Free Republic

It was probably inevitable that Jonathan Haidt, an academic long concerned about the politicization of academia, would eventually be caught up in the displacement of intellectual inquiry by ideological rigidity. Last week the New York University (NYU) psychology professor announced that he would resign at the end of the year from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, his primary professional association, because of a newly adopted requirement that everybody presenting research at the group's conferences explain how their submission advances "equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals." It was the sort of litmus test against which he has warned, and which...

What is happening to our country, and our universities? It sometimes seems that everything is coming apart. To understand why, I have found it helpful to think about an idea from cosmology called “the fine-tuned universe.” There are around 20 fundamental constants in physics—things like the speed of light, Newton’s gravitational constant, and the charge of an electron. In the weird world of cosmology, these are constants throughout our universe, but it is thought that some of them could be set to different values in other universes. As physicists have begun to understand our universe, they have noticed that many...

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who has been in the, news sharing his erroneous theory of morality in a mistitled book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Dr. Haidt bases his theory of morality on the atheist assumption that evolution is a non-purposive mechanism, driven by random mutations selected for survival functionality. From that spiritual void, Dr. Haidt tells us morality is an artifact of evolutionary sociobiology. "Evolution shaped human brains[, resulting in] evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress selfishness and make social life possible." Social life is the universal human...

How reliable is academic research? Not very it seems, after noting that the Journal of Vibration and Control, a reputable academic publication, had to retract 60 different papers over the summer. The editors concluded that Chen-Yuan Chen, a researcher in Taiwan, had created a “peer-review and citation ring.” OK, it’s not exactly a “Sopranos” plot. But it’s pretty shady for the world of higher education. Chen went to great lengths to make up fake e-mail addresses and even assume the names of other scientists to write approvingly of his own research. In a sense, though, he was just exploiting the...

At the most recent conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the most talked-about speech was one that essentially accused the attendees of bias. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist from the University of Virginia, started his presentation by polling the audience of approximately 1,000 psychologists. When he asked how many considered themselves to be politically liberal, about 80 percent of the hands went up. Centrists and libertarians? Dr. Haidt estimated that fewer than three-dozen hands were raised. When he asked how many were conservatives, precisely three hands went up. As The New York Times reported, Haidt called that...