Fantastic, long interview by Tyler Cowen with Jon Haidt, one of my intellectual heroes. Here’s an excerpt I really like. Let’s say you had an army in which everybody was told to do their own thing. How well would they achieve their purpose, which is to win wars? They would be terrible at it! Well, consider the contemporary university. Excerpt:
COWEN: Say we take the military, a very different environment. The military is not-for-profit, it intersects with corporate America, but it’s not itself a corporation. It can at times be highly inefficient, and we at least try to overcome this by building up an ethos which is in some ways fairly homogenous, and it tells people to behave a certain way, and there are strong group norms, and a lot of sanctions.
One may not like all of that, but typically once sees something like that is needed in the military. Now if we take colleges and universities, they’re big, they’re bureaucratic, they’re not-for-profit, the incentives are not traditional commercial incentives — could it be the case that for higher education to function well it needs these tight, strict norms? Tight, strict norms, will ex post always look in some ways silly, as they can in the military. Maybe this is a semi‑second, third best efficient way of running academia, yes or no?
HAIDT: No. Again, you’re looking at it like you look at these giant systems, and then let’s take that analogy to another giant system, but you have to think about what is each system designed to produce. Diversity is divisive. There’s a lot of social science research on this, the more you make something diverse, the less trust there will be, the harder it is for people to work together.
If you’re the US military, or any military, yes in the ’70s the Army in particular embraced ethnic diversity, and they did a great job of it. It’s actually quite striking that the military has done — that things have gotten better and better and better in terms of racial climate in the military, and worse and worse and worse in the academy, we can come back to that. If you’re the military, you need cohesion, and that’s what they say — above all, unit cohesion, we must have that.
You want to basically bury racial and other kinds of diversity in a sea of uniformity. You want to give people a sense of common mission, you have common uniforms, so you want to make people feel they’re all part of the same — that’s what you do if you need a group to function effectively together.
In the academy that is not our goal. We’re not trying to turn out classes of “our graduating class will go forth, and they will all work together as a unit to accomplish greatness.” No, that’s not what it’s all about. We want clashing ideas.We don’t want uniformity and homogeneity, we want the benefits of diversity, but the irony is we have so focused on racial and other kinds of demographic diversity, because of the political slant of the university, because of the sacred values of the campus left, we have so focused on that kind of diversity.
There’s this wonderful line from George Will, in some essay he wrote, “There’s a certain kind of liberal that wants diversity in everything except thought.” That’s where we are. We now have almost a kind of uniformity the military has, where everybody’s on the left, which gives us cohesion, but that kills the very function of the university, which is to have diversity of thought, so we can change our minds. We challenge each other in the marketplace of ideas.
Here’s another good excerpt:
COWEN: Let’s say you were put in charge of undergraduate admissions at Yale, and you could more or less do what you thought was best without constraint, what would you change?
HAIDT: Oh gosh, I’d change a lot of things. One thing that I would do is I would start admitting for signs that you can contribute to an intellectually diverse environment. That means that I would look for people who — so Yale in particular, but all of the top schools have a huge problem, that they have basically social justice warriors who are so empowered, so angry, that they dominate discourse and you basically have the small illiberal left has completely terrorized the larger liberal left.
Yale right now is quite dysfunctional. Students there say they can’t speak up, they can’t speak up in class, they feel pressure on Facebook, if somebody sends around a petition for some left-wing cause they have to endorse it, even if they don’t want to. Yale’s a mess right now, as a lot of schools are. That should be the top diversity issue, is intellectual diversity. I would stop admitting for social justice cred, in other words, if you say, “Oh, I started this protest group, and we got this overturned.”
Basically I think a lot of students know is the way to get into a top school is show your social justice activism. Well, top schools are now full of social justice activists, and they’re no longer places where people can say anything that contradicts the social justice activists. What’s that old joke? “Doctor, it hurts when I do this. Well, stop doing this.” They should stop admitting social justice warriors and start admitting people they’ve got the guts to disagree.
One more:
COWEN: What’s the best replacement for religion in modern, secular society?
HAIDT: Oh boy, the best replacement.
COWEN: Good question. Durkheimian question.
HAIDT: Yeah. A few years ago I would have tried to give you an answer and say we should have some other sacred value to replace it, but given what’s happened in the last year on campuses, I’m really afraid of it, because you might think, “Humanitarianism should replace it. We should all have a religion of helping the poor, helping each other.” Now, of course, it’s really important to help the poor. It’s really important to help people who are oppressed.
But once you make it a religion, that means you are impervious to evidence. You are committed to certain religious rituals even if those rituals make things worse. For example, I’ve been studying the research on affirmative action and diversity training. As far as I can tell there’s no evidence that they make things better and there is some evidence that it makes things worse.
Now, it’s messy. I can’t say for sure that they do, but the point is, we seem to be doing things on campus that are making things worse. The activists are largely asking for things that will make things worse. Much more affirmative action, much bigger racial preferences, which will cause much bigger gaps between Asians at the top and African-Americans at the bottom. Which is going to inflame prejudice, not reduce it.
Once you make something a religion, you’re not open to evidence. You do really crazy, stupid things. What I would say is, let’s not have a replacement for religion. Let’s set things up so that there isn’t a big religion that unites us all to take on our enemies. Let’s try to return to a climate in which people find meaning and purpose in their private lives and in their smaller associations, but we don’t have a big sense of national purpose.
Read the whole thing, or listen to the interview here. It’s very long, and very good.