In 2015, American universities were widely respected and trusted. By 2023, they had alienated conservatives, moderates, and even most liberals. What happened? In this talk hosted by The Jefferson Council, CRs at UVA, Heterodox at UVA, and the Center for Politics, Jonathan Haidt will describe several interacting causes of the implosion, including the rise of identitarianism, political polarization, declining viewpoint diversity, and the arrival of Gen Z in 2014. He concluded with a discussion of what needs to be done to construct institutions that can be homes for free inquiry in the post-Babel, post-Gutenberg era.
About the Speaker
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and taught for sixteen years in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia
Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures, including the cultures of progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. His goal is to help people understand each other, live and work near each other, and even learn from each other despite their moral differences. Haidt has co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology toward that end, including HeterodoxAcademy.org, The Constructive Dialogue Institute, and EthicalSystems.org.
Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and of The New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff). He has written more than 100 academic articles, which have been cited nearly 100,000 times. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was chosen by Prospect magazine as one of the world’s “Top 50 Thinkers.” He has given four TED talks.
Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. He is currently writing The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, to be released in March 2024.