CORRECTION 4/29/25: The headline and several statements within this article have been updated to more accurately reflect this HxA chapter’s status as an organization that has not been officially recognized by Mount Holyoke College’s Office of Student Involvement, among other changes. For a full description of these changes, please refer to the complete correction notice at the bottom of the page.

By Karishma Ramkarran ’27

News Editor

Content Warning: This article discusses racism and transphobia.

A new unofficial organization at Mount Holyoke College has emerged amidst renewed discussions about the role of free speech on college campuses.

Elise Schemmel Shapiro ’25 is the co-chair, alongside Professor Cassandra Sever, of Mount Holyoke College’s chapter of Heterodox Academy — abbreviated as HxA — a non-profit organization whose mission statement, according to their website, is to advocate for “policy and culture changes that ensure universities are truth-seeking, knowledge-generating institutions grounded in open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.” As of right now, the College’s chapter of HxA is registered within the national organization itself but is not officially recognized by the College’s Office of Student Involvement.

The national organization was co-founded in 2015 by three academics, including New York University Professor Jonathan Haidt, who advocated that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives on college campuses had created ideologically intolerant environments. While HxA advocates for institutional neutrality, Schemmel Shapiro described that she believes HxA founder Jonathan Haidt is fundamentally a classical liberal. Haidt has stated that colleges that have espoused DEI missions have cultivated a “hostile climate” to conservative viewpoints. Instead of focusing on racial, sexual, or gender diversity, HxA advocates for viewpoint diversity through institutional neutrality and open inquiry.

In an interview with Mount Holyoke News, Schemmel Shapiro said she sought to create a chapter on campus last semester because of what she sees as a “lack of viewpoint diversity.” She said, “My first semester, I would hear the same [thing] over and over again. I would hear these slogans like ‘cis-white men take up so much space’ ... I was just like, ‘This is really boring.’”

“College is supposed to be a place where you … engage with uncomfortable ideas because that’s what intellectual growth is,” Schemmel Shapiro said. “You’re not going to convince anyone of your position if … all you know about their position is that it’s bad. You need to spend time with them and actually know the psychological mechanisms behind their arguments, and then you can develop your argument to be stronger.”

Members of the national HxA organization have defended controversial statements made by academics and institutions regarding race and political engagement. For example, in an October 2024 post on the organization’s official Substack, HxA Director of Policy Joe Cohn defended statements made by a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in which she said, “America would be better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration” and that she had “never seen a Black student graduate in the top quarter of the class.” Cohn wrote in response,“As offensive as many may find those views, free expression and academic freedom cannot only protect the inoffensive.”

More recently, HxA criticized a Hunter College job listing, which stated that the institution was seeking “a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine … Ideal candidates will also have a record of public engagement and community action.” Although HxA defended the right of Hunter College to search for a professor of Palestinian studies, it claimed that the job listing had to be reworded because “it clearly seeks applicants to put activism before scholarship,” according to a press release on the HxA website. These examples highlight how HxA’s purported mission about viewpoint diversity and academic freedom has resulted in ideological tension.

To further understand students’ thoughts on academic freedom on the College’s campus, Mount Holyoke News interviewed Red Scare Book Club founder Vic Klapa ’26. Klapa founded the unofficial student organization in Fall 2023 to make leftist political theory more accessible to a greater audience.

Klapa agrees that there are merits to hearing the perspectives of those we disagree with, but said that “there is a difference between listening to those perspectives and having those perspectives platformed to people who don’t know any better.”

“You also have to remember the way American conservatives debate, and they don’t debate kindly. Debates aren’t supposed to be kind, but they frequently use a lot more logical fallacies,” Klapa said.

Schemmel Shapiro said that, in conversations that have taken place during her chapter’s HxA meetings, “the consensus was that … a lot of people think Mount Holyoke is an echo chamber and that they don’t hear different points of views a lot. And sometimes, they’ve been shamed” for having a “different point of view.”

Klapa, however, called attention to the ramifications of unlimited academic speech on campus. “If you have an opinion and say it out loud, you need to be ready to back up your opinion. And if people are actively being like, hey, I think your opinion is dangerous for X, Y and Z … try some introspection.”

Nevertheless, Schemmel Shapiro claimed there is strong student interest in an organization like HxA. “HxA exists [and] people [have] an appetite because they noticed that Mount Holyoke is abusing their mission statement. They’re saying ‘we stand for social justice and we stand for inclusion’ but inclusion is defined in elite terms … and it behaves in ways that say views that don’t align with this are bigoted,” Schemmel-Shapiro said.

Inclusion was a core principle of Mount Holyoke’s founding. The Seven Sister colleges, including Mount Holyoke as the first, were initially founded to expand access to higher education for women at a time when men dominated academics. The College was not only the first of the Seven Sisters to be established to create inclusion in academia, but also the first within the group to expand its college admissions to be inclusive of all transgender and gender-nonconforming applicants in 2015.

Schemmel Shapiro expressed disappointment with the College’s response to current social issues. For instance, she referenced the United States v. Skrmetti decision in late 2024, which would decide whether minors can receive gender-affirming care. Schemmel Shapiro said, “Within the next week, Mount Holyoke has a panel that says that trans healthcare is a human right … when they don’t have another event that gives a different viewpoint, that’s when it becomes a problem.” Schemmel Shapiro’s comments appear to be in reference to the “Trans Health Care Is a Human Right: On Safeguarding Gender-Affirming Care After United States v. Skrmetti” panel hosted by the College on Dec. 9, 2024.

Mount Holyoke News reached out to Lily Rood ’27, an activist for transgender rights, for her thoughts on the representation of trans issues on campus when it comes to ideological discussions. “We absolutely need viewpoint diversity in our communities; I believe deeply in creating opportunities for all people, especially those of us experiencing marginalization, to share our voices and be

heard. The activist foremother Sylvia Rivera once said ‘We have to be visible. We should not be ashamed of who we are,’ and I work every day to create that freedom for all,” Rood wrote in an emailed statement to Mount Holyoke News. “At the same time, I think often about the paradox of tolerance, which is this philosophical concept explaining the need to actually refuse to tolerate one thing — intolerance — in order to create a tolerant society.”

“We need to create a community in which different viewpoints about how folks understand and access their fundamental rights are not only tolerated but uplifted,” Rood continued. “We do not need to — and in fact must not — tolerate intolerance in the form of platforming viewpoints that deny people their rights altogether. I am a proud trans woman and, of course, I have a right to access my healthcare like anyone else.”

“It has been exciting to engage in dialogue with leading activists and scholars about how to protect that right, and I would welcome the opportunity to again engage with folks who may share a wide array of viewpoints on the matter and debate those openly,” she said. “I refuse, however, to put my rights and the rights of people who are dear to me up for debate. Trans healthcare is a human right.”

Mount Holyoke College is within its right to espouse a dedication to social justice and DEI through mediums such as panels. Although institutional neutrality is more strict in terms of public institutions associated with the state, private institutions are allowed to prioritize a specific set of moral, philosophical or religious teachings.

Students on campus do still have a right to express their opinions, even at a private institution like Mount Holyoke. The College has historically had conservative groups, such as the Mount Holyoke College Republicans, who in 2018 hosted a Conservative Women’s Summit with the College’s Weissman Center for Leadership and the Zionist Organization of America, though the MHC Republicans student group is no longer active on campus as of the last academic year. Although students may have the right to express their opinions, whether they be conservative or liberal, the College is not expected to reflect any viewpoint but the one that is written in their mission statement, whether it be through official press statements, lectures, and events sponsored by the College.

The recent state-sanctioned detainment of pro-Palestinian activists on college campuses has renewed discussions about the issue of free speech in academic settings. Based on several public statements made by HxA, the organization seems to draw a boundary between protected academic speech and “activism.” Agendas of open inquiry or institutional neutrality in this context seem difficult to ascertain. HxA defends rights to free speech, but not some forms of activism. The right to expression is also a civil liberty that individuals are entitled to by the Constitution.

“Everyone has a right to voice their opinion,” Klapa said, “but you shouldn’t be offended or shocked when you’re offering a juvenile point and the other person is actually giving you factual information.”

Leah Dutcher ’28 contributed fact-checking.

Editor’s note: Mount Holyoke’s chapter of Heterodox Academy is co-chaired by Professor Cassandra Sever, who also serves as the faculty advisor for Mount Holyoke News. MHN operates independently from the Heterodox Academy chapter; MHN does not endorse any of the opinions or views expressed in this article.

CORRECTION 4/29/25: After being contacted by both the Office of Student Involvement and HxA Chapter Co-Chair Cassandra Sever, MHN has updated this article to more accurately reflect the HxA chapter’s status. The original headline, “New student group seeks to alter campus discourse,” has been amended to “New campus community seeks to alter discourse.” Elise Schemmel Shapiro ’25 is now denoted as a co-chair of the HxA chapter alongside Sever, rather than as the group’s founder; according to Sever, “HxA chapters are not allowed to be founded by students” and the organization is primarily faculty-run. The article also mistakenly stated that the organization is unrecognized by the Student Government Association: the Office of Student Involvement has not officially recognized the group, not SGA. In an email to MHN, the Office of Student Involvement stated that “This group did not go through the Office of Student Involvement's new org process, was not approved, is not Recognized, and as such cannot use the Mount Holyoke College name.” The email also stated that “HxA is not an official organization on campus, cannot use the MHC name, and is behaving in violation of College policies.”