A Conversation with Jonathan Haidt

[Valin]

Minding The Campus:

Feb. 3 2016

 

 

 

On January 11, John Leo, editor of “Minding the Campus,” interviewed social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, one of the editors of the five-month-old site, “Heterodox Academy,” and perhaps the most prominent academic pushing hard for more intellectual diversity on our campuses. Haidt, 52, who specializes in the psychology of morality and the moral emotions, is Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business and author, most recently, of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012).

 

 

JOHN LEO: You set off a national conversation in San Antonio five years ago by asking psychologists at an academic convention to raise their hands to show whether they self-identified as conservatives or liberals.

 

JONATHAN HAIDT: I was invited by the president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology to give a talk on the future of Social Psychology. As I was finishing writing The Righteous Mind, I was getting more and more concerned about how moral communities bind themselves together in ways that block open-minded thinking. I began to see the social sciences as tribal moral communities, becoming ever more committed to social justice, and ever less hospitable to dissenting views. I wanted to know if there was any political diversity in social psychology. So I asked for a show of hands. I knew it would be very lopsided. But I had no idea how much so. Roughly 80% of the thousand or so in the room self-identified as “liberal or left of center,” 2% (I counted exactly 20 hands) identified as “centrist or moderate,” 1% (12 hands) identified as libertarian, and, rounding to the nearest integer, zero percent (3 hands) identified as “conservative.”

 

(Snip)

 

JOHN LEO: To many of us, it looks like a monoculture.

 

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes. It is certainly a monoculture. The academic world in the humanities is a monoculture. The academic world in the social sciences is a monoculture – except in economics, which is the only social science that has some real diversity. Anthropology and sociology are the worst — those fields seem to be really hostile and rejecting toward people who aren’t devoted to social justice.

 

(Snip)

 

JOHN LEO: So you voted for Obama.

 

JONATHAN HAIDT: Twice. I no longer consider myself a Democrat today. But let me be clear that I am absolutely horrified by today’s Republican Party – both in the presidential primaries and in Congress. If they nominate Trump or Cruz, I’ll vote for the Democrat, whoever it is.

 

JOHN LEO: To get back to the lopsided faculties – -what are the chances of cracking anthropology or sociology?

 

JONATHAN HAIDT: Anthro is completely lost. I mean, it’s really militant activists. They’ve taken the first step towards censoring Israel. They’re not going to have anything to do with Israeli scholars any more. So it’s now – it’s the seventh victim group. For many years now, there have been six sacred groups. You know, the big three are African-Americans, women and LGBT. That’s where most of the action is. Then there are three other groups: Latinos, Native Americans….

 

JOHN LEO: You have to say Latinx now.

 

JONATHAN HAIDT: I do not intend to say that. Latinos, Native Americans, and people with disabilities. So those are the six that have been there for a while. But now we have a seventh–Muslims. Something like 70 or 75 percent of America is now in a protected group. This is a disaster for social science because social science is really hard to begin with. And now you have to try to explain social problems without saying anything that casts any blame on any member of a protected group. And not just moral blame, but causal blame. None of these groups can have done anything that led to their victimization or marginalization.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

It Is Only Going to get Worse -- Jonathan Haidt on the Crisis on Campus
David French
February 4, 2016

 

Over at the invaluable Minding the Campus, John Leo has a fascinating interview with NYU’s Jonathan Haidt, founder of Heterodox Academy, a site advocating for increased diversity in higher education. The entire thing is worth a read, but I wanted to pull three segments that demonstrate the depth of the conservative challenge on campus.

 

First, most Americans simply don’t understand the extent of the ideological monoculture. Take this example, from Haidt:

 

(Snip)

 

The last point is crucial. As a parent of teenagers, I’ve noticed the incredible extent to which even some of my conservative Christian peers will go to protect their kids from any kind of harm — not just from physical dangers but from the natural disappointments and heartbreaks of growing up. There is an almost desperate desire to make life perfect, to help children fulfill their every dream. If we don’t stop, we won’t just kill our universities, we’ll kill our culture.