Half Hour of Heterodoxy

In 2016, Jonathan Haidt gave a talk at a number of American universities in which he made the provocative argument that universities must choose either truth or social justice as their primary motive for operating. He argued that universities used to be centered around truth, and that going forward some universities could continue to do that, whereas others could be frank about declaring social justice to be their primary motive. He did not argue that students couldn’t pursue social justice at a university but simply that the university itself had to choose one primary goal. Today I’m talking to Chad Wellmon, an expert on the history of universities, about whether universities truly were motivated by the pursuit of truth or whether history is in fact more complicated. I’ve known Chad since 1995 when he and I were freshmen at Davidson College and in the same humanities class. Chad is now an associate professor of German Studies at the University of Virginia. His interests include European intellectual history,