NYU’s Student Paper Wants Change. It Just Doesn’t Want to Hear It.

When New York University announced that Stern professor Jonathan Haidt would address the class of 2026 at its all-university commencement on May 14, the Washington Square News (WSN) opinion desk section ran an editorial titled “Graduates deserve better than Jonathan Haidt.” The piece, by contributing writer Griffin Eckstein, closes on what is meant to be its rhetorical climax: “Haidt’s selection is a gutting reminder that our institution is more committed to platforming speakers who won’t rock the boat rather than those who would encourage us to make a change for the better.” Read that sentence twice. It contains, in compressed form, the entire intellectual problem the editorial is trying to deny. Jonathan Haidt is, by any reasonable definition, a boat-rocker. He has spent the past decade telling university administrators things they did not want to hear about ideological monoculture in the academy, co-founding Heterodox Academy to press the point. He has spent the past five years telling parents, schools, and tech companies things they did not want to hear about what smartphones are doing to adolescent mental health. He resigned from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology rather than sign a compelled political statement, accepting professional cost to preserve scholarly independence. His book The Anxious Generation has been a New York Times bestseller for 104 weeks precisely because it forced an uncomfortable national conversation that comfortable people had been avoiding. NYU’s own NYU IRL initiative—launched under President Linda Mills, who has publicly called Haidt “the most consequential academic in America today” —exists because his research rocked the institution hard enough to change its policy. What the WSN editorial actually wants is not a boat-rocker. It wants a speaker who will rock the boat in a direction the editorial author has already pre-approved. The piece favorably contrasts Haidt with Molly Shannon, Sanna Marin, and Taylor Swift—each of whom, the editorial reminds us, “share students’ values.” There is the tell. The criterion is not whether a speaker challenges the institution; it is whether the speaker challenges the institution from inside the editorial writer’s existing convictions. Anything else is “patronizing,” “out of step,” and unworthy of graduates. This is precisely the disposition Haidt has been describing, in book after book, for fifteen years. The complaint that he is “patronizing” for raising concerns about coddled students and phone-mediated childhood is offered without the slightest engagement with the evidence behind those concerns—the longitudinal mental health data, the international replication studies, the rising rates of anxiety and depression that began their vertical climb almost exactly when smartphones reached saturation among adolescents. One can disagree with Haidt’s interpretive frame. Many serious scholars do . But disagreement requires engagement, and the editorial offers none. It simply asserts that the topics themselves are inappropriate for graduates to consider. Which is to say: the editorial wants a commencement speaker who will not raise the questions that have made Haidt the most-read social scientist of his generation, because raising those questions is itself the problem. Here is the deeper point. To say “I want a speaker who will encourage us to change for the better” is to make a substantive claim—it presupposes that one already knows what “better” means, what direction change should take, and which voices count as legitimate in pointing the way. A serious encounter with the idea of change requires the willingness to hear from someone who thinks your generation has, in some respects, gotten things wrong. That is what change actually feels like from the inside. It does not feel like affirmation. It feels like Haidt. If the editorial writer genuinely wanted change rather than ratification, it would treat Haidt’s selection as a welcome gift rather than a grievance. Here is a scholar who has spent his career arguing that universities have failed their students by sheltering them from disagreement, and the response from the student writer is to demand that the university once again shelter them from his disagreement. The irony is textbook, and NYU clearly has its work cut out for its students. Universities exist to form citizens capable of self-government, and self-government is impossible without the capacity to hear arguments one finds unwelcome and to weigh them on their merits rather than their tribal markings. President Mills understood this when she selected Haidt. The WSN editorial, in objecting, has demonstrated precisely why she was right to do so. The graduates of the class of 2026 deserve, on their last day as students, to be addressed by someone who will treat them as adults capable of receiving an argument they did not arrive prepared to accept. That is what change for the better actually looks like. It is also, not coincidentally, what Jonathan Haidt has been trying to tell American higher education for a very long time. The post NYU’s Student Paper Wants Change. It Just Doesn’t Want to Hear It. appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .