I have found that almost all of Jonathan Haidt's writings are worth a read. He co-authored The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good intentions and Bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. He says what he thinks and calls out nonsense in a no-nonsense way. He is hiking because it violates his principles.
One of the founding members of the Heterodox Academy was Haidt, who was promoting viewpoint diversity.
The subject of today's post is the double irony that Haidt resigned from the SPSP in order to help create the academy.
According to Haidt, there are two "fiduciary duties" of professors, and they must be followed with absolute loyalty and no self-interest. When in conflict with these two, all other duties are subsidiaries. According to Haidt, here are those duties.
1). As teachers I believe we have a fiduciary duty to our students’ education.
2.) As scholars I believe we have a fiduciary duty to the truth.
They serve to fulfill the telos of a university and that telos is truth.
The duties are called "quasi-fiduciary duties" since we aren't obligated to promote students' overall welfare. He gave four examples of how a professor can violate each of these duties, and argued that universities are now declining in public esteem because they are making the second duty subsidiary to other goals.
He said this in his 2016 lecture at Duke University.
I said that universities can have many goals (such as fiscal health and successful sports teams) and many values (such as social justice, national service, or Christian humility), but they can have only one telos, because a telos is like a North Star. It is the end, purpose, or goal around which the institution is structured. An institution can rotate on one axis only. If it tries to elevate a second goal or value to the status of a telos, it is like trying to get a spinning top or rotating solar system to simultaneously rotate around two axes. I argued that the sudden wave of protests and changes that were sweeping through universities were attempts to elevate the value of social justice to become a second telos, which would require a massive restructuring of universities and their norms in ways that damaged their ability to find truth.
I expanded on this argument in a blog post for Heterodox Academy where I predicted that “the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable … Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict.” It’s now six years later, and I think it’s clear that this prediction has come true. It has been six years of near-constant conflict, with rising numbers of attempts to get scholars fired or punished for things they have said, and a never-ending stream of videos showing students (and sometimes professors) saying and doing things that are gifts to critics of universities and of the left. As one university president said to a friend of mine in 2019, “Universities are becoming ungovernable.” Public trust in universities has plummeted since 2015,² first on the right, but later across the board. We are in trouble.
He's correct. At the University of Chicago, I can see the search for truth becoming subsumed under calls for the university to become a social justice mill. The sciences are bent towards Leftist "progressive" ideology and departments are trying to promulgate ideological statements and begin to ask for DEI statements by job applicants.
Haidt's advice for us academics is to always stick to our two "fiduciary duties". Don't follow a subsidiary's "duty" when it violates them.
In the interest of promulgating social justice, Haidt was asked to abandon or water down his duties. He was asked by the SPSP.
I have been thinking a lot about fiduciary duty because my main professional association — the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) — recently asked me to violate my quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth. 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.” Our research proposal would be evaluated on older criteria of scientific merit, along with this new criterion.
These sorts of mandatory diversity statements have been proliferating across the academy in recent years. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the Academic Freedom Alliance, and many professors have written about why they are immoral, inappropriate, and sometimes illegal. I’ll just add one additional concern: 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. I refuse to do this, but I’ve never objected publicly.
The SPSP mandate, however, forced us all to do something more explicitly ideological. Note that the word diversity was dropped and replaced by anti-racism. So every psychologist who wants to present at the most important convention in our field must now say how their work advances anti-racism. I read Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist in the summer of 2020, so I knew that I could no longer stay silent.
He wrote to Laura King, the SPSP's president, who said that all speakers had to submit diversity statements affirming that their talks would advance "equity, inclusion, and anti-racism". Talks would be assessed on ideological grounds as well. Haidt doesn't adhere to Kendi's principles as limning any form of "truth", they are simply ideology. He sees Kendi's dicta as "incorrect morally because it requires us to treat people as members of groups, not as individuals, then to treat people well or badly based on their group membership"
It is unobjectionable for Haidt to agree that a form of diversity isamplifying the voices of those who have historically been underrepresented in our field. He doesn't like what he sees:
I believe that anti-racism has a place at SPSP, and I said so to King. Let there be speakers, panels, and discussions of this morally controversial and influential idea at our next conference! But to adopt it as the official view and mission of SPSP and then to force us all to say how our work advances it, as a precondition to speaking at the conference? I thought this was wrong for two reasons: First, it elevated anti-racism to be a coequal telos of SPSP, which meant that we would no longer rotate around the single axis of excellent science. Every talk would have to be both scientifically sound and anti-racist, even though good science and political activism rarely mix well. Second, it puts pressure on social psychologists — especially younger ones, who most need to present at the conference — to betray their fiduciary duty to the truth and profess outward deference to an ideology that some of them do not privately endorse.
The last sentence gives the reason why scientific societies and universities shouldn't make political or ideological statements unless it's rare. The Kalven Report forbids such statements and the Society for the Study of Evolution has betrayed their telos by injecting ideology into their program.
I'm not sure what to say. Haidt is leaving since the SPSP won't change its policy.
I raised my voice again to write to King and object to the new policy. But soon it will be time for exit. I cannot remain loyal to an organization that is changing its telos and asking its members to violate their quasi-fiduciary duties to the truth. I am especially dubious of the wisdom of making an academic organization more overtly political in its mission, especially in the midst of a raging culture war, when trust in universities is plummeting.
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. I hope that other members will raise their voices.
The large number of academics who object to ideological violations of our telos would do the same thing. Courage and eloquence are missing from most academics. You don't have to be articulate. Haidt resigned from academic societies that made social justice a higher value than truth, and all you have to do is speak your mind.
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