Jonathan Haidt is Wrong: Truth and Social Justice are Compatible in the University
When universities commit to both truth and social justice, do they betray their purpose, their telos? Jonathan Haidt thinks they do. He said so at Duke University on October 6, 2016. His lecture, which bears the unwieldy title “How two incompatible sacred values are driving conflict and confusion in American universities,” is available on YouTube and has garnered nearly a half million views.
According to Haidt, before about 1990 things went well for the search for truth. But then universities got confused about their purpose. When the “Greatest Generation” retired, the professoriate became more politically homogeneous. Nowadays “The social justice agenda” has eclipsed “viewpoint diversity” which makes the search for truth impossible. Haidt concludes his lecture with these words: “Only if you commit to truth can you achieve justice.” The former leads to the latter: it’s a one-way street.
Haidt is correct: the search for truth and the pursuit of social justice can come into conflict. But rather than corrupt knowledge, conflict helps shape its production. Accepted truths that undergird justice in one era are considered morally bankrupt in another. Nietzsche (1844–1900) called the history of this tension the “genealogy of morality.” A paradigmatic American example is the fact that chattel slavery came to an end after over 400 years of spectacular dominance. American higher education as we know it began to take form following the wreckage of the Civil War. When American scholars searched for truth in the second half of the 19th century, they sometimes produced knowledge that had implications for emergent ideas about race. Sometimes their work contributed to social justice, and at other times justified and attempted to preserve the status quo.
These grave topics were not on Haidt’s mind as an undergraduate at Yale. He describes himself as a descendant of Plato and Aristotle and of the medieval university, and his work as an extension of a tradition of rational inquiry stretching back over 2,500 years. He remembers majoring in philosophy there as “thrilling”: “You could really feel that link back to the academy” where, through debate and discussion, students “improved each other’s thinking.” Learning was exhilarating; he says that “it was so much fun.” (As a philosophy student myself, I concur.) Back then (from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s), he claims, the pursuit of truth in higher education was unsullied by politics, special interests, power relationships, or a commitment to social justice.
Perhaps Haidt didn’t get out enough; there was plenty of activism at Yale when he was enrolled. In any case, Haidt is a student no more; he is a respected scholar and public intellectual. But his expertise — he’s a social psychologist — is not sufficient to illuminate creative tensions over time between the search for truth and the pursuit of social justice in higher education. These are historical issues. This essay examines these creative tensions, focusing on the history of race in the United States as an extended example. A deeper look at the past than Haidt is able to provide reveals that the pursuit of truth and the aims of social justice are compatible in the university.
A Brief History of American Higher Education Before the Civil War
Haidt notes that the first universities in North America were religious in nature, but he passes over this important fact when it merits sustained attention. He uses Yale University (est. 1701) to illustrate what a strong commitment to truth in higher education looks like. The university’s crest, adopted in 1736, reads “Lux et Veritas,” which means “light and truth.”
Haidt makes a great deal of the fact that “Veritas,” as he understands the term, has always been central to Yale’s mission. According to the Yale Alumni Magazine, however, when this motto was coined early in the 18th century everyone knew that it referred to the light of God. The book depicted “on the Yale seal [was identified] as the Bible itself.”
Haidt says that insights associated with the Enlightenment (~1715–1789) did away with the religious sense of truth embodied in university culture. He’s off by a couple of hundred years.
Yale’s founders took their cues from Harvard, the first such institution in the North American colonies. After Puritan settlement in the early 17th century, Protestant leaders worried what would happen, when they died, to their “city on a hill,” a phrase coined in 1630 by John Winthrop in a sermon delivered on the flagship Arabella before it landed on Cape Cod. They needed to cultivate leadership among their progeny in order to sustain a righteous God-fearing community into future generations. Harvard College organized in 1636 (65 years before Yale) to train religious leaders and, because this society was a forthright theocracy, the Harvard Corporation chose the motto In Christi Gloriam, a Latin phrase meaning “for the glory of Christ,” for its crest. The decision reflected Harvard’s “Rules and Precepts,” adopted in 1646, which stated that the main goal of every student’s “life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome [sic], as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.” The crest depicted three open books. According to a 2015 article in the Harvard Gazette, “The open books represent the Old and New Testaments — the truth that any could read in the Bible. But the third book represented the yet unwritten truth of the future as the Puritans saw it: the book of truth that would be written by a second coming of Christ.” Veritas was nowhere to be found.
This emphasis on Christian devotion did not wane in the 18th century but continued on. According to historian David Sorkin writing in 2008, most Enlightenment thinkers were profoundly religious, and Christian tenets guided their fields of inquiry and training. Harvard’s first professional schools followed dictates of Protestant Christianity in order to prepare students to be doctors, religious leaders, and lawyers. Its schools of medicine (est. 1782), ministry (non-sectarian est. 1816) , and law (est. 1817) graduated professionals who were essential to the new republic. Decades later, discipline-based academic schools and departments, all founded after the Civil War in the late 19th century, followed suit. The academic work they produced assumed that social hierarchy based on race, sex, and ethnicity aligned with God’s plan and correctly sat at the heart of American society. These beliefs guided much of university life well into the 20th century.
Maintaining social hierarchy shaped both theory — what was taught — and practice — what it took to build and sustain universities. Historian Craig Steven Wilder’s book Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (2013) shows that enslaved people hauled the wood, bricks, and mortar and constructed the buildings in which the faculty, administrators, and students of Harvard, Princeton, Rutgers, Williams College, and Yale conducted intellectual work that justified their authority and dominance. In the name of truth as they understood it, they organized intellectual endeavor to realize the telos of Christianizing native peoples and African slaves and their descendants, and leading a society in which women were almost completely subservient to men. Slavery and higher education grew up together intertwined, mutually dependent, each nurturing the other. The nation’s leading universities became breeding grounds for the racist ideas that practices sustained them, and that they, in turn perpetuated. Some institutions are coming to grips with this disturbing history. Their efforts are but one example of how a commitment to social justice guides the search for truth in today’s universities.
What of “Veritas” during this period? A history of Harvard’s symbols reveals that “Veritas” began to appear on the Harvard crest only after 1836 when the university was 200 years old. That year a sketch penned in 1644 with the word “Veritas” was discovered in a campus archive.
Leaders decided to put “Veritas” on the crest and change the university’s motto to “Christo et Ecclesiae,” which means “For Christ and Church.” Truth and Christ — the embodiment of God and so of justice — continued to be more than simply compatible in the university; the former was a function of the latter. The value of viewpoint diversity that Haidt celebrates (he focuses on political viewpoints) did not yet exist.
The Search for Truth After the Civil War
The search for truth became more complicated after the Civil War (1861–1865). The nation attempted to understand what it had done to itself by enshrining slavery into its founding structures, and then warring with itself for four long years to secure its abolition. According to historian Dorothy Ross writing in 1992, during the thirty-five years after the war over nine thousand American men sought higher education in Germany because its universities were the most advanced in the world. They were eager to learn the new academic disciplines, particularly the social sciences, and to put them in service of preserving the idea that the ideology of “American exceptionalism” had survived the war. When universities first took up problems of society in a systemic and quasi-scientific way, they believed that no national problem could eclipse American greatness or evade American reform.
Ross teaches us that Protestant theology shaped the character of nascent social science departments. Many of the first political scientists, economists, sociologists, and often historians tended to take for granted that the United States was the best country in the world. Like their Puritan predecessors, they were committed to the mission (or telos) of bringing the benefits of civilization to heathens within its borders and in other parts of the world. They thought capitalism, democratic politics, and science were the proper tools for realizing American ideals, which many considered an expression of God’s will. They shared a strong consensus that the search for truth was best pursued through discipline-based knowledge. And they rested easy knowing that when they did the searching, they would find the truth.
This would have been just great except for the after-effects of the Civil War. The war haunted the country in living memory for decades. According to historian Louis Menand writing in 2001:
“[T]he outcome of the Civil War was a validation, as Lincoln had hoped it would be, of the American [democratic] experiment. Except for one thing, which is that people who live in democratic societies are not supposed to settle their disagreements by killing one another. For the generation that lived through it, the Civil War was a terrible and traumatic experience. It tore a hole in their lives. To some of them, the war seemed not just a failure of democracy, but a failure of culture, a failure of ideas. As [subsequent wars would do for subsequent generations], the Civil War discredited the beliefs and assumptions of the era that preceded it.”
This was a crucible moment in the genealogy of American political morality, to borrow Nietzsche’s phraseology. One outcome of the war was a philosophy that came to be called pragmatism. Thinkers such as William James, Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey saw that good ideas — truths, even — are not found or discovered, as Haidt’s version of “Veritas” suggests, but made. Truth is inherently social and must adapt to a changing world in order to be useful. The notion that meaning and truth are fixed and firm was insufficient for the dynamic nature of modern life. Instead, the truth of an idea could be measured by the effects of its practical application. Rather than confirm assumptions, pragmatists were skeptical about holding too tightly onto any idea. This meant that as time goes by there is an intrinsic dynamic between truth, context, and expressions of human intentionality. These ideas embraced not the presumption of exceptionalism, but of the constant presence of change, thus making criticism of ideas and not only their preservation central to the work of education.
But practice tends to lag behind theory. Universities searching for truth found plenty that improved human life in fields such as medicine, agriculture, the arts, and the social sciences. And yet most were still committed to racial segregation and did not admit women. So women and African Americans had to find other ways to get a college education. Philanthropists helped to found women’s colleges and historically Black colleges and universities (hereafter HBCUs). Before the Civil War African Americans could apply to only three HBCUs in the country; in the wake of the war over a hundred more were founded (there are now 107). African Americans could learn emerging modern trades and agricultural techniques, train public school teachers, and develop an intelligentsia. And in HBCUs the search for truth was not the only imperative. For example, Wilberforce University, founded in 1856, adopted suo marte as its motto: Latin for “through one’s own Mars,” meaning by one’s own toil, effort, and courage. The motto implies that there were some truths that evaded the institutions keeping African American students out, and that HBCUs didn’t have to search for.
Take American slavery, for example. For generations the study of slavery was grounded in the work of Ulrich B. Phillips. Born in Georgia in 1877, Phillips earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University and was recruited to the University of Wisconsin by Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932), whose “frontier thesis” (1893) on the significance of western expansion is widely regarded as the most profound influence on 20th century American historical research. Phillips was an apologist for racism; his nine books and fifty-five articles dominated the scholarship about slavery until the 1950s. He ended his career in the 1930s at Yale where, according to Haidt, the search for truth was right on course.
Phillips’s work was, in fact, emblematic of the kinds of truths that scholars at top universities were finding as they searched, and that influenced how they governed their institutions: by exclusion. Sociologist Jerome Karabel wrote in 2006 that in the 1920s, the criterion of academic merit, for example, would have required universities to admit a disproportionate number of Jews. According to Gerald R. Burrow writing in 2002, as late as 1935 the dean of Yale’s medical school instructed admissions committees, “Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all” (there was no mention of women). One exception was Amherst College under the presidency of Alexander Meiklejohn from 1912 to 1923; he welcomed Jewish and Black students.
It is instructive to contrast Phillips’s work with a contemporary of his who studied at an HBCU. W.E.B. DuBois (1868–1863) began his education at Fisk University (founded in 1866). In 1895 he became the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard. His scholarship focused on the plight of formerly enslaved Americans and their descendants. He was one of the founders of the NAACP (1909) and coined the term “the talented tenth” to refer to the black intelligentsia which began to take shape after the Civil War. DuBois explicitly aimed to contribute to social justice and his work influenced generations of antiracist scholars.
By about 1940, higher education began to accept larger numbers of African Americans, Jews, and women. By then, leading thinkers had spent decades borrowing ideas such as “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection” from Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and applying them to social contexts in a field called Eugenics. This became another way to explain and often justify extant inequalities and slow down the work of making higher education more inclusive. Eugenics (Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton coined the term) seemed to hold promise for human progress. The First International Eugenics Conference was held in London in 1912; Darwin’s son Leonard presided. Eugenics became an academic discipline, or more properly an outcome of an attempt to unify all fields of knowledge under the rubric of evolution. The logo for the second conference, held in 1921 at the Museum of Natural History in New York City, reads, in part: “Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution.” Note that the logo embraces both the “hard” and social sciences, implying that both divisions of knowledge provided evidence that hierarchy based on race, gender, and ability was innate to our species.
Eugenics reached its greatest popularity in the early decades of the 20th century because governments, institutions, and influential individuals around the world promoted it. Many countries enacted policies such as genetic screenings, marriage restrictions, forced birth control, abortion, and segregation by race, mental health, and ability. Eugenicists thought they engaged in a benevolent science which aimed to improve human life as a whole. The hope was to engineer populations so as to eventually eradicate forms of suffering based on characteristics that they considered defects, such as moral weakness, criminal tendencies, and disability. These ideas united people across the political spectrum. Eugenics began to fall out of favor only after World War II when it became widely known that the Nazis embraced its precepts, and after the United Nations was founded (1945) and the idea of human rights began to gain a little international traction. Emerging ideas about social justice came into conflict with “truths” which, for the previous half-century, influential and educated leaders had taken from biology and applied to the social world.
As far as intellectual or “viewpoint” diversity is concerned, late 19th and early 20th century intellectuals became preoccupied with this issue as the implications of pragmatist philosophy became apparent. How would people know if new knowledge was practically useful, and what counted as “practically useful” anyway? It all depends on what kind of a country you want. A subset of American intellectuals started to fully grasp the idea that the knowledge produced by the academic disciplines embodied power, sometimes explicitly but also implicitly by reproducing norms without calling them into question or thinking critically about them. Writing in 1965, Christopher Lasch noted that “‘education’, conceived very broadly, came to be seen not merely as a means of raising up an enlightened electorate but as an instrument of social change in its own right.” These “new radicals” were ambivalent about the economic class with which they were associated because of their status as intellectuals (today called a form of “privilege”). They eschewed what they regarded as elite influences and wanted to align themselves in “kinship” with the lower classes. Theirs was an uneasy position. Scholars who have produced intellectual histories of this period chose titles that reflect this edginess: T.J. Jackson Lears’s No Place of Grace: AntiModernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981); James Kloppenberg’s Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (1988); Winfred McClay’s The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (1994); and George Cotkin’s Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880–1900 (2004). The distance between the search for truth and the aims of social justice were shrinking.
In the mid-twentieth century, two events that shaped higher education hastened this process. First, Germany had long been known to have some of the world’s finest universities. But national socialism proved more powerful than Germany’s finest thinkers were. As the horrors of World War II became apparent, it became clear that an exceptional education didn’t guarantee that the search for truth would lead to justice. After the war, Germany’s aggression was interpreted by some as an example of the excesses and arrogance of modernity and of intellectualism itself.
Second, American veterans benefited from the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, sometimes called the G.I. Bill of Rights, which brought men and women from all walks of life to higher education. In 1947, 49% of new college students were veterans, many from working class and/or immigrant backgrounds. Parents who had saved money to send their sons to college had a windfall and could afford to send their daughters, too. (That’s why my mother was able to go.) Thus, the G.I. Bill fueled a profound change in higher education. Although African American veterans were entitled to the G.I. Bill (including Charles Rangel, Medgar Evers, Hosea Williams, and Harry Belafonte), over a million were systemically discriminated against and could not go to college even though HBCUs would accept them. Even with these limitations, women and men who in earlier times could not attend college because of poverty, race, ethnicity, gender, or religion were able to go. They sometimes searched for truths that had not mattered to their predecessors. All this is to say that the changing demographics of who can do the searching helped to put social justice, as we understand that term today, squarely on higher education’s agenda.
For example, in the 1930s Mamie Phipps Clark (1917–1983) and Kenneth Clark (1914–2005) studied at Howard University, an HBCU in Washington D.C. founded in 1867 with the motto, Veritas et Utilitas: truth and service. The Clarks had an interest in race and child development; they were the first African Americans to earn doctorates in psychology from Columbia University (Ulrich Phillips’s alma mater). They practiced social science, but their chosen topic reached in a direction that had not been of much interest to their white colleagues at segregated institutions. Their path-breaking research, often called the “doll study”, informed the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 which deemed racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The Clarks did not engage in purely dispassionate systemic inquiry absent the aims of social justice. Their choice of subject matter expressed their knowledge of racism’s damage from living it: segregation hurts people and is not just, and yet laws protected it. The search for truth in higher education was starting to find out some new things about education itself.
More Than One Telos for Higher Education
Of all the problems that plague higher education, the pursuit of social justice should concern Haidt the least. If he really wants to do a public service, he might bring his critical eye to other university issues of ethical importance such as the explosion of the adjunct faculty system, the under-valuing of the liberal arts, the over-valuing of STEM fields, and the phenomenon of academic celebrity. It’s worth asking why he thinks the search for truth is so deeply threatened by social justice. His use of the Aristotelian concept of telos is instructive in this regard. A college or university can have only one telos, he says. Let’s look at this claim by examining the concept of telos more closely.
A telos is the aim of something: its nature, the reason it exists. And that aim is intrinsic to its design and its natural environment. A tadpole exists to turn into a frog or to become a source of nutrition for a neighboring predator. That’s its nature. An acorn exists to turn into an oak or to be a source of nutrition for a resident squirrel. That’s its nature.
A tool can have a telos, too. The aim of an ax, for example, is to cut or chop — to do a kind of work that people want done. Of course, axes have changed since our ancient ancestors forged stone tools by hand. Over time axes have become more efficient, and so have the processes by which they are made. Axes produced in factories are different than those crafted by stonecutters, woodworkers, and blacksmiths. And they work pretty well, realizing their telos.
But the conditions of a given ax’s production might have consequences that have nothing to do with the telos of the ax itself. An ax factory is a tool of sorts that might exploit workers and degrade the environment. But the factory itself is still realizing its telos as a tool of production: to make axes that can realize their telos. Consider what this means: while the telos of an ax may be stable over time, everything else about it — its design and the context in which it is produced and used — is not. In other words, the telos of an ax does not tell its whole story. Likewise, the telos of the tool we call higher education does not tell its whole story either. We require context, too, which I have tried to provide here.
Most people don’t know much about history. Viewpoint diversity didn’t exist in some golden age. It’s happening now and turns out to be fraught in ways that confound people like Haidt and others who are threatened, in some way, by the messy, searching, and difficult business of addressing, in the real life of higher education, the legacies of historical wrongs. Haidt sees Marx foreshadowing the social justice agenda in this quote from the Theses on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” It turns out that interpreting the world, changes it. The search for truth and the concerns of social justice have always been part of the life of American higher education. The gap between them is getting smaller and Haidt feels the squeeze. His discomfort is not evidence of an eclipse of the search for truth, but of its active and difficult realization.
