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Five years after Heterodox Academy’s founding, we continue to pursue our mission of promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in higher education. While the road ahead remains challenging, we are proud of our accomplishments and the growing community of educators, administrators, and students that we have created.As we wrap up this unprecedented year, we invited you to join us as we reflected on the past and looked ahead to the future. We were thrilled to host four esteemed panelists, Nadine Strossen, Randall Kennedy, Nicholas Christakis and Jeffrey Adam Sachs – each with a different level of engagement with HxA – who helped us think together about future opportunities to further our mission, the challenges that lie ahead, and what we can learn from the past five years. More information on our panelists can be found below. This virtual panel event took place on Wednesday, December 16 at 7pm Eastern Time.
Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. His work is in the the fields of network science, biosocial science, and behavior genetics. He directs the Human Nature Lab and is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2006; the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010; and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.Randall Kennedy is Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School where he teaches courses on contracts, criminal law, and the regulation of race relations. He served as a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the United States Court of Appeals and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He is a member of the bar of the District of Columbia and the Supreme Court of the United States. Awarded the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Race, Crime, and the Law, Mr Kennedy writes for a wide range of scholarly and general interest publications. His other books are For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law (2013), The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency (2011), Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal (2008), Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (2003), and Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (2002). A member of the American Law Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Association, Mr. Kennedy is also a Trustee emeritus of Princeton University.Jeffrey Sachs is a lecturer in Politics and History at Acadia University. A specialist in Middle Eastern politics, he has also written widely on academic freedom and free speech on campus. His work has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, the Niskanen Center, and of course at Heterodox Academy. He is currently conducting research on campus free speech issues in Canada, portions of which are forthcoming next year from the University of Toronto Press.Nadine Strossen is the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law at New York Law School. She is also a leading scholar, advocate and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties issues, who has testified before Congress on multiple occasions. The National Law Journal has named Strossen one of America’s “100 Most Influential Lawyers.”The immediate past President of the American Civil Liberties Union (1991-2008), Strossen serves on the national advisory boards of the ACLU, Electronic Privacy Information Center and FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education).Her acclaimed 2018 book HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship was selected by Washington University as its 2019 “Common Read.”