NYU Students Demand Cancellation of Haidt as Commencement Speaker Over Opposition to DEI and Cancel Culture

After students and faculty at Georgetown successfully campaigned to cancel commencement speaker Morton Schapiro over his support for Israel, there is a similar movement to cancel NYU Professor and author Jonathan Haidt as the graduation speaker at New York University. Haidt is being targeted for his opposition to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and, ironically, his opposition to cancel culture.

Haidt is the author of The Anxious Generation and The Coddling of the American Mind. He has written extensively against the culture of orthodoxy and viewpoint intolerance in higher education.

He is also the cofounder of the online Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit “dedicated to defending and modeling the norms of open inquiry and constructive disagreement.”

In a May 6 column, senior Mehr Kotval described Haidt as “an anti-woke author who has consistently patronized student activists” and called his selection as commencement speaker a “last parting gift of disrespect” from NYU.

The Student Government Association condemned the choice and, in a May 5 open letter, called his “deeply unsettling” selection unacceptable, accusing him of “making homophobic remarks in a class and public misconceptions about transgender identity.”

What is most striking about these complaints is that they captured perfectly the sense of orthodoxy in higher education, the very thing that Haidt and some of us have been addressing in our writings.

The fact that he is considered “anti-woke” and holds divergent views is considered intolerable at a university that has largely purged conservative, libertarian, and contrarian views from its faculty.

There is, of course, no problem with speakers holding far-left viewpoints. Likewise, the warm reception given to Justice Sonia Sotomayor has not been extended to other potential justices on the Supreme Court, such as Justice Clarence Thomas.

As I wrote earlier, this year’s commencement speakers list continues to reflect the same universal preference for Democratic political figures and liberal figures. Indeed, this year, schools seem to be doubling down with figures ranging from Nancy Pelosi (Notre Dame de Namur University) to Jamie Raskin (American University and Goucher College) to candidates like James Talarico (Paul Quinn College). There is no subtlety in their selection or their messages. Pelosi slammed the GOP and Trump while Talarico gave effectively a stump speech on fighting the billionaires.

The strained rationalization for the cancel campaign was illustrated in the quote from Grayson Stevenson, the outgoing sophomore class president at N.Y.U., who said, “I don’t think that students saying that the speaker doesn’t represent our values is the same thing as students being incapable of hearing opposing viewpoints. Those are two very different things.”

No, it says you should not have to listen to “hearing opposing viewpoints.” You are physically capable of hearing them, but you have been taught throughout your education that you should not be subjected to views that they disagree with or find triggering.

I would expect that, given his long fight for intellectual diversity, Haidt will not prove as easy to get to self-cancel. Often, speakers targeted in these campaigns do not want to risk the embarrassing protests or interruptions during a speech.

The campaign, however, has likely succeeded as a warning to other administrators that they need to select speakers who run from the left to the far left, or face such complications or confrontations.

Haidt, who describes himself as “a non-partisan centrist,” has written about the very sentiments expressed in the campaign against him at NYU. He is a critic of Herbert Marcuse, who called for a new type of “liberating” tolerance which is achieved through suppressing non-progressive voices.