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Jonathan Haidt on the Cultural Roots of Campus Rage
An unorthodox professor explains the ‘new religion’ that drives the intolerance and violence at places like Middlebury and Berkeley.
By BARI WEISS
Updated March 31, 2017 7:27 p.m. / WALL STREET JOURNAL
When a mob at Vermont’s Middlebury College shut down a speech by social scientist Charles Murray a few weeks ago, most of us saw it as another instance of campus illiberalism. Jonathan Haidt saw something more—a ritual carried out by adherents of what he calls a “new religion,” an auto-da-fé against a heretic for a violation of orthodoxy.
“The great majority of college students want to learn. They’re perfectly reasonable, and they’re uncomfortable with a lot of what’s going on,” Mr. Haidt, a psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells me during a recent visit to his office. “But on each campus there are some true believers who have reoriented their lives around the fight against evil.”
These believers are transforming the campus from a citadel of intellectual freedom into a holy space—where white privilege has replaced original sin, the transgressions of class and race and gender are confessed not to priests but to “the community,” victim groups are worshiped like gods, and the sinned-against are supplicated with “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”
The fundamentalists may be few, Mr. Haidt says, but they are “very intimidating” since they wield the threat of public shame. On some campuses, “they’ve been given the heckler’s veto, and are often granted it by an administration who won’t stand up to them either.”
All this has become something of a preoccupation for the 53-year-old Mr. Haidt. A longtime liberal—he ran a gun-control group as an undergraduate at Yale—he admits he “had never encountered conservative ideas” until his mid-40s. The research into moral psychology that became his 2012 book, “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion,” exposed him to other ways of seeing the world; he now calls himself a centrist.
Paul Gigot says there is a clear disconnect between Wisconsin and New York City.
In 2015 he founded Heterodox Academy, which describes itself as “a politically diverse group of social scientists, natural scientists, humanists, and other scholars” concerned about “the loss or lack of ‘viewpoint diversity’ ” on campuses. As Mr. Haidt puts it to me: “When a system loses all its diversity, weird things begin to happen.”
Having studied religions across cultures and classes, Mr. Haidt says it is entirely natural for humans to create “quasireligious” experiences out of seemingly secular activities. Take sports. We wear particular colors, gather as a tribe, and cheer for our team. Even atheists sometimes pray for the Steelers to beat the Patriots.
It’s all “fun and generally harmless,” maybe even healthy, Mr. Haidt says, until it tips into violence—as in British soccer hooliganism. “What we’re beginning to see now at Berkeley and at Middlebury hints that this [campus] religion has the potential to turn violent,” Mr. Haidt says. “The attack on the professor at Middlebury really frightened people,” he adds, referring to political scientist Allison Stanger, who wound up in a neck brace after protesters assaulted her as she left the venue.
The Berkeley episode Mr. Haidt mentions illustrates the Orwellian aspect of campus orthodoxy. A scheduled February appearance by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos prompted masked agitators to throw Molotov cocktails, smash windows, hurl rocks at police, and ultimately cause $100,000 worth of damage. The student newspaper ran an op-ed justifying the rioting under the headline “Violence helped ensure safety of students.” Read that twice.
Mr. Haidt can explain. Students like the op-ed author “are armed with a set of concepts and words that do not mean what you think they mean,” he says. “People older than 30 think that ‘violence’ generally involves some sort of physical threat or harm. But as students are using the word today, ‘violence’ is words that have a negative effect on members of the sacred victim groups. And so even silence can be violence.” It follows that if offensive speech is “violence,” then actual violence can be a form of self-defense.
Down the hall from Mr. Haidt’s office, I noticed a poster advertising a “bias response hotline” students can call “to report an experience of bias, discrimination or harassment.” I joke that NYU seems to have its own version of the morality police in Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia. “It’s like East Germany,” Mr. Haidt replies—with students, at least some of them, playing the part of the Stasi.
How did we get here, and what can be done? On the first question, Mr. Haidt points to a braided set of causes. There’s the rise in political polarization, which is related to the relatively recent “political purification of the universities.” While the academy has leaned left since at least the 1920s, Mr. Haidt says “it was always just a lean.” Beginning in the early 1990s, as the professors of the Greatest Generation retired, it became a full-on tilt.
“Now there are no more conservative voices on the faculty or administration,” he says, exaggerating only a little. Heterodox Academy cites research showing that the ratio of left to right professors in 1995 was 2 to 1. Now it is 5 to 1.
The left, meanwhile, has undergone an ideological transformation. A generation ago, social justice was understood as equality of treatment and opportunity: “If gay people don’t have to right to marry and you organize a protest to apply pressure to get them that right, that’s justice,” Mr. Haidt says. “If black people are getting discriminated against in hiring and you fight that, that’s justice.”
Today justice means equal outcomes. “There are two ideas now in the academic left that weren’t there 10 years ago,” he says. “One is that everyone is racist because of unconscious bias, and the other is that everything is racist because of systemic racism.” That makes justice impossible to achieve: “When you cross that line into insisting if there’s not equal outcomes then some people and some institutions and some systems are racist, sexist, then you’re setting yourself up for eternal conflict and injustice.”
Perhaps most troubling, Mr. Haidt cites the new protectiveness in child-rearing over the past few decades. Historically, American children were left to their own devices and had to learn to deal with bullies. Today’s parents, out of compassion, handle it for them. “By the time students get to college they have much, much less experience with unpleasant social encounters, or even being insulted, excluded or marginalized,” Mr. Haidt says. “They expect there will be some adult, some authority, to rectify things.”
Combine that with the universities’ shift to a “customer is always right” mind-set. Add in social media. Suddenly it’s “very, very easy to bring mobs together,” Mr. Haidt says, and make “people very afraid to stand out or stand up for what they think is right.” Students and professors know, he adds, that “if you step out of line at all, you will be called a racist, sexist or homophobe. In fact it’s gotten so bad out there that there’s a new term—‘ophobophobia,’ which is the fear of being called x-ophobic.”
That fear runs deep—including in Mr. Haidt. When I ask him about how political homogeneity on campus informs the understanding of so-called rape culture, he clams up: “I can’t talk about that.” The topic of sexual assault—along with Islam—is too sensitive.
It’s a painfully ironic answer from a man dedicating his career to free thought and speech. But choosing his battles doesn’t mean Mr. Haidt is unwilling to fight. And he’s finding allies across the political spectrum.
Heterodox Academy’s membership has grown to some 600, up about 100 since the beginning of March. “In the wake of the Middlebury protests and violence, we’re seeing a lot of liberal-left professors standing up against illiberal-left professors and students,” Mr. Haidt says. Less than a fifth of the organization’s members identify as “right/conservative”; most are centrists, liberals or progressives.
Balancing those numbers by giving academic jobs and tenure to outspoken libertarians and conservatives seems like the most effective way to change the campus culture, if only by signaling to self-censoring students that dissent is acceptable. But for now Heterodox Academy is taking a more modest approach, focusing on three initiatives.
The first is its college guide: a ranking by viewpoint diversity of America’s top 150 campuses. The goal is to create market pressure and put administrators on notice. The University of Chicago currently ranks No. 1—rising seniors, take note.
The second is a “fearless speech index,” a web-based questionnaire that allows students and professors to express how comfortable they feel speaking out on sensitive subjects. Right now, Mr. Haidt says, there are a tremendous number of anecdotes but no real data; the index aims to remedy that.
The third is the “viewpoint diversity experience,” a six-step online lesson in the virtue and practice of open-minded engagement with opposing ideas.
Heterodox Academy is not the only sliver of light. Following the Middlebury incident, the unlikely duo of Democratic Socialist Cornel West and conservative Robert P. George published a statement denouncing “campus illiberalism” and calling for “truth seeking, democracy and freedom of thought and expression.” More than 2,500 scholars and other intellectuals have signed it. At Northwestern the student government became the first in the country to pass a resolution calling for academic freedom and viewpoint diversity.
“What I think is happening,” Mr. Haidt says, is that “as the visible absurdity on campus mounts and mounts, and as public opinion turns more strongly against universities—and especially as the line of violence is crossed—we are having more and more people standing up saying, ‘Enough is enough. I’m opposed to this.’ ” Let’s hope.
If you’re not a student or professor, why should you care about snowflakes in their igloos? Because, Mr. Haidt argues, what happens on campus affects the “health of our nation.” Ideological and political homogeneity endangers the quality of social-science research, which informs public policy. “Understanding the impacts of immigration, understanding the causes of poverty—these are all absolutely vital,” he says. “If there’s an atmosphere of intimidation around politicized issues, it clearly influences the research.”
Today’s college students also are tomorrow’s leaders—and employees. Companies are already encountering problems with recent graduates unprepared for the challenges of the workplace. “Work requires a certain amount of toughness,” Mr. Haidt says. “Colleges that prepare students to expect a frictionless environment where there are bureaucratic procedures and adult authorities to rectify conflict are very poorly prepared for the workplace. So we can expect a lot more litigation in the coming few years.”
If you lean left—even if you adhere to the campus orthodoxy, or to certain elements of it—you might consider how the failure to respect pluralism puts your own convictions at risk of a backlash. “People are sick and tired of being called racist for innocent things they’ve said or done,” Mr. Haidt observes. “The response to being called a racist unfairly is never to say, ‘Gee, what did I do that led to me being called this? I should be more careful.’ The response is almost always, ‘[Expletive] you!’ ”
He offers this real-world example: “I think that the ‘deplorables’ comment could well have changed the course of human history.”
Ms. Weiss is an associate book review editor at the Journal.
Appeared in the Apr. 01, 2017, print edition as 'The Cultural Roots of Campus Rage.'
JOHN CASSIDY just now
So much for free speech in America.
Walter Altholz 4 minutes ago
A very accurate portrayal of the current climate. Mr. Haidt is dead on. Wish that his Heterodox Academy has slightly more aggressive goals but he has a much better feel for the right strategy that I.
Wish that he had also included arresting these pathetic protestors when they commit an act the breaks the law. Lets see how they do by spending an evening in jail with some of the people they claim to support. Unless there are consequences, little will happen.
You are though appreciated, Mr. Haidt and many of us hope that you will be successful.
XAVIER L SIMON 5 minutes ago
It seems like we've created a monster, and I say we because I'm in my seventies and perhaps I overprotected my kids and for sure my grandchildren are being overprotected. I want to make excuses but I don't think I can, especially since I live in a fairly safe neighborhood.
Young parents should think about that. In contrast to what I am sure they do, I had my first motorcycle when I was about eight years old, and in Mexico City! At fifteen I had a car and for one vacation I took it to Acapulco. I was on the road with my younger brother with my mother right behind us in her car. My brother and I returned to Mexico City alone! Nothing bad ever happened to us, nor did we ever get into trouble.
Now, I don't recommend that parents do the same with their kids, but please, please, give them much more rope than you are giving them today.
Carol Sandor 7 minutes ago
The root of all this seems to be a need to create a system of control over other people, with different excuses given to create that system. It's "big brother is watching you", coming from the "liberals".
DOROTHY DIMOCK 11 minutes ago
“Colleges that prepare students to expect a frictionless environment where there are bureaucratic procedures and adult authorities to rectify conflict are very poorly prepared for the workplace. So we can expect a lot more litigation in the coming few years.”
In other words, too many of our college-age students are still emotionally children.
XAVIER L SIMON 18 minutes ago
“By the time students get to college they have much, much less experience with unpleasant social encounters, or even being insulted, excluded or marginalized,” Mr. Haidt says. “They expect there will be some adult, some authority, to rectify things.”
Combine that with Shelby Steele’s thesis that many on left have turned their liberal ideology into an identity and you have a cocktail for developmental disaster. I know liberal people in their forties that become terrified, literally, if their ideas are questioned by a conservative, say, on Facebook.
DOROTHY DIMOCK 10 minutes ago
@XAVIER L SIMON Which means they are ripe for a demagogue who promises to "protect," them from "negative experiences."
XAVIER L SIMON 3 minutes ago
@DOROTHY DIMOCK @XAVIER L SIMON
Exactly, Dorothy, and look no further than Obama or Hillary.
John Kovalsky 18 minutes ago
What is really troubling is their 21st century understanding of freedom of speech extends beyond yelling fire in a crowded theatre to ransacking an event and preventing a paid speaker from speaking. Once the Right decides to physically over-power Leftists conducting an event in private room or with a stage, we'll witness hypocrisy at its zenith. However, folks on the Right don't attend idiot speeches, so that will never happen. The vast majority of Leftist men are emasculated, quasi homosexuals, who conduct themselves in the most effeminate way, shouting down their opponent and having the event delayed, postponed and/or interrupted. And of course everyone with whom they disagree is a homophobe, xenophobe, racist, sexist, etc..and the argument is over.
Carol Sandor 4 minutes ago
@John Kovalsky So a normal guy is trying to be, like, not. This is so funny.
Rocco Papalia 22 minutes ago
No taxpayer bailouts of student loans. Ever.
Bob Russell 25 minutes ago
I think the behavior on college campuses these days is a good reason to require everyone when they attain the age of 18 or graduate from high school be required to serve a minimum of six months in the military. I think the discipline and other things they would learn would benefit them and especially our nation. When they are discharged from the military, I think they would have a new perspective of life that is much different than the socialist communism they learn in high school and college.
steve petarra 23 minutes ago
@Bob Russell What in the world would the military do with you for six months? Not to be harsh, but thats silly. The military of today is highly trained and skilled. It isnt Starbucks making coffee.
terry reed 28 minutes ago
Sounds like the Chinese Red Guard in the late 60s…..forbidding politically incorrect speech….those who violate that self-evident truth must confess before the masses , then publicly humiliated. The only thing missing are little Red Books containing the approved slogans.
steve petarra 22 minutes ago
@terry reed And professors wearing dunce caps.
Kathy Herrmann 31 minutes ago
"...as students are using the word today, ‘violence’ is words that have a negative effect on members of the sacred victim groups. And so even silence can be violence.”
The world today reminds me of the 1930s. Enough I fear a new major war is coming and it's less a matter of if than when. If the snowflakes think words are violence, then god help us all.
TROY SIMPSON 32 minutes ago
The best news to come out of universities in a long time!
Thomas Bowler 34 minutes ago
"[H]e now calls himself a centrist."
Any further to the right and he'd lose his job.
XAVIER L SIMON 35 minutes ago
"The fundamentalists may be few, Mr. Haidt says, but they are 'very intimidating' since they wield the threat of public shame."
This brought to mind the video of the shrieking young lady Greg Gutfeld loves to show during his Saturday shows. I picture her shrieking in front of Charles Murray before she accuses him of raping her mentally.
ALAN SEWELL 35 minutes ago
The radicalization is due to the career-ization of university education. With all the government grants available, more people are expecting to stay in universities their whole lives. Obama's mother was fed her entire adult life by Federal grants. Millions more are lining up at the trough. They are becoming ever more removed from the world of economic work, and ever more attached to the world of sponging from public money. So, of course they are becoming radicalized.
The same phenomenon has long been part of Latin American higher education. Communist agitators make their nests in universities. They are there to radicalize the students and incite riot and revolution. In the 60's through '80's many were funded by the Soviet Union and China. It has to be the same thing happening here: a variety of Liberal groups are funding people to be "professional students" whose real jobs are to disseminate agitprop to naive students.
Tim Dolan 35 minutes ago
Apparently the only difference between the dems and the jihadists is which book they read in order to see who they should call names, shoot or blow up.
Ted Terry 39 minutes ago
Protect your children to their detriment and then as they go through college never having to acknowledge an opposite viewpoint they graduate fell fledged millennials that are collective of their own ilk and dismissive of everybody else, except maybe their their parents who they tolerate because they live with them.
XAVIER L SIMON 39 minutes ago
Sounds like we are back to the witch hunt days that made Salem, Mass. famous!
WILLIAM SMITH 40 minutes ago
Mr. Haidt's work on moral philosophy has demonstrated real world applications in areas as diverse as jury selection and hiring practices. His recommendation awhile back that all students should be required to take a course (or experience a structured set of sessions) in cognitive behavioral therapy during their freshman year is perhaps the best recommendation possible for countering campus fundamentalism.
Those of us on the center-right who engage in public policy thinking encounter a diversity of thought from a diversity of thinkers (predominantly on the left) on a daily (hourly) basis. My friends in the local University of California faculty have told me that I am the only "right-winger" they know.
On another note: I truly hope that Mr. Haidt's organization becomes a tax-exempt, donation accepting organization. I'm ready with a (small) check. Finally, where does one go to join?
.
Charles Harmon 41 minutes ago
Good piece. One is reminded of the intolerance and bigotry of the Matxists, Leninists, Trots etc in the 70's. Different ideology (to an extent), same expression. Plus ca change ....
Frank Healey 42 minutes ago
Glad to see someone non-conservative realizes the danger of liberal fascism.
How do you battle institutional racism without specific racist policies or dictates that are in fact racist.
You can't.
How do you deal with a white privilege that lives only in people's minds and nowhere else and is an original sin for which there is no redemption?
How do you correct an unconscious bias that you can only guess exists in other peoples minds?
Who are the mind readers that can do that?
James Petkas 42 minutes ago
A long article that didn't say much other than the part about learning to deal with bullies growing up. I learned by getting my butt kicked until I couldn't stand it anymore and kicked the bullies butt. Today kids are taught to whine until an adult makes it all better.
Well, unless the bully gets his butt kicked he keeps bullying. Notice that no matter how far administration bends over to "understand" and placate these screaming brats the brats keep demanding more. Classic bully behavior.
There needs to be some butt kicking. Not physically, but some serious disciplinary action (expulsions) for this behavior. It will only stop then.
Wayne Grabow 22 minutes ago
@James Petkas The uncivilized part of me likes your 'butt-kicking" approach. Do these children know what real violence is?
George Kuck 44 minutes ago
I'm one of those deplorables who is fighting back. I retired from avery leftist campus several years ago. I was the only conservative in my department and was definitely given the cold shoulder. How to fight back? It costs me $160 a month to publish a column (it is an advertisement) titled "What your teach will not tell you." If you have the money and want to fight back, do the same with your observations and comments. It may cost some money but some of the students will read it and use it. Target your own Alma mater.
ALAN SEWELL 40 minutes ago
@George Kuck Excellent idea. You were and are very brave to be a voice of Conservative dissent. When I was at the university in the 70's the humanities profs were always agitating political agendas. They were arrogant, stuffy old men, who had nothing practical to teach anybody. They used their classes for indoctrination. One day I dissented in the class of a mangy old prof and was rebuffed. "Don't contradict him," said a practical-minded upperclassman after class was over. "Just tell him what he wants to hear and he'll give you an 'A.'"
How's that for an intellectually honest Liberal Arts education!.
An unorthodox professor explains the ‘new religion’ that drives the intolerance and violence at places like Middlebury and Berkeley.
By BARI WEISS
Updated March 31, 2017 7:27 p.m. / WALL STREET JOURNAL
When a mob at Vermont’s Middlebury College shut down a speech by social scientist Charles Murray a few weeks ago, most of us saw it as another instance of campus illiberalism. Jonathan Haidt saw something more—a ritual carried out by adherents of what he calls a “new religion,” an auto-da-fé against a heretic for a violation of orthodoxy.
“The great majority of college students want to learn. They’re perfectly reasonable, and they’re uncomfortable with a lot of what’s going on,” Mr. Haidt, a psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells me during a recent visit to his office. “But on each campus there are some true believers who have reoriented their lives around the fight against evil.”
These believers are transforming the campus from a citadel of intellectual freedom into a holy space—where white privilege has replaced original sin, the transgressions of class and race and gender are confessed not to priests but to “the community,” victim groups are worshiped like gods, and the sinned-against are supplicated with “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”
The fundamentalists may be few, Mr. Haidt says, but they are “very intimidating” since they wield the threat of public shame. On some campuses, “they’ve been given the heckler’s veto, and are often granted it by an administration who won’t stand up to them either.”
All this has become something of a preoccupation for the 53-year-old Mr. Haidt. A longtime liberal—he ran a gun-control group as an undergraduate at Yale—he admits he “had never encountered conservative ideas” until his mid-40s. The research into moral psychology that became his 2012 book, “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion,” exposed him to other ways of seeing the world; he now calls himself a centrist.
Paul Gigot says there is a clear disconnect between Wisconsin and New York City.
In 2015 he founded Heterodox Academy, which describes itself as “a politically diverse group of social scientists, natural scientists, humanists, and other scholars” concerned about “the loss or lack of ‘viewpoint diversity’ ” on campuses. As Mr. Haidt puts it to me: “When a system loses all its diversity, weird things begin to happen.”
Having studied religions across cultures and classes, Mr. Haidt says it is entirely natural for humans to create “quasireligious” experiences out of seemingly secular activities. Take sports. We wear particular colors, gather as a tribe, and cheer for our team. Even atheists sometimes pray for the Steelers to beat the Patriots.
It’s all “fun and generally harmless,” maybe even healthy, Mr. Haidt says, until it tips into violence—as in British soccer hooliganism. “What we’re beginning to see now at Berkeley and at Middlebury hints that this [campus] religion has the potential to turn violent,” Mr. Haidt says. “The attack on the professor at Middlebury really frightened people,” he adds, referring to political scientist Allison Stanger, who wound up in a neck brace after protesters assaulted her as she left the venue.
The Berkeley episode Mr. Haidt mentions illustrates the Orwellian aspect of campus orthodoxy. A scheduled February appearance by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos prompted masked agitators to throw Molotov cocktails, smash windows, hurl rocks at police, and ultimately cause $100,000 worth of damage. The student newspaper ran an op-ed justifying the rioting under the headline “Violence helped ensure safety of students.” Read that twice.
Mr. Haidt can explain. Students like the op-ed author “are armed with a set of concepts and words that do not mean what you think they mean,” he says. “People older than 30 think that ‘violence’ generally involves some sort of physical threat or harm. But as students are using the word today, ‘violence’ is words that have a negative effect on members of the sacred victim groups. And so even silence can be violence.” It follows that if offensive speech is “violence,” then actual violence can be a form of self-defense.
Down the hall from Mr. Haidt’s office, I noticed a poster advertising a “bias response hotline” students can call “to report an experience of bias, discrimination or harassment.” I joke that NYU seems to have its own version of the morality police in Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia. “It’s like East Germany,” Mr. Haidt replies—with students, at least some of them, playing the part of the Stasi.
How did we get here, and what can be done? On the first question, Mr. Haidt points to a braided set of causes. There’s the rise in political polarization, which is related to the relatively recent “political purification of the universities.” While the academy has leaned left since at least the 1920s, Mr. Haidt says “it was always just a lean.” Beginning in the early 1990s, as the professors of the Greatest Generation retired, it became a full-on tilt.
“Now there are no more conservative voices on the faculty or administration,” he says, exaggerating only a little. Heterodox Academy cites research showing that the ratio of left to right professors in 1995 was 2 to 1. Now it is 5 to 1.
The left, meanwhile, has undergone an ideological transformation. A generation ago, social justice was understood as equality of treatment and opportunity: “If gay people don’t have to right to marry and you organize a protest to apply pressure to get them that right, that’s justice,” Mr. Haidt says. “If black people are getting discriminated against in hiring and you fight that, that’s justice.”
Today justice means equal outcomes. “There are two ideas now in the academic left that weren’t there 10 years ago,” he says. “One is that everyone is racist because of unconscious bias, and the other is that everything is racist because of systemic racism.” That makes justice impossible to achieve: “When you cross that line into insisting if there’s not equal outcomes then some people and some institutions and some systems are racist, sexist, then you’re setting yourself up for eternal conflict and injustice.”
Perhaps most troubling, Mr. Haidt cites the new protectiveness in child-rearing over the past few decades. Historically, American children were left to their own devices and had to learn to deal with bullies. Today’s parents, out of compassion, handle it for them. “By the time students get to college they have much, much less experience with unpleasant social encounters, or even being insulted, excluded or marginalized,” Mr. Haidt says. “They expect there will be some adult, some authority, to rectify things.”
Combine that with the universities’ shift to a “customer is always right” mind-set. Add in social media. Suddenly it’s “very, very easy to bring mobs together,” Mr. Haidt says, and make “people very afraid to stand out or stand up for what they think is right.” Students and professors know, he adds, that “if you step out of line at all, you will be called a racist, sexist or homophobe. In fact it’s gotten so bad out there that there’s a new term—‘ophobophobia,’ which is the fear of being called x-ophobic.”
That fear runs deep—including in Mr. Haidt. When I ask him about how political homogeneity on campus informs the understanding of so-called rape culture, he clams up: “I can’t talk about that.” The topic of sexual assault—along with Islam—is too sensitive.
It’s a painfully ironic answer from a man dedicating his career to free thought and speech. But choosing his battles doesn’t mean Mr. Haidt is unwilling to fight. And he’s finding allies across the political spectrum.
Heterodox Academy’s membership has grown to some 600, up about 100 since the beginning of March. “In the wake of the Middlebury protests and violence, we’re seeing a lot of liberal-left professors standing up against illiberal-left professors and students,” Mr. Haidt says. Less than a fifth of the organization’s members identify as “right/conservative”; most are centrists, liberals or progressives.
Balancing those numbers by giving academic jobs and tenure to outspoken libertarians and conservatives seems like the most effective way to change the campus culture, if only by signaling to self-censoring students that dissent is acceptable. But for now Heterodox Academy is taking a more modest approach, focusing on three initiatives.
The first is its college guide: a ranking by viewpoint diversity of America’s top 150 campuses. The goal is to create market pressure and put administrators on notice. The University of Chicago currently ranks No. 1—rising seniors, take note.
The second is a “fearless speech index,” a web-based questionnaire that allows students and professors to express how comfortable they feel speaking out on sensitive subjects. Right now, Mr. Haidt says, there are a tremendous number of anecdotes but no real data; the index aims to remedy that.
The third is the “viewpoint diversity experience,” a six-step online lesson in the virtue and practice of open-minded engagement with opposing ideas.
Heterodox Academy is not the only sliver of light. Following the Middlebury incident, the unlikely duo of Democratic Socialist Cornel West and conservative Robert P. George published a statement denouncing “campus illiberalism” and calling for “truth seeking, democracy and freedom of thought and expression.” More than 2,500 scholars and other intellectuals have signed it. At Northwestern the student government became the first in the country to pass a resolution calling for academic freedom and viewpoint diversity.
“What I think is happening,” Mr. Haidt says, is that “as the visible absurdity on campus mounts and mounts, and as public opinion turns more strongly against universities—and especially as the line of violence is crossed—we are having more and more people standing up saying, ‘Enough is enough. I’m opposed to this.’ ” Let’s hope.
If you’re not a student or professor, why should you care about snowflakes in their igloos? Because, Mr. Haidt argues, what happens on campus affects the “health of our nation.” Ideological and political homogeneity endangers the quality of social-science research, which informs public policy. “Understanding the impacts of immigration, understanding the causes of poverty—these are all absolutely vital,” he says. “If there’s an atmosphere of intimidation around politicized issues, it clearly influences the research.”
Today’s college students also are tomorrow’s leaders—and employees. Companies are already encountering problems with recent graduates unprepared for the challenges of the workplace. “Work requires a certain amount of toughness,” Mr. Haidt says. “Colleges that prepare students to expect a frictionless environment where there are bureaucratic procedures and adult authorities to rectify conflict are very poorly prepared for the workplace. So we can expect a lot more litigation in the coming few years.”
If you lean left—even if you adhere to the campus orthodoxy, or to certain elements of it—you might consider how the failure to respect pluralism puts your own convictions at risk of a backlash. “People are sick and tired of being called racist for innocent things they’ve said or done,” Mr. Haidt observes. “The response to being called a racist unfairly is never to say, ‘Gee, what did I do that led to me being called this? I should be more careful.’ The response is almost always, ‘[Expletive] you!’ ”
He offers this real-world example: “I think that the ‘deplorables’ comment could well have changed the course of human history.”
Ms. Weiss is an associate book review editor at the Journal.
Appeared in the Apr. 01, 2017, print edition as 'The Cultural Roots of Campus Rage.'
JOHN CASSIDY just now
So much for free speech in America.
Walter Altholz 4 minutes ago
A very accurate portrayal of the current climate. Mr. Haidt is dead on. Wish that his Heterodox Academy has slightly more aggressive goals but he has a much better feel for the right strategy that I.
Wish that he had also included arresting these pathetic protestors when they commit an act the breaks the law. Lets see how they do by spending an evening in jail with some of the people they claim to support. Unless there are consequences, little will happen.
You are though appreciated, Mr. Haidt and many of us hope that you will be successful.
XAVIER L SIMON 5 minutes ago
It seems like we've created a monster, and I say we because I'm in my seventies and perhaps I overprotected my kids and for sure my grandchildren are being overprotected. I want to make excuses but I don't think I can, especially since I live in a fairly safe neighborhood.
Young parents should think about that. In contrast to what I am sure they do, I had my first motorcycle when I was about eight years old, and in Mexico City! At fifteen I had a car and for one vacation I took it to Acapulco. I was on the road with my younger brother with my mother right behind us in her car. My brother and I returned to Mexico City alone! Nothing bad ever happened to us, nor did we ever get into trouble.
Now, I don't recommend that parents do the same with their kids, but please, please, give them much more rope than you are giving them today.
Carol Sandor 7 minutes ago
The root of all this seems to be a need to create a system of control over other people, with different excuses given to create that system. It's "big brother is watching you", coming from the "liberals".
DOROTHY DIMOCK 11 minutes ago
“Colleges that prepare students to expect a frictionless environment where there are bureaucratic procedures and adult authorities to rectify conflict are very poorly prepared for the workplace. So we can expect a lot more litigation in the coming few years.”
In other words, too many of our college-age students are still emotionally children.
XAVIER L SIMON 18 minutes ago
“By the time students get to college they have much, much less experience with unpleasant social encounters, or even being insulted, excluded or marginalized,” Mr. Haidt says. “They expect there will be some adult, some authority, to rectify things.”
Combine that with Shelby Steele’s thesis that many on left have turned their liberal ideology into an identity and you have a cocktail for developmental disaster. I know liberal people in their forties that become terrified, literally, if their ideas are questioned by a conservative, say, on Facebook.
DOROTHY DIMOCK 10 minutes ago
@XAVIER L SIMON Which means they are ripe for a demagogue who promises to "protect," them from "negative experiences."
XAVIER L SIMON 3 minutes ago
@DOROTHY DIMOCK @XAVIER L SIMON
Exactly, Dorothy, and look no further than Obama or Hillary.
John Kovalsky 18 minutes ago
What is really troubling is their 21st century understanding of freedom of speech extends beyond yelling fire in a crowded theatre to ransacking an event and preventing a paid speaker from speaking. Once the Right decides to physically over-power Leftists conducting an event in private room or with a stage, we'll witness hypocrisy at its zenith. However, folks on the Right don't attend idiot speeches, so that will never happen. The vast majority of Leftist men are emasculated, quasi homosexuals, who conduct themselves in the most effeminate way, shouting down their opponent and having the event delayed, postponed and/or interrupted. And of course everyone with whom they disagree is a homophobe, xenophobe, racist, sexist, etc..and the argument is over.
Carol Sandor 4 minutes ago
@John Kovalsky So a normal guy is trying to be, like, not. This is so funny.
Rocco Papalia 22 minutes ago
No taxpayer bailouts of student loans. Ever.
Bob Russell 25 minutes ago
I think the behavior on college campuses these days is a good reason to require everyone when they attain the age of 18 or graduate from high school be required to serve a minimum of six months in the military. I think the discipline and other things they would learn would benefit them and especially our nation. When they are discharged from the military, I think they would have a new perspective of life that is much different than the socialist communism they learn in high school and college.
steve petarra 23 minutes ago
@Bob Russell What in the world would the military do with you for six months? Not to be harsh, but thats silly. The military of today is highly trained and skilled. It isnt Starbucks making coffee.
terry reed 28 minutes ago
Sounds like the Chinese Red Guard in the late 60s…..forbidding politically incorrect speech….those who violate that self-evident truth must confess before the masses , then publicly humiliated. The only thing missing are little Red Books containing the approved slogans.
steve petarra 22 minutes ago
@terry reed And professors wearing dunce caps.
Kathy Herrmann 31 minutes ago
"...as students are using the word today, ‘violence’ is words that have a negative effect on members of the sacred victim groups. And so even silence can be violence.”
The world today reminds me of the 1930s. Enough I fear a new major war is coming and it's less a matter of if than when. If the snowflakes think words are violence, then god help us all.
TROY SIMPSON 32 minutes ago
The best news to come out of universities in a long time!
Thomas Bowler 34 minutes ago
"[H]e now calls himself a centrist."
Any further to the right and he'd lose his job.
XAVIER L SIMON 35 minutes ago
"The fundamentalists may be few, Mr. Haidt says, but they are 'very intimidating' since they wield the threat of public shame."
This brought to mind the video of the shrieking young lady Greg Gutfeld loves to show during his Saturday shows. I picture her shrieking in front of Charles Murray before she accuses him of raping her mentally.
ALAN SEWELL 35 minutes ago
The radicalization is due to the career-ization of university education. With all the government grants available, more people are expecting to stay in universities their whole lives. Obama's mother was fed her entire adult life by Federal grants. Millions more are lining up at the trough. They are becoming ever more removed from the world of economic work, and ever more attached to the world of sponging from public money. So, of course they are becoming radicalized.
The same phenomenon has long been part of Latin American higher education. Communist agitators make their nests in universities. They are there to radicalize the students and incite riot and revolution. In the 60's through '80's many were funded by the Soviet Union and China. It has to be the same thing happening here: a variety of Liberal groups are funding people to be "professional students" whose real jobs are to disseminate agitprop to naive students.
Tim Dolan 35 minutes ago
Apparently the only difference between the dems and the jihadists is which book they read in order to see who they should call names, shoot or blow up.
Ted Terry 39 minutes ago
Protect your children to their detriment and then as they go through college never having to acknowledge an opposite viewpoint they graduate fell fledged millennials that are collective of their own ilk and dismissive of everybody else, except maybe their their parents who they tolerate because they live with them.
XAVIER L SIMON 39 minutes ago
Sounds like we are back to the witch hunt days that made Salem, Mass. famous!
WILLIAM SMITH 40 minutes ago
Mr. Haidt's work on moral philosophy has demonstrated real world applications in areas as diverse as jury selection and hiring practices. His recommendation awhile back that all students should be required to take a course (or experience a structured set of sessions) in cognitive behavioral therapy during their freshman year is perhaps the best recommendation possible for countering campus fundamentalism.
Those of us on the center-right who engage in public policy thinking encounter a diversity of thought from a diversity of thinkers (predominantly on the left) on a daily (hourly) basis. My friends in the local University of California faculty have told me that I am the only "right-winger" they know.
On another note: I truly hope that Mr. Haidt's organization becomes a tax-exempt, donation accepting organization. I'm ready with a (small) check. Finally, where does one go to join?
.
Charles Harmon 41 minutes ago
Good piece. One is reminded of the intolerance and bigotry of the Matxists, Leninists, Trots etc in the 70's. Different ideology (to an extent), same expression. Plus ca change ....
Frank Healey 42 minutes ago
Glad to see someone non-conservative realizes the danger of liberal fascism.
How do you battle institutional racism without specific racist policies or dictates that are in fact racist.
You can't.
How do you deal with a white privilege that lives only in people's minds and nowhere else and is an original sin for which there is no redemption?
How do you correct an unconscious bias that you can only guess exists in other peoples minds?
Who are the mind readers that can do that?
James Petkas 42 minutes ago
A long article that didn't say much other than the part about learning to deal with bullies growing up. I learned by getting my butt kicked until I couldn't stand it anymore and kicked the bullies butt. Today kids are taught to whine until an adult makes it all better.
Well, unless the bully gets his butt kicked he keeps bullying. Notice that no matter how far administration bends over to "understand" and placate these screaming brats the brats keep demanding more. Classic bully behavior.
There needs to be some butt kicking. Not physically, but some serious disciplinary action (expulsions) for this behavior. It will only stop then.
Wayne Grabow 22 minutes ago
@James Petkas The uncivilized part of me likes your 'butt-kicking" approach. Do these children know what real violence is?
George Kuck 44 minutes ago
I'm one of those deplorables who is fighting back. I retired from avery leftist campus several years ago. I was the only conservative in my department and was definitely given the cold shoulder. How to fight back? It costs me $160 a month to publish a column (it is an advertisement) titled "What your teach will not tell you." If you have the money and want to fight back, do the same with your observations and comments. It may cost some money but some of the students will read it and use it. Target your own Alma mater.
ALAN SEWELL 40 minutes ago
@George Kuck Excellent idea. You were and are very brave to be a voice of Conservative dissent. When I was at the university in the 70's the humanities profs were always agitating political agendas. They were arrogant, stuffy old men, who had nothing practical to teach anybody. They used their classes for indoctrination. One day I dissented in the class of a mangy old prof and was rebuffed. "Don't contradict him," said a practical-minded upperclassman after class was over. "Just tell him what he wants to hear and he'll give you an 'A.'"
How's that for an intellectually honest Liberal Arts education!.
That's to what I've seen on TV or read about. In personal exchanges with family and friends it has always remained civil as all involved realize that our friendships and family relationships are more important than any political or ideological differences.