Proposal for a Heterodox
Research Funding Program

Dear Sir/Madam,

We are writing to ask you to consider establishing a major new ‘heterodox’ funding program at NSF for research topics that have been neglected due to socio-political bias.

Repeated studies show that academic research has extensive socio-political bias. A recent study of flagship colleges showed 8.5 Democratic faculty members for every Republican. This disparity is more pronounced at elite institutions. For example, a 2022 survey of Harvard faculty showed 82% identifying as liberal and 1% identifying as conservative. Similarly, there are high rates of self-censorship in higher education. A 2024 survey found that roughly 25% of faculty reported self-censoring—and the rates are about twice as high for conservatives.

As a result of these imbalances, some areas of research are over-saturated while others are neglected. A recent study of over 600,000 social science academic abstracts showed that 90 percent lean left and this trend accelerated between 1990 and 2024. For instance, 85 percent of articles in top sociology journals now concern inequality, a major increase over past decades. At the same time, the proportion of government-funded research using DEI keywords exploded from 2.9% in 1990 to 30.4% in 2020. Meanwhile, database searches of top psychology journals show zero search results for terms like “anti-Christian bias,” “anti-conservative,” “anti-male bias,” “anti-white aggression,” “liberal bias,” “cancel culture,” “self-censorship,” and a host of other terms of interest to conservatives.

Currently, the largest gaps in the research literature are related to topics neglected due to socio-political bias. This is true in the fields of public health, mental health care, education, sociology, and numerous other disciplines. To address this problem, agencies must do more than cut funding for bad research. They must support the research that’s needed. 

This work is already beginning. The Heterodox Social Science movement envisions a two-pronged research agenda encompassing heterodox social science and the critical study of woke ideology. This was outlined in the recent Buckingham Manifesto which featured high-profile signatories from Steven Pinker to Chris Rufo. Last year, the Open Therapy Institute launched a peer reviewed journal with an editorial board consisting of numerous Ivy League faculty, to address socio-political biases in the mental health field. Other efforts are starting to emerge as well.   

The primary barrier preventing more research like this from occurring is a lack of funding. That’s why we’re proposing an initiative to prioritize $150 million in government grants for research into topics and perspectives that are under-researched due to socio-political bias. A small $200,000 Heterodox pilot grants program conducted last year revealed numerous interesting projects that could not be funded.

Over time, this research program could help to develop new faculty to provide needed balance at universities. It can lead to new textbooks and course curricula for students. It can foster research infrastructure like AI-searchable databases, special journal issues, and entirely new journals. It can fuel the development of new centers, institutes, and professional organizations to address bias inside and outside universities. 

This program has a powerful research rationale: to address important and large gaps in the literature. In the process, these findings can help millions of people adversely impacted by the socio-political biases that have pervaded the knowledge base, the education system, and through them various professions. 

This research should prioritize empirical studies, but it could also include structured reviews of the literature, theoretical papers, proposed interventions, policy recommendations, and case studies. A funding call might mention some of the following research questions:

• The effect of family structure on children’s education, mental health and employment outcomes

• The effect of DEI-based hiring practices on minorities, majorities and organizations

• Alternative explanations – besides systemic discrimination - for racial, sexual or gender inequality

• The effect of various kinds of diversity on social cohesion and social capital

• What causes crime and what best reduces it?

• Youth attitudes to free speech and objective truth

• The extent and causes of left-wing authoritarianism

• Long-term mental health outcomes for people who detransition after medical sexual reassignment interventions

• A large national survey on the mental health outcomes of children impacted by anti-white racial bullying

• Distortion in the public understanding of historical events (i.e. ‘native people lived in peace and harmony’)

• Positive sociology (not just about fixing problems but realizing societal potential for excellence)

• The social construction of trauma and harm (to what extent are narratives of trauma about perception and framing rather than reality?)

• The extent to which experiences of discrimination are perception-driven?

• The level of anti-conservative/male/white/Asian discrimination in elite institutions

• The social construction of disinformation and hate speech (in practice, are these terms scientifically or politically defined?)

• What explains the correlation between unconventional sexual or gender orientation, left ideology and poor mental health? Might experimentation and choice lead to instability?

• Negative effects of low-skilled immigration

• Public misconceptions about levels of police violence against minority groups

• The effects of genetics on social behavior (i.e. is crime heritable?)

• The nature and impact of anti-conservative bias and discrimination

• The impact of patriotic symbols and rituals on feelings of national unity

• The challenges of communities transformed by rapid mass migration

• Does exposure to concepts used in DEI trainings increase hostile attribution bias, all-or-nothing thinking, external locus of control, aggression, hypervigilance, censorship, or other harmful dynamics

• National surveys to assess people’s experiences of socio-political bias from psychotherapists, doctors, educators, and employers 

• Among various professions, cultural competency with people of faith

• The costs of intensive parenting on children’s and parents’ mental health  

• The nature and extent of internalized self-hatred among people in demographic groups labeled “privileged”

• An evaluation of overt political activism in academic research and various professions (from medicine to education): its prevalence, the extent of extremism, and the costs

• Assessing the relationship between promiscuity and mental health

• Policing and public safety (dominant focus on structural critique and abolition frameworks vs. underexamined evidence on deterrence, legitimacy, crime reduction, and community trust models)

• Sexual violence prevention and campus adjudication systems (prevailing activist-informed frameworks vs. empirical evaluation of prevention efficacy, due process concerns, and institutional tradeoffs)

• Ethics of punishment, mercy, and rehabilitation (dominant focus on carceral critique vs. underexplored moral tradeoffs around accountability, deterrence, and restorative justice)

• Western civilization and Enlightenment values (literature emphasizing colonialism and oppression vs. scholarship highlighting liberal constitutionalism, scientific inquiry, and institutional development)

• American national identity and the founding era (interpretations centered on structural injustice vs. competing civic-republican and liberal-pluralist accounts of institutional achievement)

• Patriotism, nationalism, and civic solidarity (treatment primarily as exclusionary constructs vs. research on social cohesion, democratic stability, and prosocial identity)

• Capitalism, markets, and global trade (dominant focus on exploitation, inequality, and colonial legacies vs. underexamined evidence on poverty reduction, institutional development, innovation, and liberal-democratic prosperity)

• Healthy masculinity and male development (emphasis on “toxic masculinity” frameworks vs. research on virtue, responsibility, pro-social norms, and protective identity formation)

• Sex differences and contemporary gender frameworks (strong social-construction emphasis vs. integration of biological, developmental, and cross-cultural evidence)

• Diversity initiatives and institutional outcomes (intended equity effects vs. unintended consequences, backfire effects, and organizational performance impacts)

• Institutional activism and organizational mission drift (normative advocacy roles vs. costs to trust, neutrality, and stakeholder legitimacy)

• Identitarianism and civic pluralism (identity-based political frameworks vs. universalist or cross-cutting solidarity models)

• Elite capture within NGOs and progressive institutions (grassroots representativeness vs. leadership concentration and incentive dynamics)

• Symbolic vs. material reform goals (expressive institutional signaling vs. measurable policy outcomes)

• Infusion of political advocacy into historically non-political professional domains (e.g., counseling, therapy, medicine, social work) (advocacy-oriented frameworks vs. traditions of professional neutrality and pluralism)

• Inequality and social mobility (structural and systemic explanations vs. family structure, institutional design, cultural norms, and agency-based models)

• Race and discrimination measurement (audit-study dominance vs. methodological debates in causal inference, administrative data, and longitudinal analysis)

• Cultural relativism and Western universalism in anthropology (postcolonial critique vs. debates over human universals, moral psychology, and cross-cultural regularities)

• Historical period emphasis in historiography (relative decline in pre-1800 scholarship vs. expansion into modern social and cultural history; implications for curriculum and civic education)

• Statecraft, political leadership, and strategy studies (relative underrepresentation vs. expansion into structural and social-history frameworks)

• Ideological diversity and self-censorship/institutional capture within academic disciplines (normative consensus vs. empirical measurement of viewpoint distribution, intellectual homogeneity, and perceived costs of dissent)

• Religions as prosocial institution (dominant emphasis on certain religions such as Christianity as oppression or social control vs. underexamined evidence on community-building, moral formation, mental health, and civic cohesion)

• Secularization and the “decline of religion” thesis (standard narratives of inevitable decline vs. alternative accounts emphasizing religious persistence, transformation, and the limits of modernization theory)

• Religious liberty and pluralism in liberal democracies (religious freedom framed primarily as cover for discrimination vs. scholarship on pluralism, conscience rights, and institutional diversity)

• Religion and social justice movements (focus on religion as an obstacle vs. comparative work on religious contributions to abolitionism, civil rights, humanitarianism, and democratic reform)

• Moral education and character formation (dominant emphasis on critical consciousness frameworks vs. traditions of virtue ethics, civic education, and moral psychology)

• The moral psychology of ideological and religious difference (emphasis on bias and prejudice models vs. research on moral disagreement, sacred values, and the ethics of tolerance)

• Surveys and interviews assessing the mental health costs of self-censorship

• Assessments of which policies and practices contribute to censorship cultures and potential interventions that could effectively overcome these dynamics

• Case studies of people who’ve been fired for their political views or speech (“cancelled”)

• The long-term outcomes for adolescents with gender dysphoria who receive “gender-affirming care” vs. exploratory psychotherapy

• An evaluation of the impact of anti-white, anti-Christian, antisemitic, and anti-male bias and aggression on students in American universities

• Effective methods for teaching political dialogue and tolerance of viewpoint diversity to school children

• Interventions to address family estrangement due to political or religious differences

• Is emotional dysregulation around politics increasing, and if so, why?

• Empirical evaluations of socio-political bias in media, arts, and civil society institutions

While the administration has taken steps to curtail scholar-activism, we believe that positive steps must be taken to reshape and rebalance knowledge production, and to incentivize viewpoint diversity in scholarly research, and academic more broadly.

Best regards,

Eric Kaufmann, Ph.D. 
The University of Buckingham 

Andrew Hartz, Ph.D. 
Open Therapy Institute