Andrew Hartz, Eric Kaufmann
To Fix Higher Education, Fund Heterodox Research
Restoring the academy requires more than budget cuts—it needs grant funding for the research that the Left has ignored
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Education, The Social Order, Politics and Law, Health Care
/ Eye on the News/
Education, The Social Order, Politics and Law, Health Care
The Trump administration has spent the past year taking an axe to university research, much of it overdue. But academia can’t be fixed merely by shrinking it. Fully addressing ideological bias requires developing new scholars and conducting new research
The problem is extensive. From 1990 to 2020, the share of National Science Foundation grants with abstracts that invoke DEI-related terms rose more than tenfold, from under 3 percent to over 30 percent. In psychology, liberals went from outnumbering conservatives about four to one before the 1990s to roughly 14 to one today. When Manhattan Institute senior fellow James Manzi used AI to classify some 600,000 social-science abstracts from 1960 to 2024, he found that roughly 90 percent of politically relevant research leaned left. In the top four sociology journals, the share of papers focusing on inequality has risen to about 75 percent, on average.
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Just as certain left-leaning topics are over-chronicled, other topics get neglected. Psychologists have built a vast literature on biases against women, but there’s virtually nothing on bias against men—though men die by suicide nearly four times as often, live roughly five years fewer, and account for nine in ten workplace deaths. Researchers have studied “right-wing” authoritarianism for nearly a century, but there’s much less mention of the left-wing form. Whole literatures are built on the psychological problems of conservatives, leaving the other side almost completely unexplored.
A recent analysis found that top psychology journals show zero search results for terms like “anti-conservative,” “anti-male bias,” “cancel culture,” “anti-Christian bias,” “self-censorship,” and many other concepts of interest to conservatives. A host of questions go unexplored: What specific ideological biases exist in film or literature? What are the outcomes for adolescents with gender dysphoria who received medical interventions versus those who didn’t? How does anti-religious bias affect social dynamics in civil society institutions? And many others.
To get a sense of the scale of this gap, take a single topic like self-censorship. Examining it robustly would mean theoretical papers, observational studies, surveys, and trial interventions. Researchers could examine what variables predict self-censorship, how it tracks with social isolation, and how it might affect mental health. At least a few dozen studies are needed before any topic can be understood. Mature research topics often have hundreds or even thousands of studies
Remedying this problem would require no extra government funding but only a reprioritization of which studies get funded. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) allocated $35.3 billion in total grants in 2025, and its initiative on “Health Disparities and Racial or Ethnic Minority Health Research” received over $5 billion in 2024. Significant bias could be corrected if just one-half of 1 percent of the NIH’s budget were directed toward heterodox research. The same is true for the National Science Foundation and every other government organization that allocates research grant funding.
And a reformist research program has a clear academic rationale: these are enormous gaps in the literature. They are relevant to millions of people, and they involve questions that shape how professionals get trained and how public policy gets made. They can’t go unstudied forever
Funding for these topics could be shockingly simple. Agencies already prioritize topics that are under-researched. The only extra step is determining if a gap in the literature is likely caused by sociopolitical bias. If it is, those studies could be given prominence in a new funding program
It’s true that grant-making committees are always subjective and could easily be biased themselves. That’s a reason to take care in selecting who serves on those committees, not to avoid trying to address the situation
Many scholars are ready to do this work. Heterodox Academy and the National Association of Scholars each have thousands of members with faculty titles. Ventures like the Open Therapy Institute’s peer-reviewed journal and the Buckingham Manifesto—signed by figures ranging from Steven Pinker to Christopher Rufo—reveal a community of heterodox scholars from across the political spectrum. Most of them would happily conduct these studies if the funding existed
On the policy front, NIH director Jay Bhattacharya has already overhauled the agency’s grantmaking to favor neglected research topics. Extending this approach to include ideological blind spots could help restore the credibility of the scientific enterprise
The hope is that, over time, sustained funding for heterodox research seeds new scholars, faculty, textbooks, and courses, along with the institutes, societies, and databases that enable new fields of study to sustain themselves. This could eventually attract private philanthropic support that outlasts any single administration. Eventually, it can rebalance the production of knowledge, bolstering academia’s truth-seeking mission
Targeted cuts are important: they can curtail activist sectors of academia that deliver little of value. But only new funding can build a balanced and functional higher education system. Such a program would be a good start
Andrew Hartzis a clinical psychologist and the founder and president of the Open Therapy Institute.Eric Kaufmannis a sociologist at the University of Buckingham
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