Heather Heying

In July 2017, following a year of student protests at Evergreen State College, which disrupted the campus, including one altercation between protesters and Heying's husband and fellow professor of biology at Evergreen, Bret Weinstein, the pair brought a lawsuit against the college; the $3.85 million suit alleged the college failed to "protect its employees from repeated provocative and corrosive verbal and written hostility based on race, as well as threats of physical violence."[9][10][11][12][13] A settlement was reached in September 2017, in which both Heying and Weinstein resigned, and received $250,000 each.[12]

Following her resignation, Heying has written articles and opinion pieces related to evolution and cultural politics for journals and newspapers such as The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education.[14][15] She co-hosts a weekly podcast, the Darkhorse Podcast, with her husband on his YouTube channel.[16]

Heying was a 2019–2020 James Madison Program Visiting Fellow at Princeton University, a fellowship which continued for the 2020–2021 year.[17][18] With Weinstein, they presented a theory on the evolutionary adaptation of consciousness on 29 April 2020 .[19]

In 2021, Heying and Weinstein's book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, was published. Reviewing it for The Guardian, Stuart J. Ritchie wrote that the authors "lazily repeat false information from other pop-science books", and that overall the book was characterized by an annoying, know-it-all attitude.[20] Writing for Willamette Week, Nancy Koppelman and Leo Blakeslee said that the book did well at covering basic topics around evolution and biology, but faltered when the authors claim expertise beyond their own fields such as in matters related to politics.[21] Another review, written for Areo Magazine by English Literature graduate Daniel James Sharp, said the book was "a great, if also greatly flawed, achievement.".[22]