Many students and faculty across the U.S. hold truth and social justice as two sacred values, but what happens when they come into conflict with each other? Jonathan Haidt argues that truth is increasingly losing out to social justice and that this is detrimental to the liberal values that enable learning to flourish on campus.

 

Haidt's research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures—including the cultures of American progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and spent most of his career (1995-2011) at the University of Virginia. He is currently the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the NYU-Stern School of Business. where he is applying his research on moral psychology to business ethics, asking how companies can structure and run themselves in ways that will be resistant to ethical failures.

 

Haidt was named a “top 100 global thinker” in 2012 by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the 65 “World Thinkers of 2013” by Prospect magazine. He is the author of more than 90 academic articles and two books: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and The New York Times bestseller The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.