though. On the island, I am a heterodox. But there’s a boat waiting on the shore.
freedom and reason 