A cautionary tale from US academia
The distinguished professor Jonathan Haidt won’t compromise his commitment to truth-seeking
Jonathan Haidt is the latest public figure to run up against the demands of diversity, equity and inclusion in American academic life. The social psychology professor is internationally regarded for his seminal book, The Righteous Mind, which seeks to explain why sincere liberals and conservatives can see the world so differently. More recently, he’s known for his contributions to The Coddling of the American Mind, which he co-authored with Greg Lukianoff, for his work exposing the risks posed by social media to private and public life, and for founding Heterdox Academy, a initiative to promote “open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement” in universities.
So when the Society for Personality and Social Psychology said that research presented at its conferences must advance the Society’s “equity, inclusion, and anti-racism” goals, it was a red flag for Haidt. In a public statement, he notes for starters that, “Most academic work has nothing to do with diversity, so these mandatory statements force many academics to betray their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth by spinning, twisting, or otherwise inventing some tenuous connection to diversity.” But his main concern is that the requirement forces scholars to be “explicitly ideological”. The commitment to “anti-racism” particularly concerns him, given this passage from the leading book, How to be an Antiracist:
“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
Writing to the President of the society to share his concerns, Haidt said:
“I thought the claim was incorrect from a social science perspective because there are obviously many other remedies. And I explained why I thought the claim was incorrect morally because it requires us to treat people as members of groups, not as individuals, and then to treat people well or badly based on their group membership. That’s exactly the opposite of what most of us who grew up in the late 20th century thought was a settled moral fact.”
Haidt has no problem with anti-racism as a subject of research and conference presentations, only with making it an official goal to be endorsed by all. Instead, he argues, the goal of science and the academy should be to seek the truth no matter what its relationship is to an official ideology. Policies like this pressure scholars, “especially younger ones” who need recognition of their work, “to betray their fiduciary duty to the truth and profess outward deference to an ideology that some of them do not privately endorse.”
Haidt’s concluded he must resign from the Society if the policy remains in place. He believes that ideological conformity reduces the quality of scholarship, and he’s been raising these concerns for over a decade within the Society and outside of it. As nothing has changed—indeed, as the trends have intensified—he believes that the only remaining option is to exit an organisation that does not share his commitment to seeking the truth.
It's a brave stance and one that more academics may find themselves forced to contemplate. I don’t know whether any New Zealand institutions or universities impose any similar conditions on research here. If they do, then let’s hope that local scholars draw inspiration from examples like Haidt’s and push back on those requirements before they become entrenched.
Haidt is part of a small minority of academics who are unfortunately fighting a losing battle standing up for academic integrity in an academic world gone rogue - a world dominated by immature, ill-schooled but aggressive ideologues who were indoctrinated by extremist lecturers and professors in the 1990s and are now attempting to take their utopian ideologies to the extreme. They ignore the lessons of the failed 20th century utopian attempts (or are ignorant of them) and their social media savviness allows their small but extreme voice to be beamed incessantly and forcefully to the masses. The idealist experiments of last century ended in mass destruction and outrageous death tolls every time. Are we clever enough to listen to people like Dr Haidt and prevent that happening again? The lemmings currently say, "No!"