You’ve got to read this dynamite John Leo interview with Jonathan Haidt, who is emerging as one of the country’s leading public intellectuals, and a traitor to his liberal secular academic class because of his fidelity to the ideals of the university. Excerpts:

JONATHAN HAIDT: But that’s fine. As long as you have an alternate model, then other universities can copy it. But more importantly is this – here’s the one reason for hope – almost all Americans are disgusted by what’s happened to the universities. JOHN LEO: You mean the micro-aggression, the trigger warnings and the censorship? JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. The craziness on campus. Almost everybody says, you know, shut up, grow up, stop complaining. And this is even true for people on the left. And so, there’s a gigantic market of parents who don’t want to send their kids to Yale and Brown and Amherst, and they want to send them someplace where they won’t be coddled. And so my hope is that if there are some prestigious alternatives where their kids actually could learn how to survive hearing things they don’t like, and that market forces will lead a stampede to less coddling schools. JOHN LEO: But what about the craving for elite credentials, no matter how bad the school really is. A lot of parents will send their kids anywhere, to the mouth of hell, if they can get a Yale degree. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. Well, look, Chicago’s pretty darn good. Chicago’s a very prestigious school. I don’t know what Ivy could join them. … JOHN LEO: Well, Columbia still has the Great Books course. JONATHAN HAIDT: Columbia is very PC. Columbia’s not, going to be it. So, another reason for hope is that more and more progressive professors and presidents are being attacked. And each time they’re attacked, they usually feel quite bitter. And at some point we’re going to get a college president who has been attacked in this way who sticks his or her neck out and says, enough is enough; I’m standing up to this. I also hope and expect that alumni will begin resisting. That’s something we’re going to do at “Heterodox Academy.” We’re going to try to organize alumni and trustees. Because the presidents can’t stand up to the protesters unless there is extraordinary pressure on them from the other side.

More:

JOHN LEO: Well, but there’s always a possibility of truth and accuracy. I mean, why is the professoriate so… JONATHAN HAIDT: Spineless? Nowadays, a mob can coalesce out of nowhere. And so we’re more afraid of our students than we are of our peers. It is still possible for professors to say what they think over lunch; in private conversations they can talk. But the list of things we can say in the classroom is growing shorter and shorter. JOHN LEO: This sounds like the Good Germans. JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes. Exactly. It is. It’s really scary that values other than truth have become sacred. And what I keep trying to say – this comes right out of my book The Righteous Mind – is that you can’t have two sacred values. Because what do you do when they conflict? And in the academy now, if truth conflicts with social justice, truth gets thrown under the bus.

Read the whole thing. It has far more great material than I can possibly excerpt here. And while you’re at it, check out and bookmark the website Heterodox Academy, where Haidt and his band of academic rebels — many of them fellow liberals who are disgusted with the lies and bullying on campus — are fighting the good fight, every single day.

Here’s an example of what you can find through Heterodox Academy: this incredible interview with Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech civil engineering professor who broke the Flint polluted water scandal wide open. In the interview, Edwards blames, in part, academic scientists for being so corrupt that they avert their eyes to scientific conclusions that lead them to places that might put their funding into jeopardy. That is, the scientists believed state and federal agencies, when the scientific data ought to have made them skeptical. Excerpt:

Q. Now, of course, when you walk around Flint and ask people about the reassurances they’re hearing now, they don’t believe anybody. When is it appropriate for academics to be skeptical of an official narrative when that narrative is coming from scientific authorities? Surely the answer can’t be “all of the time.” A. I’m really surprised how emotional this interview is making me, and I’ve given several hundred interviews. What these agencies did in [the Washington, D.C., case] was the most fundamental betrayal of public trust that I’ve ever seen. When I realized what they had done, as a scientist, I was just outraged and appalled. I grew up worshiping at the altar of science, and in my wildest dreams I never thought scientists would behave this way. The only way I can construct a worldview that accommodates this is to say, These people are unscientific. Science should be about pursuing the truth and helping people. If you’re doing it for any other reason, you really ought to question your motives. Unfortunately, in general, academic research and scientists in this country are no longer deserving of the public trust. We’re not. Q. I think of that rock with the spray paint on it that says, “You want our trust??? We want Va Tech!!!” That’s a vote of confidence in you at the expense of confidence in anybody else. Is that a happy piece of graffiti in your eyes? A. It’s a symbol of the total failure of our government science agencies, and also of our academic institutions. I really derive no personal satisfaction from that. I feel shame. That’s what I feel.

This is a particular instance of a broader point that the Heterodox Academicians hammer home every day: that academic institutions are also corrupted by politically correct fear, and a concomitant desire either to fix the data around the ideologically preferable conclusions, or to ignore research, or areas of research, that undermine those conclusions.