Jonathan Haidt set to resign from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology
I already had quite a bit of respect for Jonathan Haidt. He’s a moderate who tends more to the liberal end of things, but his work on political belief systems is very important and for the most part very fair. I’ve written about him several times previously.
My respect has only increased due to this action he recently took to repudiate the woke academy:
Last week the New York University (NYU) psychology professor announced that he would resign at the end of the year from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, his primary professional association, because of a newly adopted requirement that everybody presenting research at the group’s conferences explain how their submission advances “equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals.” It was the sort of litmus test against which he has warned, and which he sees as corroding institutions of higher learning.
“Telos means ‘the end, goal, or purpose for which an act is done, or at which a profession or institution aims,'” he wrote in a Sept. 20 piece published on the website of Heterodox Academy, an organization he cofounded that promotes viewpoint diversity on college campuses, and republished by the Chronicle of Higher Education. “The telos of a knife is to cut, the telos of medicine is to heal, and the telos of a university is truth.”
“The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)—recently asked me to violate my quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth,” he added. “I was going to attend the annual conference in Atlanta next February to present some research with colleagues on a new and improved version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. I was surprised to learn about a new rule: In order to present research at the conference, all social psychologists are now required to submit a statement explaining ‘whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.'”
Such diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements have proliferated at universities and in academic societies, he notes, even though “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.”…
“So I’m going to resign from SPSP at the end of this year, when my membership dues run out, if the policy on mandatory statements stays in place for future conventions,” he concludes.
I was quite moved when I read the words “the telos of a university is truth.” Why? Because I think that, for most universities, that used to be the case but no longer is. Or rather, the truth they now seek is a “greater” truth, a sort of lefist “my truth” rather than the truth as best it can be ascertained. This is one of the biggest failings of our age, and Haidt is correct to call it out.
I don’t fool myself that his voice will make a particle of difference to academia or the huge majority of present-day academics, though. I don’t know whether he himself thinks it will matter, but his actions are a case of “live not by lies,” and I applaud him for it.
He adds an excellent point about this being in part a generational conflict:
“I have gotten about a dozen supportive emails from other social psychologists, and no real criticism beyond a few psychologists on Twitter who, perhaps shaped by Twitter, go to great lengths to assume the worst about me and my motives for writing the essay,” Haidt told me by email. “I have the sense that there is a large generational split. Psychologists and academics who are older than me (I’m 58) seem uniformly supportive: they are all on the left, and the left used to be creeped out by loyalty oaths, whether administered by the McCarthyite right or the Soviet left. But young people on the left seem to be very comfortable requiring such pledges.”
Almost all psychologists are on the left, but the older ones are more the old-fashioned type who got into the habit of championing free speech when they felt it was their speech that was being suppressed. Some of them have adopted it a general principle. I wonder, however, how many of those academics who have emailed Haidt (only a dozen?) would be willing to go public with their support.
Academe needs to be punished.
“In order to present research at the conference, all social psychologists are now required to submit a statement explaining ‘whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.’”
How about a statement like this one:
“This submission does nothing to advance the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP. But note that it also does nothing to retard or obstruct the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP. The submission is what it is, and hearers are free to glean from it whatever they may find useful and/or enlightening.”
“Those the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
yes, they are at the grazing stage
https://edwest.substack.com/p/the-triumph-of-the-blank-slate
I got out just in time to avoid having to sign such statement for all the classes I would teach. DEI must be part of senior level QM and all other science courses. Syllabi are now required to be submitted to a central committee for approval.
There may be a few schools not totally given in to the madness, but not many.
Meanwhile, the medical professional societies (the AMA, the AAP, and the Children’s Hospital Association) are asking Merrick Garland “to censor, deplatform, investigate, and prosecute journalists who question the orthodoxy of radical gender surgeries for minors, arguing that public criticism is ‘disinformation’.”
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1577029634042253313
So it isn’t just the academics; it’s the clinical practitioners as well.
So it isn’t just the academics; it’s the clinical practitioners as well.
How many of the institutional politicians sitting on AMA committees are in something resembling clinical practice? If they actually were, would they have time for anything in excess of one conference per year?
Note, the American Academy of Pediatrics has been corrupted by politics for 20 years at any rate.
Every white academic who pushes DIE should be pressured to resign to make room for “people of color” to get their job. Every white person who gets paid to advance “ social justice” should be pressured to resign to make room for paying more “ people of color.” Make them live up to what they are trying to force on everybody else.
Haidt is a failure. Liberals hate conservatives, thinking they are “violent”. And conservatives are tired of the persecution by the banks, corporations, government and the leftist thugs.
So it seems that universities have become religious institutions again. Having to adhere to the current dogma, teaching “truth “ instead objective, fact based truth. Having studied history in college and most of my life this is almost funny if it wasn’t so sad.
I liked Haidt’s book _The Righteous Mind_, and wish that his Heterodox Academy project had found more success. However, what we have here is not a failure to communicate. The SPSP will not be shamed by Haidt’s resignation. Indeed I would argue that his resignation is the desired outcome. The left has been consciously driving conservatives and moderates out of the academy since at least the late 1980s. Post-modernist unintelligibility and “Bad Writing” to weed out all but the most conformist, along with the first rollouts of sexual harassment (for example as dramatized in Mamet’s Oleanna_ ) were but early tactics. They can be more explicitly political now.
}}} Or rather, the truth they now seek is a “greater” truth, a sort of lefist “my truth” rather than the truth as best it can be ascertained.
I suggest, Neo, that the word you are after is Steven Colbert’s “Truthiness”
I would define it as: Something that may not be true in the least, but “ought to be”.
;-P
Everyone can grasp the desire for such things to turn out true… some of us are intellectually honest enough to grasp that many times, they are not.
“What We Want” does not equal “What Actually Is”
}}} So it seems that universities have become religious institutions again. Having to adhere to the current dogma, teaching “truth “ instead objective, fact based truth. Having studied history in college and most of my life this is almost funny if it wasn’t so sad.
Indeed. I suspect the only option is to begin creating our own institutions, which have a focus on the Truth.
It’s funny, but it occurs to me that we are looking at the flip side of the schism that Robert Persig’s alter ego, “Phaedrus” spoke of in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, when the break between Art and Philosophy occurred — the ones fighting for Truth won out, with tremendous long-term effects on humanity — without that devotion to Truth, the Enlightenment would never have happened, and we would still live in a pre-technology hellhole around the world.
And to some of The Truth’s detractors, that would be a Real Good Thing.
The fact that Getting from Here to There would cost about 7 billion lives and leave the rest in squalor and misery is not a problem for them.
I repeat once more:
PostModern Liberalism is a Social Cancer. Literally, not Figuratively™.