NYU Students Tried To Cancel Jonathan Haidt, And Proved His Entire Point

Ultimize. You know, every now and then the news hands you a story so perfectly ironic, so cosmically self-defeating, that you almost feel bad reporting it. Almost. This week, Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist who spent the last decade warning that American universities are producing a generation of students who cannot handle challenging ideas, was invited to give the commencement address at NYU, his own university, at Yankee Stadium. And a group of NYU students tried to get him canceled. The man who wrote The Coddling of the American Mind got coddled by his own students at his own school. Now, this is not irony. This is a peer-reviewed replication study. Students told The New York Times, I don't think students saying the speaker doesn't represent our values is the same thing as being incapable of hearing opposing viewpoints. Oh boy, you wrote a letter asking officials to disinvite a speaker because you disagree with him. That is the definition of being incapable of hearing opposing viewpoints. You didn't just disagree, you tried to make sure nobody else got to hear him either. That's not having values, that's having a veto. These are very different things. Let's be clear about what the smartphone revolution actually produced. We have an entire generation raised with a device in their pocket specifically engineered to make them miserable in productive ways. Every scroll is a tiny dopamine hit designed by behavioral psychologists whose entire job is to make sure you never put the phone down. And then we wonder why teen depression tripled. We wonder why nobody can sustain a conversation. We wonder why politics became a circus. Mark Zuckerberg is not worth $200 billion because he's a genius. He's worth $200 billion because he figured out how to monetize human loneliness. He found the hole in the human psyche where connection should be and built a machine that pumps fake connection In and real attention out. Jonathan Haidt is the guy standing at the entrance to the machine yelling, "Stop! Don't go in there!" And the NYU students tried to cancel him. There's a debate happening right now in American higher education that goes far beyond one commencement ceremony. It's a debate about what universities actually stand for, and this week the debate went landed at NYU in the most ironic way imaginable. According to the reporting in the New York Times by Jeremy Peters, student government leaders sent a letter to university officials calling Jonathan Haidt's selection as commencement speaker as deeply unsettling and asked NYU to reconsider before the ceremony at Yankee Stadium. Now, this is deeply unsettling. You're graduating from one of the most prestigious universities in the world, about to enter a civilization that is on fire politically, economically, and psychologically, and you are deeply unsettled by a commencement speaker. If a graduation speech is the most unsettling thing in your life right now, I got news for you: adult life is going to be a serious problem. Now, I want to be fair. This is New York City. The overwhelming majority of NYU students identify as liberal or left of center, and I get it. If, if NYU had invited a right-wing provocateur or some Trump-loving culture warrior who just wanted to trigger the libs, then okay, I get it, the objection would be understandable. But Jonathan Haidt is a self-described centrist Democrat. He's not a MAGA apologist. What the students are objecting to are specific ideas that they dislike, but interestingly can't actually refute. They didn't write a letter explaining why Hyde was wrong. They wrote a letter explaining that he makes them feel uncomfortable, which is almost word for word his entire thesis. According to The Times, students dug up a class lecture from 2014 to find something objectionable. A lecture from 2014. These students, who were approximately 11 years old at the time, conducted what I can only describe as an archaeological grievance mining. They also expressed shock that NYU could not find a speaker who better reflects their values, noting the previous speakers included Taylor Swift. Now, I love Taylor Swift, but Taylor Swift's commencement address will not help you understand why your brain is being systematically harvested by Silicon Valley. Jonathan Haidt's will. One student described his selection as a last parting gift of disrespect. You have a degree from NYU, your whole life ahead of you, and you feel disrespected because your graduation speaker wrote important books about human psychology. Hmm, I genuinely don't know how some of these people are going to handle a difficult performance review in a few years. Let's talk about who Jonathan Haidt actually is. The Anxious Generation, his most recent book, is a number one New York Times bestseller with more than 2 million copies sold, named one of Barack Obama's favorite books of the year, certainly one of my favorite books of the year. It was named one of the best books of the year by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, Time, and The Economist. His previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind, was an international bestseller. He's a professor at NYU's own Stern School of Business and one of the most cited social scientists working anywhere on the earth today. This is not some right-wing crank. This is one of the most consequential public intellectuals of the 21st century. Now, a great public intellectual is judged not by the quality of their ideas are not just by that, but by the importance of the problems they select. And Haidt has zeroed in on arguably the single most important problem in modern civilization, the systematic hijacking of human attention by technology companies. Everything flows from this, the collapse of teen mental health, the epidemic of loneliness, the dysfunction of democracy, the fact that Donald Trump became president at all. All of it connects back to one thing: our brains are being stolen, and we let it happen because the theft feels like entertainment. I'd said it directly in his commencement speech at Yankee Stadium earlier this week. He told those graduates that Meta is valued at over a trillion dollars, even though almost none of us have given it any money. How is this possible? Because Meta invented a business model that extracts attention from nearly half of all human beings and sells it back to advertisers. It extracts attention from nearly half of planet Earth. This is not a social media company. This is industrial-scale attention strip mining with 2 billion people standing in it by voluntarily. He also quoted the poet Mary Oliver: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. Three lines, arguably the most important three lines anyone can give a graduating class in 2026, because your attention is not just a resource. Your attention is your identity. What you consistently pay attention to is who you become. And we've handed that choice to an algorithm optimizing for one thing: whatever keeps you staring the longest, which turns out unfortunately to be outrage, fear, and the intoxicating feeling that you're right and everyone who disagrees with you is somehow despicable. The Anxious Generation should be required reading for every parent in America, in my humble opinion. If your child has a smartphone and you have not read that book, you're flying blind. Haidt lays out exactly how the rewiring of childhood through phones and social media drove teen depression through the roof, how girls were especially harmed, and what parents, schools, and governments can actually do about it. To those NYU students who were upset, he wasn't criticizing you. He was criticizing the system that raised you. The adults who prioritize your emotional comfort over your intellectual development, and the technology companies that turn your childhoods into a behavioral experiment for profit. He's on your side, folks. He just shows it by telling you the truth. The entire premise of higher education, going back to Socrates, is that you need ideas that genuinely unsettle you. If every belief you walked in with emerges 4 years later completely undisturbed, you didn't get an education, you got a very expensive mirror. NYU is right to keep him as the speaker. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. This is not a parting gift of disrespect. This is the whole ball game. I'm TJ Walker. This is Filtered. Thanks so much for joining me. Post your comments in the comment section. Ultimize.