Individuated Into Silence: Why the Heterodox Academy Gets Higher Education Wrong, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Individuated Into Silence: Why the Heterodox Academy Gets Higher Education Wrong

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 26, 2026

I saw this video this evening on the Heterodox Academy and decided to write this blog that you can understand best if you view this video on the organization's website.

A growing chorus of voices associated with the Heterodox Academy insists that the central task of higher education is to treat students as individuals—to “individuate” them, to strip away group identities, and to return the university to a supposedly neutral space of ideas. On its surface, this sounds reasonable, even principled. But beneath this framing lies a profound misunderstanding of both education and democracy.

The problem is not individuality. The problem is individualism detached from history, power, and community.

To “individuate” students in the abstract is to ignore the conditions that shape their lives: race, class, language, gender, citizenship status, urbanity, and the institutional arrangements that structure opportunity. It is to pretend that students arrive on campus as free-floating agents rather than as members of communities with histories of exclusion, resilience, and struggle. This is not neutrality. It is erasure.

In fact, the call to individuate often functions as a quiet form of depoliticization. It relocates structural inequality into the realm of personal responsibility and reframes collective concerns as distractions from intellectual life. In doing so, it mirrors what Apple (2018) identified as the ideological work of schooling: to naturalize inequality by presenting it as the outcome of individual differences rather than systemic conditions.

But students—especially in this century—do not need to be stripped of their connections. They need to be anchored in them.

The challenges they face are not individual problems. Climate change, racial injustice, democratic erosion, and economic precarity are collective crises that demand collective capacities. Preparing students to navigate such a world requires more than critical thinking in isolation; it requires relational thinking, coalitional practice, and community accountability (Giroux, 2020).

This is why the most powerful educational spaces today are not those that isolate students into individualized intellectual actors, but those that cultivate shared inquiry and collective agency. Ethnic Studies, community-based learning, and culturally sustaining pedagogies do precisely this. They do not deny individuality; they situate it—within histories, within communities, within movements for justice (Paris & Alim, 2017; Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001).

Indeed, as Paulo Freire (1970) reminds us, education is never a solitary act. It is a dialogical process rooted in relationships, in naming the world together, and in transforming it. To educate is not to extract individuals from community, but to deepen their capacity to act within it.

The Heterodox Academy’s framework ultimately rests on a thin vision of democracy—one that imagines a marketplace of ideas populated by disembodied individuals. But democracy is not sustained by isolated thinkers. It is sustained by communities capable of deliberation, solidarity, and action (Dewey, 2004).

If we are serious about preparing students for the world they are inheriting, we must reject the false choice between individuality and community. The task is not to individuate students away from one another, but to cultivate individuals in and through community—capable of thinking critically, acting collectively, and building a more just society.

Anything less leaves them alone in a world that demands we face it together.

References

Apple, M. W. (2018). Ideology and curriculum (4th ed.). Routledge.

Dewey, J. (2004). Democracy and education. Dover. (Original work published 1916)

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.

Giroux, H. A. (2020). On critical pedagogy (2nd ed.). Bloomsbury.

Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. Teachers College Press.

Solórzano, D. G., & Delgado Bernal, D. (2001). Examining transformational resistance through a critical race and LatCrit theory framework: Chicana and Chicano students in an urban context. Urban Education, 36(3), 308–342.

How China Controlled the Coronavirus: Teaching and learning in Sichuan during the pandemic by Peter Hessler

This gripping story told by a New Yorker staff writer and teacher in China, Peter Hessler, is is quite illuminating in terms of how their response has been so dramatically different from ours. One can see how Chinese culture itself was an enabling factor in their fight against this virus. 

Structurally, China's neighborhood-committees meant that the message on the ground was coordinated with that of their federal government. Contact tracing is as much art as it is science. Americans will no doubt cringe at certain aspects of containment that were demonstrably focused, if not extreme. The story ends with how the Chinese have the virus under control and how many now have a stronger faith in their government, as a result. 

At the same time that we have so much to learn from China, we can also glean from this narrative that since Americans were predictably never going to go down this path of extreme containment—perhaps not even with a national plan or mandate in place—our own culture was destined to be a mitigating factor.

You may or may not agree with this, but my take away is that our only real hope was to head it off at the pass from the very beginning, which, as we know, our government failed to do.

-Angela Valenzuela

During the lockdown, the Chinese government never trusted people to set the terms of their own behavior, but it depended heavily on their willingness to work hard for various organizations that fought the coronavirus.Photograph by Zhang Kechun for The New Yorker

A Reporter at Large

August 17, 2020 Issue

How China Controlled the Coronavirus

Teaching and learning in Sichuan during the pandemic.

By Peter Hessler

A few days before my return to classroom teaching at Sichuan University, I was biking across a deserted stretch of campus when I encountered a robot. The blocky machine stood about chest-high, on four wheels, not quite as long as a golf cart. In front was a T-shaped device that appeared to be some kind of sensor. The robot rolled past me, its electric motor humming. I turned around and tailed the thing at a distance of fifteen feet.

It was May 27th, and it had been more than three months since my last visit to the university’s Jiang’an campus, which is on the outskirts of Chengdu, in southwestern China. In late February, when the spring semester was about to begin, I had hurried to campus to retrieve some materials from my office. We were nearly a month into a nationwide lockdown in response to the coronavirus, which had started in Wuhan, a city about seven hundred miles east of Chengdu. The university had informed the faculty that, at least at the beginning of the term, all courses would be online.

In those days, it still seemed possible to escape the disease by leaving China, and a number of foreign teachers at the university had departed. At the U.S. Embassy and consulates, nonessential staff had been evacuated, along with the spouses and children of the diplomats who remained. Throughout February, I answered e-mails from worried friends and relatives in the U.S. I reassured them that my family was fine, and told them that we had decided to stay in Chengdu, despite numbers that, at least at that particular moment, seemed frightening. On February 20th, when I visited campus, China’s official death toll reached 2,236.

Since then, the semester had crawled along, as everybody’s perspective on the disease changed. During the third week of classes, the epidemic officially became a pandemic; by week six, the U.S. death toll had exceeded that of China. That week, China’s borders were closed to foreigners, and the evacuations reversed direction—Chinese nationals in America and Europe, many of them students, were desperately trying to return home. China was the first to experience the pandemic, and it was also among the earliest countries to control the spread and enter what would now be considered normal life. In week eleven, my nine-year-old twin daughters resumed classes; in week thirteen, I boarded a plane for the first time in the post-coronavirus era. And now, on May 27th—week fourteen—I was finally back on campus.

I followed the robot until it paused on a street lined with dormitories. An electronic voice called out, “Daoda zhandian! ”—“Arriving at the stop!” The street was empty, because most undergraduates hadn’t yet returned. One new policy was that students couldn’t leave after entering campus, unless they received special permission. Every gate to the university had been equipped with facial-recognition scanners, which were calibrated for face coverings. Earlier that day, when I arrived, a guard told me to keep my mask on while being scanned. My name popped up on a screen, along with my body temperature and my university I.D. number. As a faculty member, I could go through the gates in both directions, unlike students.

Now I waited with the robot, looking around at the silent dormitories. Finally, three students approached from different directions, masked and holding cell phones. Each of them entered a code on a touch screen at the back of the robot, and a compartment popped open, revealing a package inside.