MFSA Leads STEM-Focused Session Heterodox Academy’s 2025 Conference

July 16, 2025

The MIT Free Speech Alliance was among the numerous scholars and organizations presenting at Heterodox Academy’s 2025 conference, held from June 23-25 in New York City. MFSA President Wayne Stargardt moderated a panel titled “STEM Strikes Back: How Elevating STEM Voices Can Restore the Academy’s Reputation – and How to Get Them in the Room.”

This year’s conference theme was “Truth, Power, and Responsibility,” a theme HxA says “takes on new urgency as recent events highlight the fragility of academic freedom, the dangers of political overreach, and the weight of academic responsibility.” MFSA’s session was well-suited to the conference’s theme, as our program note highlights:

“[T]he STEM fields are far from immune to the groupthink and degraded, relativistic standards that have threatened the legitimacy of other academic fields. Even so, it is not too much of a stretch to say that if more STEM voices were in the room at pivotal moments, higher education could be in a much better place, enjoying greater public support and lessened scrutiny from politicians and pressure groups who don’t always have its best interests at heart. The question, then: How do we get more STEM voices in the room?”

Participating in our session were Ian Hutchinson, Professor Emeritus of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT and a Co-President of the MIT Council on Academic Freedom; Luana Maroja, evolutionary biologist and professor at Williams College, as well as a previous MFSA debate participant; and Frank Laukien, CEO of the Bruker Corporation, a visiting scholar at Harvard University, and a member of both HxA and MFSA’s Boards of Directors.

Among the topics discussed during MFSA’s panel were the dilution of the faculty role in governance as university administrations have ballooned, the underrepresentation of STEM faculty in faculty governance, the role the STEM fields have played in the public’s declining trust for higher education, and how STEM practitioners can be key to winning that trust back.

In all, more than three dozen panels, symposia, and workshops were presented as part of Heterodox Academy’s 2025 conference. The sessions were recorded and can be viewed on HxA’s YouTube page, and you can watch MFSA’s session below and at this link.

MFSA thanks Heterodox Academy for providing the forum for our panel and the session attendees who kept the questions coming during the Q&A.