So I’d like to start off with the Yiddish word chutzpah. Many of this word. It means gall, like you’ve got a lot of gall or nerve. And the classic definition of chutzpah from the Borscht Belt comedian age was a boy who kills his parents and then asks the judge for leniency because he’s an orphan. And in the same way, here’s another example, a conference on academic freedom that invites people from all over the spectrum, invites its critics. None of them come, and then they accuse the conference of lacking diversity. And here’s the sad thing that goes even beyond that. There is more diversity, more ideological and political diversity in the room today than in probably any other room anywhere in any of America’s top hundred universities this year.
So, we’re in a very strange state. I’m thrilled to be here addressing you. Actually, I’m really lamenting that I’m not there with you. I am hiding away to write two books on why everything is going to hell, why everything began to go to hell around 2014, 2015. So what I want to talk with you about today is why university culture changed so suddenly in the USA, the UK, and Canada in just two years between 2014 and 2016. And of course, this is work that I did with Greg Luciano. Now, what I want to do in this brief talk is give you a framework for the rest of the work that we’re doing here at this conference. I want to talk about how we had changes in mindset, telos, and institution. So let me go through that.
So first, defend mode replaced discover mode. What does that mean? The most fundamental question in life, I’ve asked my students this and they say things like, “Is there a god? What’s the meaning of life?” But those are not fundamental questions. The most fundamental question is approach or avoid, because as soon as life got the ability to move, the question was which way? And the rest of evolution, or much of it, is optimizing for that question. So a fish brain is highly optimized for telling the fish which way to move, towards the light, away from the light, whatever it is. When we get to the human brain, the approach avoid system is so elaborate. It is even slightly [inaudible 00:02:35]. So you’ve got the behavioral activation system, especially active in the front left cortex, which is about seeking out approaching goals. And you’ve got the behavioral inhibition system, which when the front right cortex is more active, that you’re switched over into behavioral inhibition system mode.
Let me give these more intuitive names. People can either be in discover mode or defend mode, and here’s what those look like. In discover mode, we’re looking out at the world and we’re scanning for opportunities. We feel like a kid in a candy shop. This is the way I felt when I showed up at Yale in 1981. I could look through the blue book. There were hundreds of courses. It was so exciting. And the motto of a student in discover mode, or what he would say to administrators is, “Stand back, let me grow, let me do things.” But if a student is in defend mode, they see everything as a threat. There’s a scarcity mindset, they’re more likely to clinging to a team for safety. And what they say to administrators is, “Keep me safe.” Now, what happened in 2014 is that Gen Z arrived around 2013, 2014, and these are the changes from the millennials. We see a slight increase in ADHD and physical disability, but that yellow line, which is psychological disorders, this was the big change when Gen Z arrived on campus.
And it wasn’t all psychological disorders. It was only anxiety and depression. As you can see, anxiety rates skyrocket in Gen Z, they go up a little in the millennials, and they don’t go up in other generations. And here’s for depression, it’s also very gendered. Both sexes are up, but the overall increase for girls, because girls started at a much higher rate, it really is especially noticeable among Gen Z girls. This is national data from high school students. And it’s not just that they’re self-reporting depression, it’s not just that they’re more open to talking about it. The exact same pattern shows up in behavior. This shows hospitalizations for self-harm and we see the same pattern for suicide. So it’s real and it’s big. And this is why, around 2014, 2015, all of our mental health centers were flooded because Gen Z was arriving and they had more than a hundred percent increase in rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide.
And interestingly, it wasn’t evenly spread across the political spectrum. Two studies have now looked at the few data sets that asked teenagers for their politics, and what did they find? If you stop your data collection in 2012, you see that there’s a very small difference in which… This is high school students now, monitoring the future study. High school students who say that they’re liberal are very slightly more likely to score high on a depressive affect scale than conservatives, and you see no sex difference in this. But what happens after 2012? The liberal girls start rising very rapidly and they rise the most, followed by the liberal males. Again, these are high school students. Conservatives rise a little later and not quite as much. So we get a big, big shift in anxiety and depression, especially among girls and especially among girls on the left, and this is high school.
Recently I’ve learned, I never knew anything about Tumblr, but there’s some speculation that a lot of the ideas that flooded in that Greg and I wrote about, the victimhood culture, a lot of the idea of speech as violence, all these things, the set that was nurtured on Tumblr and then was brought into universities around 2014 by Gen Z. In any case, whatever we do, when we’re trying to understand the transformation that happened to our world, to our beloved universities in the space of two years, a change in mindset is a big part of it.
Now let me talk about telos. So the word telos, as many of you know, a word common and Aristotelian psychology, refers to the end or purpose or goal for which a thing is designed, for which a profession aims at. So the telos of a knife is to cut, the telos of a physician is to heal, and the telos of a university, well, we’ve always thought about ourselves as being the academy descended from Plato’s Academy. This is Rafael’s The Academy at Athens, Plato and Aristotle in the center, and the telos right there on the crest of many of our top schools. Harvard is Veritas. Yale is Lux Et Veritas. And I found that Stanford actually considered this motto, it was going to be truth and service. So truth, the pursuit of truth, and as John Cochran said, “And the skills necessary to find it for yourself,” this is how our universities were designed, and much of what we do only makes sense in the light of this mission, in the light of this telos.
And so what I want to suggest is that American universities, drawing from British universities, created this extraordinary virtuous triangle. It’s a triangle, it’s an institution, set up to maximize a mindset, to put young people into discover mode. And then everything is structured that together, as students and as researchers, we find truth and we pass on those skills. It’s this virtuous triangle that created the miracle of the American research university and the American liberal arts college in the 20th century. And this is why these universities, along with a couple of British universities, dominate any list you can find of the top universities in the world. These are the greatest truth-creating engines in human history, and they’re based in the places that we work, the universities. But what happened in 2014 when we got this flood of anxious, depressed, young people demanding change, demanding that we not just have the free flow of ideas as we’d had for a long time, we got students demanding trigger warnings for books demanding that speakers be de-platformed or canceled, and demanding safe spaces if they couldn’t get a speaker dis-invited.
All of this combined to create a new moral culture of safety, keep me safe, rather than of exploration or discover or let me grow, and Greg and I wrote about all of this in our 2018 book. All of our universities pretty much are now dominated by these terms here on the left, and this is a culture that is incompatible with the search for truth. So what I’d like to suggest is our mystery is how did we go from this virtuous triangle to, well, when you change the mindset, now it doesn’t quite work. And then you get students demanding a change in the telos. If the telos is now social justice, then the institution doesn’t work right. So let me talk briefly now about the institution, where incoherence and fear have replaced purpose, courage, and playfulness.
So academic life, again, we imagine what it was like in Plato’s Academy when brilliant people lay around drinking wine and talking about truth and love and virtue and goodness. So from 387 BC until around 2013, with some long interruptions in between, but we think about academic life as being playful, fun, exciting. You remember Lingua Franca? It was a fun academic journal in the nineties and almost all of you listening to me now, you remember what it was like before 2013 when there was humor. We told jokes, academic conferences were full of humor and excitement and a general positivity. We were all in discover mode. Things have really changed. It’s gotten a lot less fun. It’s just much more about conflict and fear now. We began seeing this in 2014, 2015 with professors saying that their students scare them. And this is what survey work from Heterodox Academy and Phi repeatedly shows students are not afraid of their professors, they’re much more afraid of other students and the professors are afraid of the students.
So what happened was we began to have students sending in long lists of demands, often more than 50 demands, to the presidents. And, to their eternal shame, I believe, almost none of the presidents questioned or disputed. Most of them just said, “Let me see how many of these I can legally give you, because some of them are illegal.” And so you get this period from 2015 through, well, yesterday when presidents are doing everything they can to give into these demands and basically convert the university over from a truth-seeking institution to a social justice institution. So we get shameful events like Sam Abrams writes a perfectly normal op-ed piece in the New York Times about campus administrators and the students demand that he be fired. Pamela wrote this up, “Rebels without a clue.” Among their 92 demands I think they had, one of them was free fabric softener, so it’s become farcical.
My point here is this: every institution has a telos. It doesn’t mean it has a value. Universities can have many values and some can conflict, but a telos is like a north star. It’s the thing around which everything circles. It’s the thing around which the thing was designed. So let’s look at a refrigerator. The telos of a refrigerator is keeping food cold and it was designed to do that. But what if you said, let’s take this refrigerator and let’s make it a bathtub. You can do that. You could lay it on its back, remove the shelves, plug up whatever holes there are and put water in it. So you could use a refrigerator as a bathtub. It would work, but it would be a very bad bathtub, and it would be completely incapable of keeping food cold.
Okay, let’s try that again. You have a university designed for the pursuit of truth with all of its departments, with peer review, with all kinds of seminars. You have hundreds of years of design of an institution for truth. And you know what? Well, let’s just try remaking it as a social justice engine. Let’s make that the highest purpose, social justice. And you can kind of do that, but it’s actually not a very good social justice engine and it’s no longer able to find truth.
There are two reasons why this is such a terrible idea. The first, I wrote up an article in April on how social media is basically destroying our epistemic institutions, how it’s making it difficult for us to have any sort of shared understanding. It’s difficult for institutions to function, especially those that require viewpoint diversity and sharing and critiquing ideas. The core idea was that when social media change in 2009 and we had the retweet and the share button and the button, it got much more viral, much more super viral, and it was like we gave a little dart gun to everyone and anyone can shoot anyone they want. And who do they shoot? They shoot leaders. And so the university presidents were all scared, but actually they don’t really shoot their enemies. They don’t really shoot the other side.
What happens within institutions, I argued, is what I call structural stupidity. That is, many of the darts are shot by the far left and the far right disproportionately from the far left and the far right, and the main people they like to shoot are their moderates. So the far left shoots darts into the moderate left. Any professor, any center, center-left professor who questions any of the sacred ideas will be called a racist, a bigot, a sexist, a transphobe so quickly and their career might be ruined, so they go silent and we get the spiral of silence. Now, as John said, the problem on university on the campus is mostly from the left, but nationally, in my opinion, of the two parties, and I argue this in the Atlantic piece, it’s the Republican Party that’s become the stupid party because they shot all their moderates. The Democrats still have a far left wing and a moderate wing, and the moderates usually win.
So the problem is very, very deep, but it’s asymmetrical. There’s structural stupidity on both sides. But in terms of the universities, the problem is I believe primarily the far left shooting and intimidating everybody else. The moderates and centrists go quiet, they keep their heads down, and at that point the pursuit of knowledge fails. We become structurally stupid. There’s another reason why converting to social justice is suicidal. This is Pew research on the percent of Americans who say that universities have a positive or negative effect on the country. And as you see, if you look at just Democrats from 2012 to 2019, there’s no real change. Democrats love universities and they have very high ratings that they make a positive impact. What happens when we look at Republicans? Well, Republicans used to think that too, not by as much, but until 2015 it was 54% positive and only 30% negative.
And then this year of transformation, 2015, and boy did Republicans see those videos of students attacking Nicholas Kostakis, of all the incredible disrespect, the craziness at Evergreen State College, and very quickly, Republicans turned against universities. Now, if we love universities and we want them to be trusted by the public and supported by government, how stupid is it to declare universities explicitly as social justice institutions fighting for the left and against the right? Why would we expect Republicans to support us? So this is my story about what happened to Anglo universities throughout the English-speaking world. We see the same thing in Australia and New Zealand, only a couple of years delayed. And what I’d like to suggest, and this is what I’ll leave you with, is somehow very quickly we got into this situation which is incoherent, dysfunctional, and it certainly isn’t much fun to work in anymore. And the question is how do we get back to this virtuous triangle?
Many of the people in the room are writing about that, many of the groups represented. So certainly AFA, FIRE, Heterodox Academy, which I co-founded with some of you who are in the room in 2015. And I can tell you at Heterodox we’re working on all three of these. A lot of our writing is about the telos of the university and keeping that front and center, and looking at the intellectual history of the university. We have extraordinary writing by Musa Al Garby on our site. We have a variety of programs to help incoming college freshmen get in the right mindset to appreciate, to learn from, to love viewpoint diversity. And we’ll be working a lot more on campuses and helping our members to create groups that will directly influence policy.
So we’re all in this together. It doesn’t matter whether on the left or the right, and this was what was so much fun about the Heterodox Academy conference in Denver last June, is that you talk with people and you actually couldn’t tell who was on the left or the right because it wasn’t relevant. We were all professors who love universities, and they were concerned about what’s become of them. So I look forward to your questions and to the discussion. Thank you.
Speaker 2:
You mentioned that this is primarily a phenomenon in the English-speaking world, but you didn’t really talk about the reasons for that. I wonder if you could say a couple words on that because I think everyone’s noted that, but I’ve not been able to understand it myself.
Jonathan Haidt:
Yes, certainly. So there’s several reasons that I found. There may be more. One is that this is pretty much exclusively or primarily a product of fairly elite residential colleges. You have to get a group of students living together on campus, preferably off in the woods of New England, to believe some of the crazy stuff that students believe. So in most of the world, you go to the school that’s in your town. This is the case in Australia. You go to the school that’s in your town, you go home at night to your parents. And if you have other people telling you, “No, wait a second, in fact, speech isn’t actually violence,” then you don’t tend to fall into it, so that’s one.
The other is that, as you’ve seen, I think social media changed everything. And one thing I’ve learned about social media platforms is they do not care about national borders, but they do care about linguistic borders. So ideas circulate in the English-speaking world very quickly. And this was remarkable. It’s not like this start in the US and then spread the next year to Canada and the UK. This was all contemporaneous in those three countries. So it’s an Anglo issue. Well, there’s a lot of other things about Anglo culture that could make this. Protestantism, and many have observed this is kind of like Protestant fundamentalism, except without any of the good parts.
Peter Blair:
Hi, John. Thank you very much. Peter Blair from Hoover and Harvard. I wanted to ask, can you talk a bit about the historical protests of the 1960s that focused a lot around social justice, either on the basis of race or gender, and what happened then that allowed the university to be robust to some of those student demands that’s not happening now? And what are some of the lessons that we could learn from them? Because in some sense, the students’ demands for these freedoms aren’t something that’s new, so if you can talk about that.
Jonathan Haidt:
Oh, thank you. No, that’s a great question. As Greg Luciano has noted, as Jonathan Rauch has noted, we’re in the third wave of what you might call PC. So there was a big one in the sixties, as you say, going into the early seventies. There was another that began in the late eighties, early nineties that was more faculty driven about diversifying the curriculum. And then the third one started around 2013. That’s the one we’re in. And a lot of the content is the same, and this I learned from Musa Al Garby. If you look at just his essays on the Heterodoxy Academy blog, a lot of the intellectual content is very similar. Even the idea that speech is violence, the personal is political. So there’s always a tension between far left ideas, more classical liberal ideas, and then you get surges.
As for why the universities emerged from the previous two, I think a lot of it has to do with leadership. There were university presidents back then who would stand up for academic values and there are very, very few who have done that in the current wave of things, so the rapid capitulation of presidents I think is a big part of it. Another is that I think America had much more in the way of, there was a lot more centrifugal force, a lot more things holding things together despite the blowups over, of course, the Vietnam War, racial injustice. So in a sense, there was more to protest over and there was more protests in the sixties, but the things keeping things together were also stronger. The older generations were stronger.
Now, we’ve gone through a period where universities became more on a business model. The student is a customer, not a student who should in some sense respect authority. So a lot has changed such that now there’s less to protest over. We’re at the end of a 50-year period of extraordinary progress in social justice. So in a sense, there’s less to protest over, but there’s no resistance to the protests, I would say.
Carlos:
Hi, John. Carlos [inaudible 00:21:31] from the University of Texas. You seem to indict the students very heavily on their fault here, and the causal mechanism mean the students leading to the problem. You didn’t speak much about us, as us accepting or even playing up and using that energy coming from the students and saying, “Well, look at the courses they’re being offered right now.” There are courses they’re trying to take advantage of that energy that maybe was caused or brought up by the students. So what is the role of the faculty in place right now and what is your view on how to perhaps self-correct from that group that still runs most of the universities?
Jonathan Haidt:
Thank you. No, that’s a very good point. You’re right. I’m blaming the students. I place no blame on the faculty and that’s incorrect. So a couple of things to say. One is that this wave is student-led. In terms of the initiation, it really comes from the students. I’m confident about that. But part of what happened is that, of course, there were faculty in the grievance studies departments, the various studies departments, that had these ideas. But there used to be compartmentalization. Ideas were in one department, but they weren’t in chemistry or classical languages or something. So there was compartmentalization. Like on the Titanic, they have these watertight compartments. But what I have argued is that social media knocked over all divisions between everything. So even if a student is sitting in your class, they’re actually in the public square talking about whatever. So when everything becomes the public square, the walls fall down and everything is just one big mess.
And so I think the role of faculty in some of these more activist areas was suddenly that sort of flowed out. And you do find a lot of faculty from those departments look at any petition demanding that someone be fired. Look at the petitions condemning Nicholas Kostakis, and then there was a smaller one supporting him. The ones supporting him is almost all the sciences, and the ones condemning him is almost all the humanities and the studies departments. So the faculty do play a role, but actually the big role I believe is played by the administrators. And Greg Luciani has been writing about this. We have a chapter in our book, and Sam Abrams was writing about that and that’s why the students wanted him fired. Faculty don’t actually run very much anymore. We’re too busy doing our thing. Almost everything’s been turned over to administrators and they have PhDs from education departments, which are probably the worst units of any academic institution is the education department.
Greg Salieri:
I’m Greg Salieri of the Salem Center at the University of Texas. This is a return to the themes of the first question about the period of the sixties, but it doesn’t seem to me that that was just a little blip. At Berkeley, what’s called the free speech movement was a very motley eruption over some fairly limited plausible ROTC policies. And then you had burnings of professors’ books at Columbia. It was violent. And if you read writings of the time from center left people or from right wing people, we see all the stuff we’re seeing now. Why aren’t the president standing up? They’re all giving into this. It’s coming from them. So I am convinced there was something new that happened in 2014 and 2015, but it seems like it’s a return to 1968 or something, not the first time this happened. So is there anything you could say about the commonalities between the late sixties, early seventies and now as opposed to just the differences and why we’re allegedly better situated?
Jonathan Haidt:
Yeah. The similarities, that’s interesting. In the sixties, there were gigantic things to be upset about, and the videos, the movies that people saw from the war in Vietnam. And now, again, the 50 years from 1963 to 2013 are just such progress on everything the students care about. So I don’t think the objective situation is at all similar to the 1960s. And remember this erupted during the Obama administration, during Obama’s second term. I don’t think it had anything directly to do with Obama. So I don’t think you’re going to find the answer in anything about the objective world.
But if you look at the subjective world, well, social media takes students who I think should be celebrating our progress on social justice issues. This all begins right around when many states legalize gay marriage and Supreme Court makes it the law of the land. They should be celebrating, but suddenly everybody, once we all get on social media, it becomes hyper-viralized. Everybody is completely deluged with posts and videos showing how horrible everything is and how evil the other side is. This is my argument about life after Babel. We now live in an imagined world, shredded any possibility of shared understandings or truth, and so I think that’s where I would look for the explanation for why students are acting like things are as terrible morally as they were in 1968, when in fact they’re not.
Speaker 6:
Fantastic. I wish we were not out of time and had an exciting program for the rest of the afternoon. Jonathan, thank you.
Jonathan Haidt:
Thanks, everyone. Good luck.