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From Coddling to Crisis. Today, we trace the trajectory of student fragility from playgrounds to classrooms.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992.

Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) and of the New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind (2012) and The Coddling of the American Mind (2018, with Greg Lukianoff). He has given four TED talks. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. Haidt has co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology toward that end, including Heterodox Academy, The Constructive Dialogue Institute, and EthicalSystems.org.

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: John Haidt, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Jonathan Haidt: Thank you so much, John. What a thrill it is to be here in this really nice new office. I was here just once before, but I'm just really appreciating it. Like, we have really arrived.

John Tomasi: I love it. We have arrived and we're still going. You know, this is a special pleasure to have you on HXA. You're the co-founder of HXA. I sometimes think of you as the founder who stayed, because you stayed on with us and have been so incredibly supportive. And we're just really delighted to have you here in our new studio having this conversation. Let's go right into it. So, your new book, The Anxious Generation, came out two weeks ago, two and a half weeks ago. You've been busy.

Jonathan Haidt: Yes.

John Tomasi: Can you say something about what you've been doing since this?

Jonathan Haidt: Yeah, sure. So, you know, it said, if you build a better mousetrap, the world will be the path to your door. But that's not true unless the world is completely overrun with mice. And what's going on here is almost every family is fighting over this. This issue of technology creeping into the kids' lives, pulling them away, kids on screens all day long, not going outside, not running around. Everyone has felt like something's wrong here. But it was hard to prove it. People didn't know what to do. And all of a sudden, my book comes along and sort of really lays out, not just like, phones are bad, but let's step back and look at child. What is human childhood? Why do we have this super long childhood? What are the things you have to do in order to turn into a healthy adult? And once you see it that way, you see that we used to have a play-based childhood, because we're mammals. All mammals play. That's part of evolution's design for our large brains and our high sociability. And we had a play-based childhood, which began to fade out in the 1980s and 1990s as we freaked out about threats to our children, and we started locking them up inside, and this is all the Lenore Skenazy, let-grow, free-range stuff. So we began losing that gradually in the 90s and 2000s, but actually the mental health of millennials didn't decline. It was actually a little better than those of Gen X. It's not until 2010 that everything changes about childhood, because that's when teens trade in their flip phones for smartphones.

John Tomasi: The flip phone, and you're paying- When did the iPhone first come out?

Jonathan Haidt: Comes out 2007, but it's expensive, and it's not that- It's exciting, but it doesn't have all the bells and whistles and gizmos. There's no app store. There are no apps, other than the ones that Apple gives you. But in 2009, the app store- 2008, the app store comes out. In 2009, the retweet, like, and share buttons come out. So everything gets much more explosively viral on social media. The camera- 2010.

John Tomasi: That's 2010.

Jonathan Haidt: Right. So my point is, the iPhone comes out in 2007, totally non-toxic. I bought one in 2008. It was an amazing digital Swiss army knife. You could use it when you needed a tool. By 2010, you now have the very beginnings. You've got the front-facing camera. Instagram is founded. More people are getting high-speed internet, although most don't have it yet. So in 2010, teens had flip phones, and they could not spend six hours a day on their flip phone. You just can't do it if you have to, you know, press the seven key three times to make one less. And there were all those little shorthands people were using that became part of the pop culture.

John Tomasi: Right, but they used it then in order to meet up.

Jonathan Haidt: So it's a tool. So that's all fine. If you're talking to your friends, you meet up, that's great. By 2015, everything was different. The great majority have a smartphone with a front-facing camera. The girls mostly have an Instagram account. Everyone has high-speed internet. And so now it becomes the new lifestyle is you actually are online. And many kids, more recent data is half of young, half of American teens say that they are online almost constantly, which means that even when they're in class and you think that you're teaching them, unless you have a really strict policy, half of them have their phone in their lap or in a book because they have to be on. There's so much going on online. So my argument is that the phone-based childhood replaced the play-based childhood between 2010 and 2015. That's the great rewiring of childhood. And so it's exactly in this period, it's really right around 2012, 2013, that when you plot out the rates of especially anxiety, depression, and self-harm, you see hockey sticks in the graphs. Like everything was going sort of along flat, straight, no change. And then all of a sudden, 2013, everything skyrockets for girls. Boys go up too, but it's not quite as sharp. So whatever it is, it especially affected girls right around 2012, 2013. Maybe it's a coincidence, but that's when Instagram is founded. That's when the girl, well, I'm sorry, it's founded 2010. 2012 is when Facebook buys it. So now it becomes much more popular. It's when everybody's moving on to it.

John Tomasi: I remember when that was happening.

Jonathan Haidt: Yeah. So that's my claim, is that we have overprotected our children in the real world when we freaked out and don't let them out to play, which they need to do. We've underprotected them online. We said, it's okay for you to spend six, eight, 10 hours a day online talking with strangers, being fed nonsense by algorithms. That's okay if your brain is going through puberty and you're having garbage coming in, whatever.

John Tomasi: So this podcast, I've been going to some of your talks around New York. I went to one a couple of nights ago. The reins that I've seen you'd exhibit in terms of audiences who are interested in this topic, it's just really impressive. I saw you give a talk at the Reason Speakeasy with Nick Gillespie three nights ago, where there are a lot of statisticians in the room pushing on the technical questions. I saw you give a talk two nights ago, a private group, many parents, young parents interested in what would happen if they had phone-free kids and there's a school shooter, kinds of questions like that. So I've seen the incredible range of questions you're getting. What I want to do in this podcast for this particular audience at HXA, HXA's listeners, is talk about the impact of your findings. If we accept the main story from you, which I do, we're going to grant all that, and ask what does this mean for college education? And so when the anxious generation starts arriving on college, 2015, 2014, now they're coming on for the next class that we're going to talk about. Let's begin by going back a little bit to the coddling of the American life. So you and Greg Lukianoff published this fabulous book, 2018. At the time, you report that Greg was noticing that something new was happening on campuses. You were noticing it too, and I was too as a professor, but Greg sort of crystallized that he said that we're noticing that students now are, it's the students who are calling for speaker disinvitations, calling for protection. And crucially now, the reasons they're bringing forward to call for these speaker disinvitations and other trigger warnings and so on, they were medicalized reasons. And in that book, of course, famously, you talk about the three great untruths that students are being taught on campuses and other places too, that which doesn't kill you makes you weaker, that always trust your feelings, and that life isn't a battle between... Life is a battle between... Life is a battle between good and evil and bad people. That's right. And fragility, emotional reasoning, and us versus them. I wonder if you could just say a little bit more about how you see that book now in relation to the new one.

Jonathan Haidt: Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, it was such a crush and a rush to try to write this book. This is the fastest book I've written. It was about a year and a half. It was really hard. You do well at speed. That's a great book. It's a great... But I should have, you know, I wish I'd gone back or had, you know, even since we finished the draft, gone back and looked at the coddling because it definitely picks up from the coddling. In fact...

John Tomasi: Sorry to interrupt me. I just say that as I was prepping for this interview, after I read The Anxious Generation, I went back and re-read all the coddling. And I was amazed. There were so many sprinkles in there. We'll talk about some of the things I saw, but there's so many sprinklings in there of the concern for mental health. Phones are mentioned throughout, too. But the whole picture's not there. The picture seems to have changed.

Jonathan Haidt: Exactly.

John Tomasi: Can you just say more about what you...

Jonathan Haidt: Sure. So let me start. I wanted to do it chronologically from when Greg first came to me. We met through a mutual friend in New York, Jerry Orstrom. And Greg invited me out to lunch because he had this psychological idea he wanted to test out. And he'd read The Happiness Hypothesis and liked that and wanted to meet. So Greg lays out this idea that, as you said, that for the first time, students are asking for trigger warnings, ban this speaker, cancel this talk, not because the person's a fascist or a racist, but because people will die, people will be traumatizing. It's going to hurt us. And the rest of us were like, what do you mean? And of course, the first big case was at Brown.

John Tomasi: I was there. I was there.

Jonathan Haidt: You actually hosted it. You hosted it.

John Tomasi: I didn't host it, but I was there. I was in the room.

Jonathan Haidt: You know, but the idea that a talk going on on campus is traumatizing, even if you don't have to go to it, that was new. That was totally new. We'd never seen anything like that. And so Greg had this interesting hypothesis that he wanted to run by me, which was, you know, since he had learned CBT when he had a suicidal depression and he saw students giving exactly the opposite of what CBT recommends. So you're not supposed to catastrophize, learn to recognize that. No, catastrophize. If this person comes to speak, people will die. And black and white thinking and emotional reasoning. So anyway, so that was the hypothesis. And Greg thought somehow, you know, this new culture on campus, like students are learning this on college campuses, he thought. So we wrote up, I volunteered. I thought this was a great idea. So I just volunteered. I said, Greg, I think it's a great idea. You know, if you want a co-author, like I'd be glad, you know, I was supposed to write a book on capitalism and morality. I was saying no to everything.

John Tomasi: You and I were talking about it.

Jonathan Haidt: Oh, that's right. Yes, that's right.

John Tomasi: That was an original conversation. You used to walk around Washington Park and talk about that.

Jonathan Haidt: But I thought Greg's idea was so good. I said, you know what? If you want a co-author, I'll join you on this.

John Tomasi: I've heard some HXA members say, people who love The Coddling of the American Mind are now reading your new book. They're wondering what's changed. And one person said to me, and I'm going to paraphrase a member, wait, in coddling, John advocated tough love, but now An Anxious Generation is all about protect the kids. Has John Haidt become a coddler?

Jonathan Haidt: No, that's one of the most common questions I get. And, you know, if you just have a superficial acquaintance with the thesis, you'd say, oh, isn't that contradictory? And the answer is not at all. Kids are anti-fragile. They need a lot of experience out in the real world, the world for which we're involved. And as soon as you give them a phone, they're going to sit down outside and be on the phone. They're not going to have that experience. So a phone is an experience blocker. A phone prevents you from living, from growing.

John Tomasi: You're talking about younger people now, especially.

Jonathan Haidt: Yeah, especially, right. Now that kids are getting, I mean, kids are getting their devices. I just, a British study, a quarter of them get smartphones between five and seven years old in Britain. We're a little behind them. But by fifth grade, by sixth grade, they've been, they've had devices for a long time. And so, so we're not going to get anti-fragile kids having real world experiences as long as they're spending all their time on the phone. We've got to delay that. Conversely, the virtual world is not the world that we evolved in. It's a world in which anyone can reach anyone. And so every platform starts out nice. Everything. Twitter was lovely. TikTok was, you know, just fun line dances. Everything starts out nice. But as is the way in the biological world, you get parasites, you get diseases, you get viruses, and they all turn incredibly nasty and exploitative. And so we put our children on these things. We didn't know any better in 2012. We thought that the tech is amazing. You know, this is the way of the future. But pretty quickly, you know, our kids are being exposed to sextortion rings in Nigeria that, you know, they pretend to be a beautiful woman. They get a boy to send a nude picture of himself, and then they've got him. They blackmail him, and eventually he kills himself in some cases. So, you know, the dangers online are not the sort of things you grow from. Being publicly humiliated in a way that goes viral throughout your whole school, it's not that that toughens you. That really changes you.

John Tomasi: Let me ask you if this sounds like a reasonable way to think about the growth of your thinking from coddling to the anxious generation. We can say under coddling, Gen Z arrives, and they're more or less healthy. There are some problems with them. You saw as you wrote the coddling. They brought some mental health issues with them. But they were then taught unhealthy ideas. There's this theme in the coddling that, in some sense, campus culture was a cause of these health challenges of students. And then now, with anxious generation, we're now seeing that the anxious generation, these Gen Z students, this wave that's begun, and it's now moving through the university system, that they're arriving very unhealthy.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right.

John Tomasi: And they're arriving, perhaps, in need of some medicalized treatments. And I'll say one more thing. So thinking about the original title of your article that became the epic article in Atlantic, the original title, I believe, was Arguing Towards Misery, How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions. So there's a sense in coddling that, and I'm really focusing on the university space now, what we should think about, what are the implications of the anxious generation for this, for HXA and for universities. You seem to think then, you and Greg seem to think then, that it was campuses were teaching these distortions. What do you think? Is that a change in thinking? How do you see that?

Jonathan Haidt: It definitely is, because that was, like, that title, that's exactly what Greg presented to me in an Indian restaurant on University Place in May of 2014. It was, you know, the lunch that changed both of our lives.

John Tomasi: Lovely.

Jonathan Haidt: That's what we thought. And we put out the Atlantic article saying that, and we were wrong. A couple years later, when we started working on the book, going much deeper, we discovered now there was a lot more data. Now we could see, wait, this is happening to high school kids. This is happening to people who don't go to college. There is a mental health catastrophe unfolding across America, and we also had data on the UK. We knew it was the UK as well, and Canada. So now it was clear, well, this can't be caused by college, because it shows up in high school, in middle school even. So we changed our thinking. We expanded it. And in the coddling, we focused on the overprotection half and the overprotection of childhood. And we had a section, you know, I wrote the psychology sections. We had a section. I reviewed all the available evidence. We said, you know, in the timing, maybe social media, it could be a contributing factor, but correlation isn't causation.

John Tomasi: Right.

Jonathan Haidt: We don't know.

John Tomasi: Right.

Jonathan Haidt: So, you know, like, parents, you know, don't freak out, like, you know, but just be careful about this, because we didn't know. And it was 2017. Well, now we know. A lot more information has come in. The trends have gotten catastrophically worse. They keep going up and up. COVID didn't really change the trend line at all. It's happening across Northern Europe. It's happening across all the English-speaking countries. And now there are also a lot of experiments. So this is the other big thing I get is, oh, you know, correlation is not causation. Yeah, I know that. You know, read anything I've written. I'm very careful about this. And actually, you know what? A thing I'll bring in, because I think it is a sort of an HXA thing, is a strategy that I took from the beginning when we wrote the coddling and put it out there, and some people criticized it and said, you know, moral panic, and it's not the screens, it's not the phones, and the kids are all right. And I said, oh, my God, did I get this wrong? Because, you know, this is not my field. Like, and these people who are in these media fields are saying I got it wrong. So I collected all the research I could find, because we're all citing different studies. It was totally confusing. I just collected them all in a Google Doc, and I invited Jean Twenge to join me. We just put it up and said, here, here's everything we can find. Tell us where we're supposed to go wrong. And I've done that.

John Tomasi: Open inquiry, John.

Jonathan Haidt: Yes.

John Tomasi: It's a model of open inquiry.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right. It's a very HXA thing, because what happened was then we did this. For mental health stats, a whole document. A document for the research on causation. Is it social media? We have whole documents for the research on video games, on dating apps, on everything. And then an amazing thing happens. When you put your work online and you invite people to criticize you, they will do you the favor and criticize you. And that's how you get things right. That's how you grow. So, you know, it's so sad. Like, on social media, people are playing the game not of, how can I learn the truth? How can I grow? How can I become smarter? They're playing the game. But how can I win this argument? And the goal shouldn't be to win the immediate argument. It should be, as a scholar, it should be to win the long-term argument because you're right.

John Tomasi: Good. And we'll talk about that last formulation in a few minutes when we talk about what HSA might contribute to the health crisis on campus. There's something about it.

Jonathan Haidt: Yeah, let's go there.

John Tomasi: There's something about the way you think about learning and about research was going to be really relevant, I think, to addressing this health issue. But I still want to say for just a minute more on this idea that in the coddling, there seems to, there was this idea that universities were promoting these great truths, these three great untruths. That in their policies and in their programs and in their assumptions, the culture on campus was drifting towards an encouragement of these three great truths. I just wonder if you see that differently now, because when I read that initially, I thought to myself, well, reformers should change that. Reformers should change these cultural norms on campus because they're hurting kids. They're making kids more anxious and more depressed and less resilient. But now we're saying a little bit, things are a little bit different now on the story. And now we're seeing that those medicalized claims that students were making, would you say that they're more justified than we thought five or six years ago?

Jonathan Haidt: Well, yeah. Are universities causing it? Are they just amplifying it?

John Tomasi: Right.

Jonathan Haidt: Okay, good. So let's go into, so, you know, so as you and as the audience knows, universities are these giant complicated places with lots of schools, lots of departments, different cultures in different places. So the three great untruths, you know, let's be frank about this. The three great untruths are primarily taught in humanities and in the studies departments that are teaching the oppressor-victim mindset. And Greg and I have a whole chapter, chapter three, because it's the great untruth. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. And we go into intersectionality, which is a good idea originally. I mean, intersections of identity, there are, you know, it's not just main effects. There are intersections and interactions. We all know that in statistical terms. So intersectionality begins as a good idea, a good insight from Kimberlé Crenshaw, because as it's applied, it's basically applied to teach kids the three great untruths, to teach them that the world is divided into people with power, those are the bad people, and the people that they oppress, those are the good people. Everything's binary. And so this was, you know, this has been around since the nineties and in some ways since the seventies. But it used to be confined to small, to small departments. And unless you were majoring in one of the studies departments, if you're majoring in chemistry or history or, you know, or psychology, you wouldn't, you wouldn't really be taught these terrible ideas. But in the activist departments, I mean, the departments that aren't primarily about scholarship, in my opinion, I think, you know, I think they're, they're focused on, on causing social change. And, you know, I'm not sure that there's a place for that on a university campus. That is, of course we want our students to be competent at, at bringing about change. That's great. But departments that emphasize it, instead of the search for truth, you end up with activists who push programs that often backfire. And that's what I think we see a lot happening. And so the, the culmination of this was really, December 5th, that, that incredible day, last December, when those three university presidents were before Congress.

John Tomasi: Right.

Jonathan Haidt: Last fall, we really saw the catastrophic collapse of the brand of higher ed. Higher ed used to have the best brand in the world, like better than Apple. You know, everyone in the world wanted to come to American universities. here I'm, I'm, I'm showing off my, my new business school credentials since I moved to Stern in 2011. but you know, by 20, all the way up through 2015, American higher ed had argued with the best brand in the world. We were loved by people on the left and we were reasonably liked by conservatives and moderates. They, there was some distrust, but we still, they still had a positive view overall.

John Tomasi: And I may just add that during the 20th century, there was this great accomplishment of the American research university combining the collegiate idea from England with a research idea from Germany.

Jonathan Haidt: Yep.

John Tomasi: Of building something wholly American and its novelty and its combination.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right.

John Tomasi: And fundamentally committed to these values.

Jonathan Haidt: It was fun to be an undergraduate.

John Tomasi: Open inquiry, viewpoint diversity.

Jonathan Haidt: These were, you know, we were developing that. And that was the engine that was powering for its greatness.

John Tomasi: Exactly. But please continue this story. So I'm just really interested to hear about how you see the stronger finding now about the, the way this ancient generation has struggling with these mental health issues. Now when they're on campus, when the anxious generation comes to campus, what do you think about HXA values? I have on the wall here a cross from us so you can see the HXA way. And I'll just read them out loud for our listeners. These are norms that HXA is encouraging on campuses. Make your case with evidence. Be intellectually charitable. Be intellectually humble. Be constructive. Be yourself. And I'll add that these values, as you well know, John, are all derived from an idea of yours that the telos of the university is something like truth or knowledge seeking or self-awareness growing. And these virtues, making your case with evidence, being charitable, being humble, being constructive, these are all meant to be epistemic values, values aimed at knowledge. But now with your new book, we're thinking, well, at HXA we're all talking about this. Are there therapeutic dimensions?

Jonathan Haidt: Absolutely. Yes. Yes.

John Tomasi: Can you tell us something about that?

Jonathan Haidt: Sure. Okay, good. No, thank you. This is a great thing for us to talk about. I wanted to write a chapter in the book. The last part of the book is what governments can do, what tech companies can do, what parents can do, what educators can do. And I was going to have a separate chapter on what universities can do, because that's very different from high school. This situation is very, very different.

John Tomasi: May I say, when I first got your book and I went through the table of contents, I looked for the chapter on what universities can do. So I was thinking to myself, okay, John, I need me to talk about this in the podcast.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right. No, it's the missing chapters. It's the chapter that I, if I'd had the time, I would have written it. Greg and I have a good chapter in the coddling on what universities can do, what's a wiser university. So, but I didn't have a lot to add at the time as we were writing the book. I didn't have a lot to add to that. And I was totally out of time. I was so far behind the publication deadline. So I said, all right, I'll deal with this later. Well, later's today. We're here. Okay, let's deal with it. So here I want to just put a couple of facts out on the table. One is that levels of anxiety are extraordinarily high among our undergraduates. And this is true across the board, around the country. They're extraordinarily high. Yet, even still, students really want to learn. They really want to grow. And the dynamic that has happened is that the students, and there's a lot of research from HXA and others, the students are mostly afraid of other students, not of their professors. That's where we're finding. And the professors are afraid of, again, of a small group of students, not of their other professors. The administrators are afraid of a small group of students. It's those who believe that their activism gives them the right to shout people down, to shame them, to attack them.

John Tomasi: Right.

Jonathan Haidt: So, you know, I have felt as though I'm teaching on eggshells since 2015. Many students feel they're learning on eggshells. Deb Mashek, the previous executive director of HXA, she would tell the story about a student at Harvey Mudd College, where she had taught, who said, my motto is silence is safer.

John Tomasi: So this is so sad. Yeah, I just add that two days ago, I guest-taught a class at NYU, a freshman seminar, top-tier mutual, someone we know, an HXA member, Alicia Russ Fishbane. We were on an email chain with him together a while ago. And Alicia had me come to his class, a freshman class, called The University, What It Is, What It Was, What It Could Be. And there were 20 students in this class. And as Alicia warned me before I walked in, that it was going to be hard to get them to talk. That's what everyone says. And I was really struck from having taught my last class at Brown two and a half years ago. Maybe it's just idiosyncratic to the class, but these students wouldn't speak. And they eventually did, by the end, when I asked them, do you self-censor? They all raised their hand. And the one little statistic I thought you'll find interesting, and our listeners maybe too, we have a new, the New Campus Expression Survey. This big survey, it takes data, it's about to come out. You know, we were finding, again, as we found in the past, that students report self-censoring at these very high levels. We're now asking the question in a little, certainly more nuanced way and a little twist that you'll enjoy. So they do say, as they've said before, that they're wary. They don't speak because they're wary about their peers posting on, posting on social media. But they also say that 40% of students who self-censor say that they fear something that others will disagree with them, will debate with them, and not think that they're right.

Jonathan Haidt: Yeah, that's right.

John Tomasi: Well, it's kind of remarkable.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right.

John Tomasi: Which sounds like an anxiety response.

Jonathan Haidt: Well, exactly. It is. That's right. So I spent a lot of time in the book on the difference between being in discover mode versus defend mode.

John Tomasi: I wanted to ask you about that. Please talk about that.

Jonathan Haidt: Yeah. So let's put a couple of things on the table, and then I'll answer your question about the therapeutic applications to universities. Go for it. So we've already established that the students have high levels of anxiety, but they actually really do want to learn. They want to be exposed to different ideas. This comes through in a lot of the surveys. And they want to grow. Another fact, Gen Z is not in denial. I have never yet had a member of Gen Z say, you're wrong. You've got our generation all wrong. They say, yeah, you're right. We're anxious. We're hooked on social media.

John Tomasi: Why is that significant that they don't deny? How do you see that?

Jonathan Haidt: Because in all previous moral panics, it's like the adults are freaking out because the kids are on television. The kids are like, no, I like my TV. Like, you know, don't take it away from me. Or comic books or the early video games. So this is very different because Gen Z actually agrees that this is messing them up. If you went through puberty on social media, it changes you. It makes you more defensive. You're walking on eggshells. You're living on eggshells. You're growing up on camera. You're posting photos of your life. You're always being judged.

John Tomasi: Beautifully described in anxious generation.

Jonathan Haidt: Yeah.

John Tomasi: Now they're on campus.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right. It's so sad.

John Tomasi: It's so sad.

Jonathan Haidt: But it makes you, you're in defend mode. You're like, the world is threatening and anything can go wrong. And online, anything can blow up at any moment.

John Tomasi: Right. Right.

Jonathan Haidt: So whereas what you want is you want students to be in discover mode. When you're in discover mode, and those are circuits that are especially a little bit more in the front left cortex and front right cortex. They're specialized for approach. And when you see opportunities, you're like, wow, like I could do that. I could do that. And I always remember, you know, my first, I went to Yale undergrad and at Yale at the time, 1981, they send you over the summer, I think it is, this really thick blue book, you know, paper bound book, the blue book. I would just like flip to a random page and say, you know, Chinese art from the 13th century. I could take a course in that if I wanted.

John Tomasi: I remember that experience too.

Jonathan Haidt: I mean, but it's a feeling. You couldn't believe it.

John Tomasi: You couldn't believe it. The abundance, the possibility, a kid in a candy shop.

Jonathan Haidt: And I've got my ad to that. I think many people felt this.

John Tomasi: I still remember it too. Walking on campus, walking past these buildings with these names on it, like plant biology or classics. I'm thinking to myself, who am I going to be?

Jonathan Haidt: Yeah.

John Tomasi: I wasn't going to be plant biology, but, you know, but I was walking around the campus and I was like, possibility. Possibility. Possibility.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right. So, so you're in, so we expect students to be in discover mode. And that's what those are our stereotypes about students. They want to go out and party. They take risks. That's not true for Gen Z. Gen Z doesn't want to go out and drink. They don't want to go out and party as much. These previous generations, they, they're anxious and they have so much time on their phones. They don't have time for anything else. Anyway, so to bring this back to what we're talking about. So imagine you now have a freshman coming in 2015, 2014, 2015, all the way through now, all your students are anxious in this way. Now let's return to the HXA values.

John Tomasi: Right.

Jonathan Haidt: So imagine that you grew up online. Imagine that you grew up always, you know, posting and getting little arguments with people in the comments or, or being afraid of getting arguments in the comments. So if we read these values again, I think what we'll see is that they are exactly the opposite of the culture of most online fora, certainly for Twitter or X. So let's go through them and let's see, you know, what, what growing up online does. And then let's see whether this is an antidote that we could promote on campus.

John Tomasi: And I'll just say that you're at HXA and the Center for Academic Pluralism, the Segal Center, we're just having this discussion a lot now. We're looking at these values and asking, are there therapeutic high ends?

Jonathan Haidt: So let's, let's see, let's see how you do it. So make your case with evidence. Well, you know, on Twitter, I mean, you only have a very limited number of characters. You're more likely to make it with an ad hominem. You link somebody to someone. You say, you know, you're a fascist because, or, you know, you liked this post by some fascist or whatever. So make your case with evidence.

John Tomasi: It's tough to do on that platform.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right. But you can't, especially now that Twitter allows you to have much longer posts, especially, I mean, I'm willing to pay the eight dollars a month and it actually makes a huge difference that you can actually have longer posts. Be intellectually charitable. That doesn't happen very much online. You get points for knocking someone down.

John Tomasi: And charitable means listen to the good on what someone says.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right.

John Tomasi: Recognize we're students now on campus. We're a community of imperfect learners. I'm not perfect with my knowledge. You're not perfect either. We're going to work together in that way. We're going to show charity to you and you to me.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right. Whereas life on Instagram, especially for the girls, is all about perfection. This is one of the reasons why social media is so much rougher on girls. Girls are more prone to socially desired perfectionism. That is, trying to live up to the impossible standards of society. More girls have anxiety issues related to that than boys. Life on Instagram, especially, really heightens that. And so this fear of making a mistake. Everything has to be perfect. I mean, it's really painful for the students and it means they're not in discover mode. They're in defend mode. So yeah, be intellectually charitable. Be intellectually humble. Again, online life does not promote that. Be constructive. Again, you get more points for tearing down, for being destructive. And be yourself. Something all the kids say is, you know, you put forward your fake persona. Imagine everyone living life as a fake and thinking about that all day long. So anyway, we have to be sympathetic and realize Gen Z coming in, we deprive them of a normal childhood. We deprive them of normal social development. We allow them to be raised in a place that has exactly the opposite values as HXA. Now, how do we undo it? What do we do once they get onto campus? And here, I will, here I'll draw on the course that I teach at NYU Stern called Flourishing. It's a full semester course, you know, 13 weeks, 14 weeks. And the course is organized around how do you become smarter, stronger, and more sociable.

John Tomasi: Smarter, stronger, and more sociable.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right.

John Tomasi: Nice.

Jonathan Haidt: So if you can do those three things, then you will be more successful in love and in work. And as Sigmund Freud said, you know, Lieben und Arbeiten, love and work. That's like the formula for a successful life. And if you can be more successful in love and work, then you will be happier. That's the promise I make to the students. And their task is to make themselves smarter, stronger, and more sociable, more socially skilled during the course of the semester. So let's talk about the smart part, because that's the HXA part. So the first thing you do to make yourself smarter is you turn off almost all your notifications. You regain control of your attention. Nobody can think when they're giving away all their attention to interruptions on their phones. But then the second part of it is I have them read. So, you know, HXA produced this volume. I, you know, I worked on it with Richard Reeves and Dave Cicerelli, All Minus One. It's a beautiful little volume. It's an abridged version of chapter two of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. I urge everyone, if you haven't read it, or if you teach courses, try to assign it. It's free on the HXA website, or you can buy it on Kindle and Amazon. But I have them read just a part of that. And then we talk about what game are you playing when you're talking with someone? What game are you playing? Are you playing the game of I want to prove you wrong? Are you playing the game of I want to win this fight? Are you playing the game of I want to impress them? Are you playing the game of I want to preserve my reputation? Or are you playing the game of I want to grow and learn? And you're giving me an opportunity to grow and learn. And John Stuart Mill was all about that. You know, he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. And he said, and it's not enough to hear someone just tell you what the other side believes. You have to hear it from people who actually believe it. You have to be exposed to viewpoint diversity. And then I show them the Daryl Davis, that amazing Daryl Davis video where, you know, Daryl Davis, a black blues musician who has talked hundreds of Ku Klux Klan members out of their road. Because he listens. He gains their trust that he's going to listen to them and hear their story. Then they talk. Now they have a human connection. And he's then able to persuade them. So I say, don't, you know, because people say, oh, you know, somebody said something racist. Therefore, I can't talk to him. Well, really? Daryl Davis thought he could. And look what he did. Because Daryl was not playing the game of showing off. He had a game of, I want to take this Ku Klux Klan member, bring him out of the Klan. So if you always approach things with, what can I learn? There's a line in Dale Carnegie. This is one of the assigned books in How to Win Friends and Influence People. He quotes somebody from, you know, the 1920s. I forget who it was. He said, every man is in some way my better. And in that, I learned from him. If you take that as your motto, you're going to grow. You're going to get smarter. And if that's a social, if that motto becomes a social norm, that is now socially acceptable in this space, in this community on campus, to approach the world that way.

John Tomasi: It seems that, I feel strange still talking about these HXA values, therapeutic. They weren't designed for therapy.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right.

John Tomasi: But they were designed to set people on a certain course of life. So we think about people walking onto a campus as being this very special thing. They now are part of their isomized metaphor that it's like a hothouse. Right. A campus is only going to last for four years. But these very specialized conditions for growth and changing. Yeah. And during those four years, you're going to be transplanted outside very soon. In four years, you're going to be replaced and brought outside. But in these four years, the special place, if we think about the anxious generation coming now into this hothouse, more damage, perhaps, from previous generations. And yet, in many ways, I'm going to just try this and see what you have to say. Also be more needy, since they're self-aware of their defects, more needy about these values, more, perhaps, if it's pitched the right way, receptive to being bold. You're joining a special community where we support each other in the purpose of learning. Yes. Not some other purpose, not some warfare, not this good, evil stuff we're seeing, but rather this higher ideal that has, again, I'm going to use the word therapeutic, but something like a community of learners, of imperfect learners. Learning together. What do you make of that?

Jonathan Haidt: That is beautiful. Okay. That is beautiful. I think it's right. And it sparked an idea in me how we can get an integration of what I just said about my course and what a university should do.

John Tomasi: Please.

Jonathan Haidt: So, as I said, the course is how do you get smarter, stronger, and more sociable.

John Tomasi: Good.

Jonathan Haidt: Smarter is obvious. Of course, the university should make you smarter, and you should be open to ideas, et cetera. But it just occurs to me from what you said, that actually, a university should make you stronger in a way that I'll say in a moment, and a university should make you more sociable in this way of a community of learners. So, let's go through them.

John Tomasi: Go ahead.

Jonathan Haidt: For the stronger, and I should have started with this one, the stronger, how do you get stronger? The main reading, we read parts of Marcus Aurelius, and then we read this wonderful book, The Stoic Challenge by William Irvine. And once the students understand antifragility, they all want to grow. And after we talk about it, I always put it to them this way. You know, a lot of your professors are afraid of you. A lot of your professors are afraid to give you, they're afraid to give you harsh feedback. They're afraid to criticize because they think, you know, you'll break, or you'll get angry, or you'll report them. And so, but I want to ask you, which of the two professors would you rather have? One professor does, is the sort of standard, and everything is as positive as can be, and they don't tell you what they really think. Take it easy on you, you're not going to hurt your feelings. The other professor starts on day one and says, you know what? You know, you need to grow. You're here in a business school. This is his turn. You're here in a business school. You're going to go out into a work world, which is going to be tough. And I want to know how you want me to talk to you. One way is, I'm going to really look for what's wrong in your writing, and I'm going to say what's wrong. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I'm not going to focus on the positive, and then a little, you know. My job is to make you better, and so I'm going to criticize you. What do you think? Do you want that? And every time, all hands go up, yes. They all want it. So, if it's an individual thing, and they don't understand the point of it, then it's like, he's criticizing me. The professor doesn't like me. But once you frame it as growth, this is what I'm saying. They understand that they've been deprived of growth. And if you offer them the opportunity to grow, they grab it. They love it.

John Tomasi: Let me share with you something, get your thoughts about something I've also heard from a lot of students. I've heard this from students at Brown, but I heard it again just two days ago at NYU. I asked them what their orientation experience arrived on. What were they told? What were the signals? And the general impression that I got from these students, but I'm not picking out NYU, but NYU, I think, is a representative of a lot of places. They said that in some sense, they were being told that it was high school part two. So, they were told, you're going to have fun in these various ways, interesting places to go. You're in the city, you're all safe, but you're in the city. You're going to make friends. They're going to last a lifetime, which is a cool thing. At the end, you're going to get some job. What the NYU students told me this last week was that they felt they didn't see the purpose of that. It's good to have fun. It's nice to have friends and have some job. But they didn't have the sense that they're being told or signal that this is about you becoming the person you might be. You mentioned the three of us in your class. I mean, I have three others that I sometimes think about from Joel Peterson, former CEO of JetBlue, and someone who's been very helpful to me and my role at HXA. Joel says that each of us has to find three things to get a good life. He brought us this week, but his version is a person to be, a work to do, and someone to love. If you're thinking about the university and the search for truth and knowledge, we want to know more about the world around us. We also want to know more about ourselves. There's a sense of much figuring out finding the person to be, who you are, what your values are, what your interests are. That's going to make you stronger when you choose the work to do and perhaps the person to love. Do the HXA values help with these kinds of things? Again, I'm thinking it's not just knowledge about the world. Knowledge about the world is crucial, but it's also a question of lifelong learners, setting ourselves in a certain course of being that's open, that's charitable, that's humble, but also principled and demanding and high standards. Do you need to do anything about any of that?

Jonathan Haidt: Yeah, so I think that's very inspiring.

John Tomasi: That's a lot to throw at you.

Jonathan Haidt: It is. No, it is. It's very inspiring. Although, to me, it feels more resonant for my MBA students, for my students in their 20s. The undergrads, when they come onto campus, they're 18, 18 roughly. I'm not sure that we want to task them with this individual task. You have to go, who do you want to be? That can be very inspiring. It might work for a lot of them. But what I want to do, because you started with this with, let's go back to orientation. Let me tell you what my orientation was.

John Tomasi: Please, please.

Jonathan Haidt: And then I want to be sure that I touch on the issue of community, because that's the other big part of the story, is a sense of community.

John Tomasi: Good.

Jonathan Haidt: So my orientation, so I show up at Yale in September of 1981. I'm 17 years old. I'll turn 18 in a month or two. At that time.

John Tomasi: The young John Hype intern walking on campus for the first time.

Jonathan Haidt: And, you know, and so at Yale, you're in a residential college. I was in Davenport College. And on like day two, there's, you know, a reception at your residential college in the master's house. It was called, you know, the master of the college.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Jonathan Haidt: No more, but anyway.

John Tomasi: Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Jonathan Haidt: And, you know, there was lovely food in a lovely setting, and they served alcoholic drinks. Like, welcome to college. You're, you know, because in Connecticut, it was still 18. New York had just raised it to 21. So every September, I could drink in Connecticut or something, but not in New York. Anyway, the point is, like, you were treated as an adult. It was, you know, we put on our sport coat, and it was just an incredibly adultifying sort of thing. You, there was all kinds of orientations, but it was mostly about, actually, there weren't all kinds of orientations. I take that back. There was shopping period on campus. You figure out what courses you want to take. But my most vivid memory is they brought us all together in Woolsey Hall, which is the most beautiful auditorium on campus, where there's a gigantic pipe organ. And the president was a Bart Giamatti. And I actually, you know what? I can't remember whether he gave the speech or whether he was sick that year. In any case, it was a really inspiring speech about the mission of the university and truth and what we're here for. And then there were, the pipe organ would play. And I remember my chest shaking.

John Tomasi: Fabulous.

Jonathan Haidt: It's fabulous. And it was, it was, it, and what I now realize, what I realize now, now that I wrote The Anxious Generation, chapter four is on puberty. I cover initiation rites.

John Tomasi: Good.

Jonathan Haidt: And what we don't think about is that when you take kids from one place to another, you don't just want to give them the tools. You want to change their identity.

John Tomasi: Good.

Jonathan Haidt: And they don't do it themselves. This is why I'm a little wary of the individualistic thing. Identity historically is not something you choose. Your identity is your position in the larger social fabric. And then when you change identities, you have to, the older people have to guide you through that. Who are you now? It's not up to you.

John Tomasi: You know, now you are- It's not your parents, typically.

Jonathan Haidt: Exactly. It's other people, other adults. That's right. That's right.

John Tomasi: Again, it's sounding like college again.

Jonathan Haidt: Exactly. That's right. Because kids have to leave their parents. You know, as we say in the coddling, the job of a parent is to work him or herself out of a job.

John Tomasi: Right.

Jonathan Haidt: And you better do that before you send your kid off to college. And parents used to do that, but they don't anymore. So now we have to do it, the parenting. So anyway, what I'm saying is, if we think more about that transition to college, not as we're going to give you drug and alcohol training, we're going to give you sexual harassment training, we're going to give you all your microaggression training, we're going to give you all these trainings about how, you know, threat sensitive and all the ways you can screw up. But rather, but rather a noble vision expressed in beautiful words in a beautiful setting in the, it has to be in the first week they arrive on campus because that's when they're very plastic, very flexible about who are we. It's not just who am I, it's who are we. And if the rhetoric is a lot about, we are a community of learners, we descend directly from Plato and Aristotle. That's why we call it the academy, because we are modeled on the idea that people sitting around in a circle, maybe drinking wine, talking about ideas, being provocative, laughing with each other. Sometimes there's some tension, like, that is the origin of Western thought, as we see it, you know, fine, you know, there are exceptions, but this is our story that we tell, stories are important. We are their descendants, and now we welcome you into this guild. You are now a college student. And so if you, the more you frame, not just what are you doing, what are we doing, who are we, and then you go right into the HXA values. We are a community of learners, because you know what? People are really stupid as individuals. We don't think well as individuals, because we want to be right. We want to impress people. You have to have other people who will criticize you, who will challenge your confirmation bias. So once you, if you lay that all out for them, and you say your mission is not just to, you know, live by all these rules we're giving you, your mission is to grow, and you grow as part of a community, and you have an obligation and a duty to that community, you have to give your honest criticism of the other students. Now, I know that many of you are afraid to speak up in class. This is what all the professors say. Well, I understand that. But you know what? If we all agree that we're going to do it, you're going to find it's thrilling. And they do. They do. They really do.

John Tomasi: I love the way you just did that. Let me just, let me do a little twist to Sia. So you described your own experience walking onto the Yale campus, hearing that inspiring speech, having your heart. And I think we talk about HXA, why these initiatives, these orientation rituals are so important, that they be communal, that they're not broken up, but rather bringing people together. But now let's say that the people walking on campus are deeply anxious. And many of them, let's say, I think you can go two different ways with this. Some people, I think, say, therefore, and this is how do people on the university level respond to your book, The Anxious Generation. Some might say they need more protection.

Jonathan Haidt: No.

John Tomasi: And therefore, let's double down on these protections. Others would say what I think you and I would say, which is like double down on HXA kind of value. Can you say anything about that? Because you're resolving this.

Jonathan Haidt: No, that's right.

John Tomasi: You're bringing this attention. You're bringing up the whole world's attention to this problem. On campus now, there's going to be a struggle as to how to respond to it. Can you give us any wisdom?

Jonathan Haidt: So the most important fact here is that the treatment for anxiety in clinical psychology is exposure, not protection. If someone's anxious about elevators, you don't say, oh, we're going to be nice to you. And we're going to build staircases that you never have to take an elevator. That would be accommodating the anxiety. Or saying, oh, people might be anxious if we're going to talk about kidnapping or violence or war because somebody went through those experiences. We don't want to trigger them. No, that is building protections for them, which prevent them from growing. The cure for anxiety is exposure in a situation in which the bad thing doesn't happen after the cue. So if you're anxious about speaking, we're not going to say, therefore, you don't have to speak. We're going to say, once you frame it the right way, actually, speaking is the best way to get over it. So what I would do with my shyer students, like when I was at UVA, teaching a lot of undergrads, I would check because some of the students were very shy about speaking up in class, even a seminar class.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Jonathan Haidt: And I'd say, I really want to help you be part of the class. I'll tell you what. You think before class, because some people, some introverts especially, they don't think like so quick on their feet, they do deeper, slower thinking. So I'll say, you know, come up with a good idea. Come up with some insight. And at a certain point, I'm going to call on you. I'll just say, you know, Maria, did you have any thoughts about this? So it's okay if you prepare, but I want you to speak during class. And so once you do that, then they do it and nobody laughs at them and it goes well. And then the next day, it's easier. So over and over again, what we've done is we have accommodated kids' fears, which prevents them from growing. We did that when they were younger. We did that in high school and then we do it in college. And then we pass them off to companies. You know, I speak to a lot of people in the corporate world and I always ask them, how are your Gen Z employees? And I've never heard a positive report. It's always, I mean, they're so anxious. They need to be told exactly what to do. They're so afraid of messing up. But universities could help with this.

John Tomasi: Yes. What you were describing about the students not speaking. I mean, my colleagues and I around sort of had this joke. We would sometimes announce to our classes on the first day, this is not a class for the strong, silent type. You must be. And you find ways, you have to be thoughtful about how you bring a person into conversation. But as you were describing, I'm very familiar to me as well. Once a student speaks.

Jonathan Haidt: Yes.

John Tomasi: And they realize that they're actually as part of an environment that's supporting each other, holding no punches, but putting it in a serious way because we're all imperfect learners. Then they realize, wow, I can actually raise my hand and ask a question.

Jonathan Haidt: Yeah.

John Tomasi: And I'm not the only one who's wondering that. And then they start to go more. So colleges, I'm just really taken with this possibility that, again, we're all talking about Jason. Does HXA, because we don't think of ourselves as being there. We think of ourselves as restoring a kind of wonder and joy to the university life, removing fears and divisions. But now we're really thinking about, well, what about this anxious generation? Is there something we can offer them so that when they leave college and enter the workforce, we've done some corrective work?

Jonathan Haidt: That's right. We think a lot about that at Stern. We're producing students going into the corporate world, largely. How do we produce? What you want is you want to produce students who will be a blessing to whoever hires them, not those who are going to think it's all about me and my political values. I mean, the students who come out as activists are a curse to companies, and companies are now seeing them. They're trying to fire them as fast as they can, a lot of companies. So there's a line I quote in one of my books from Rick Warren. It's a Christian book. The book starts off the opening line is, it's not about you, or it's not all about you. And so social media teaches, it is all about you, and you have to manage your brand. I'm sorry, this is a bit rambling. Just to get back to it, the more we are in discover mode and growth mode, and we see our job not just as educating them, but as helping them to grow and flourish. And we're academics. We should understand the scientific research. We should understand clinical psychology. We should understand how do you help people gradually expose to things that scare them so that they grow. And if you hold out the promise of growth, Gen Z is going to grab it. They're really going to grab it.

John Tomasi: We're coming to the end of the podcast. I want to ask you a question about where we are right now at the university. So we've been talking about how this anxious generation is arriving on campus. We see that HXA values may be a helpful cure in some way or be part of a solution. But I want to ask you just a little more topical question about what we've seen in the past year around the university. Because you've mentioned before the congressional testimony in this podcast, there's a line from coddling that's a corrective to that third grade on truth, the idea that the world's divided between the good ones and the bad ones. And the line is, it's this, quote, the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every man, which is a line, I think, from Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.

Jonathan Haidt: I read it when I was in high school and I remember underlining that line.

John Tomasi: Wow, wow, yeah. But can you say a bit about that line? So one of the things we're watching now in the past year, the country now has become aware of that we've been tracking you and I and HXA now for years. This oppressor versus oppressed.

Jonathan Haidt: Yeah, that's right.

John Tomasi: Good versus evil. How does the anxious generation, if the anxious generation comes to campus and that paradigm is still up and running, is that going to increase their pathology? Can you address that specifically?

Jonathan Haidt: Sure. So an important term I'll put on the table is integrative complexity.

John Tomasi: Tell us about that.

Jonathan Haidt: Yeah, I don't know if Phil Tetlock invented it, but Phil Tetlock, a brilliant social psychologist now at Penn and Wharton, did research on integrative complexity. He would look at arguments for and against slavery in the 19th century, and you can code how much is just one-sided, simple, versus like, well, now there's this complication and this interaction. So our job as educators, especially at the university level, must be to enhance integrative complexity. We live in a very complicated world. Anyone who goes out thinking of their easiest solutions, they tend to actually make things worse rather than better. So we need to foster integrative complexity. If you're afraid, you're not curious. If you're afraid, you want simple answers. So part of our mission, I think we want to get our students into discover mode. We want to inspire them with thinkers who show integrative complexity. We want to really educate them to beware, beware all the hucksters and demagogues who are going to hit you with good versus evil, simple binaries, only I can save it, that sort of thing.

John Tomasi: Do those binaries appeal to anxious people?

Jonathan Haidt: Oh, of course. Absolutely. Absolutely.

John Tomasi: So that's what we're up against in some sense on the campuses.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right.

John Tomasi: Integrative thinking, integrative complexity. This is kind of a luxury, it's kind of a cognitive luxury, when we have the time and space to think deeply about something. And when we're immersed in a culture that says, you know what, things are often very complicated, but if we think carefully over a long period of time together, we actually can figure it out. That's an enlightenment view, that we can figure things out ourselves.

Jonathan Haidt: But as long as you bring in the complexity that we can figure it out, but no one of us can figure it out alone, that we're going to just confirm what we already believe, that if you put us together in the right way, and so I'll just bring up one final concept. I had an Atlantic article two years ago called, Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid. And because I watched, you know, because universities have been brilliant institutions, and of course they have their own institutional stupidity always. But, you know, what really happened in 2015, in many ways, it was a cultural revolution. It was a time when everyone was afraid to stand up and say what was obviously true. How did that happen? And my analysis in that essay was it was because of the arrival of super viral social media. Anyone could, you know, could slander or defame or attack anyone at any time anonymously, and they often attack the leaders of anything. So the key, the key idea in that essay was structural stupidity, that when you have, that individuals have all these difficulties thinking, you put us together in the right way where we, where we, you know, based on John Stuart Mill's ideas, even unconsciously, where you say, you put forward your argument, my job is to critique it. And then it's not that I hate you or that I embarrass you. It's just like I find flaws in your argument, and you make your argument better. If we do that, that's structural intelligence. And that's what a university is. That's what the academy has been from the days of Plato. Now, there were some interruptions in between those 3,000 years. But that's what we need to do. Whereas when you bring fear and intimidation into it, then you get structural stupidity. And this is why, so in 2015, we saw the spectacular collapse of courage among university leaders. They almost never punished any students for shouting down speakers. And this is what I watched from 2015 all the way to through 2022. It just got worse and worse and worse. I co-founded Heterodox Academy in 2015, not in response to anything on campus. It was a conversation I had with Nick Rosenkranz in the spring of 2015. And it was really just a faculty thing about how everyone's on the left. We need to have some bounds here in order to do our thinking in the right way. But things weren't terribly structurally stupid then. It was after the Yale debacle, the Yale Halloween debacle, that the curtain of fear and activism and attacks and ad hominem attacks swept over the university. But let's end on a hopeful note because things really began to turn around in 2023. And I wrote my, I have an annual letter that I put in the HXA report. So I think this was the first one that, during when you were president. But I think, yeah, so I think I titled it something like, the fever has broken. Because there were some signs. Because for the first time, you know, I've been in this game since 2015. And I can count on one hand the number of presidents who ever stood up against their students and said, no, that's not the way we do things here. This is not right. Here's how we do it. But suddenly we started occasionally seeing presidents saying, no, you're not allowed to just shout down these speakers. And that began, you know, there was the Stanford Law Dean. There were a couple of cases, which I had not seen in my nine years of, or eight years of being in this business. And then we get October 7th, and we get the spectacle of, I mean, it may be controversial, but just the spectacle of students blaming Israel right away before they even counterattacked the specter of anti-Semitism on the campuses. That's weird. It's most intense in the Ivies. So all kinds of weird stuff is happening that really is bringing great shame to higher ed. And the country is seeing it. And then that December 5th hearing room where the presidents could not explain, they were such obvious hypocrites. And they also, they refused, they were, they proved themselves unable to elevate, talk about higher mission. They were doing the legalese, which is understandable, perhaps. And yet they failed to say what they were there for, as though they'd forgotten.

John Tomasi: Or they didn't even know.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right.

John Tomasi: They'd lost the sense of mission. They certainly did not convey that they were the curators, the caretakers, the guardians of something very precious, of one of the most precious institutions in the Western tradition in the United States as well.

Jonathan Haidt: And so, let me just think, wait, where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. So when you look at Gallup data, and Pew also, on what Americans think about higher ed, as I said, it was very high in 2015, then it plummets, not just among the right, but among centrists and moderates. So higher ed, we've destroyed our brand.

John Tomasi: And that big Gallup poll came out before.

Jonathan Haidt: Yes, that's right. That's right.

John Tomasi: That was in June.

Jonathan Haidt: And if you did it now, there's a new study being conducted now.

John Tomasi: They'll need negative numbers.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right. Yeah. So, but my point is, I do think we've hit rock bottom. We were publicly humiliated. We destroyed our brand. And I think this has been very freeing for some people, because most, this is a principle I keep espousing, wherever you go, most people are reasonable. Wherever you go on campus, most professors want to do their work. They don't want to indoctrinate students. They're scholars first. But what's changed is the dynamics so that a small number of people can intimidate others into silence. But that changes once the small number of people realize, you know what? We actually can, we can, we can, we can speak up and we're not going to get slaughtered. If, if a few of us do it together. So that's changing. I do think there's a sense that the fever has broken. Our house is in tatters.

John Tomasi: May I give you an example of what you just, you just said at the FMA. So as you know, HXA has members all over the world and we've been bringing them together into communities on campuses. There are 50 plus now in USA, Canada, and now England. One of the striking things directly on your point is that we found when you, when we create a community of HXA members on a campus, we get more members very quickly.

Jonathan Haidt: Yeah.

John Tomasi: So it's turned to be a membership partner. Exactly the reason you say, now you're not, you realize there are other people who think like this. I'm not crazy. I'm not the only one. I'm not crazy. And I'm also willing now. And we also see the climate changing a lot since the events of last fall.

Jonathan Haidt: Oh, good. Glad to hear that.

John Tomasi: John, I know you're, I know you're extremely busy. Congratulations on the Anxious Generation. It's number one on the New York Times bestseller list. It's a fabulous read. I'd like to say to our listeners, read that book. Of course, it's just wonderful. If you do read it, I think many of you who are interested in higher education issues would really enjoy going back to look through the coddling again. You'll see fascinating traces of this book in that book. And maybe you'll join us in the thinking together about if the Anxious Generation, as the Anxious Generation goes to college, how does HXA play a role to help ameliorate the situation and move us to a higher place?

Jonathan Haidt: Right. We can make them smarter, stronger, and more sociable.

John Tomasi: Stronger and smarter, smarter, and more sociable. Sounds like a nice way to end it. John Haidt, what a pleasure.

Jonathan Haidt: Thank you so much. John Tomasi, what a pleasure. And to see what you've built here and what you're doing here. I'm thrilled. Thank you.