Afraid of Our Students

Thursday, February 18th, 2016

Why is the professoriat so …?

Jonathan Haidt: Spineless? Nowadays, a mob can coalesce out of nowhere. And so we’re more afraid of our students than we are of our peers. It is still possible for professors to say what they think over lunch; in private conversations they can talk. But the list of things we can say in the classroom is growing shorter and shorter.

John Leo: This sounds like the Good Germans.

Jonathan Haidt: Yes. Exactly. It is. It’s really scary that values other than truth have become sacred.  And what I keep trying to say — this comes right out of my book The Righteous Mind — is that you can’t have two sacred values.  Because what do you do when they conflict?  And in the academy now, if truth conflicts with social justice, truth gets thrown under the bus.

Comments

  1. Brian says:

    Part of the problem is we’ve turned education, which is a privilege into a right. If one has a right to be educated, then others are obligated to make that happen and one can abuse those who provide it freely. If, by contrast, education is a privilege, then a healthy respect for those who provide it could be asked for, because educators would have the right not to educate people who abuse them.

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