Fight for the Future applauds NYU Class of 2026’s response to fearmonger Jonathan Haidt

Tomorrow, New York University’s Class of 2026 will graduate at Yankee Stadium. Their commencement speaker will be Jonathan Haidt, a pop psychologist known for spreading unscientific claims to advance right-wing talking points about kids and the Internet.

Sarah Philips, Campaign Director at Fight for the Future, has this to say:

“NYU students are rightly protesting the announcement that Jonathan Haidt will address them as commencement speaker at tomorrow’s ceremony. As members of student government write in their letter to the university, Haidt, a pop psychologist and business professor, is a poor choice that cheapens the accomplishments of the Class of 2026 and fatally misunderstands the political moment into which they graduate.

Why might Haidt’s appearance lead to protest? Well, because he one of the leading figures of a contemporary moral panic which leverages contested science to promote policies that strip young people of their autonomy. Haidt, 62, is a consummate grifter whose scolding treatises about American youth include “The Coddling of the American Mind” and “The Anxious Generation”: fact-lite airport bestsellers which right-wing groups deploy in support of a nation-wide effort to ban young people from the Internet.

Haidt is also noted for his history of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-transgender comments. And like attracts like: he is no better than noted transphobe Senator Martha Blackburn, who has been pushing the dangerous Kids Online Safety Act to protect kids from “the transgender in this culture.” Haidt has used his positioning to push for mass censorship laws that would harm LGBTQ youth across the globe. His organization, The Anxious Generation Movement, has worked with NCOSE (formerly Morality in Media) and the Heritage Foundation, two architects of the anti-LGBTQ+ movement, to lobby for KOSA.

NYU’s speaker decision has the additional effect of doing free publicity for an author whose central claims have been hotly contested by psychologists and statisticians. Shoddy science and unabashed self-promotion —are these the values that NYU administration wishes to impress upon its graduating students?

We think it’s interesting that supporters of Haidt are citing free speech concerns, when Haidt would have young people kicked off the internet writ large if he got his way. Fight for the Future is a proponent of free speech for all—not just adults, and certainly not just white, upper-class professors like Haidt. We believe in privacy protections that would undercut Big Tech’s power to surveil us, and antitrust laws that would attenuate tech monopolies’ power. And we believe that the most significant improvements to youth mental health should be made offline: young people need better-funded schools, extracurricular programs, and affordable housing and healthcare.

NYU’s Class of 2026 deserves to hear from someone who celebrates young people’s activism and their power to change the world—not a cowardly scold who is unwilling to admit his mistakes. Haidt wants a world where adults lecture young people and dismiss their protests as signs of moral failure—perfectly highlighted by the format of the event, where NYU’s actual graduates have been kicked off the podium for daring to stand up for Palestinian liberation, while Haidt is the one crying free speech.”