New York University Professor Jonathan Haidt says academia is corrupted — and he’s resigning unless mandated “anti-racism” policies are repealed.

Last week, he explained why he’s quitting.

“I have been thinking a lot about fiduciary duty because my main professional association — the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, known as SPSP — recently asked me to violate my quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth.”

Haidt teaches and researches social and moral psychology. He started at NYU in 2011.

A university’s purpose should be to pursue truth and nothing else, Haidt says.

“Universities can have many goals (such as fiscal health and successful sports teams) and many values (such as social justice, national service, or Christian humility), but they can have only one telos, because a telos is like a North Star.”

Haidt said that universities began compromising that commitment to truth by adopting a second telos of “anti-racism” in 2015. He states that the far-left agenda of “anti-racism” or “equity, diversity, and inclusion” has infected academia.

“I argued that the protests and changes that were suddenly sweeping through universities were attempts to elevate the value of social justice to become a second telos, which would require a huge restructuring of universities and their norms in ways that damaged their ability to find truth.”

Additionally, Haidt takes issue with so-called “anti-racism.”

In his book How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi writes:

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Haidt told the president of SPSP that this perspective is immoral.

“It requires us to treat people as members of groups, not as individuals, and then to treat people well or badly based on their group membership. That’s exactly the opposite of what most of us who grew up in the late 20th-century thought was a settled moral fact.”

Recently, SPSP took its commitment to woke ideology a step further. All research proposals must include a statement about how the research “advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.”

Haidt says the policy is incompatible with his commitment to truth.

“Most academic work has nothing to do with diversity,” he says.

“Good science and political activism rarely mix well.”

Haidt believes the conflict between social justice advocacy and truth has become “unmanageable.” If SPSP keeps its anti-racism requirements for researchers, he says he’ll resign once his current contract is up.

He’s one of several professors who’ve given up their position due to higher education’s woke commitments.

Canadian professor Jordan Peterson resigned from the University of Toronto earlier this year.

“All my craven colleagues must craft [diversity, equity, and inclusion] statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly, with various rationalizations and justifications, further corrupting what is already a stunningly corrupt enterprise,” he wrote in the National Post.

Last year, Portland State University professor Peter Boghossian quit and torched his university on his way out in comments about the corrupted academia.

“Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues,” he said.

The university responded by claiming its commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion doesn’t impede their pursuit of developing critical thinkers.

Perhaps no resignation is more telling of how woke ideology is ruining universities than what happened to evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstine in 2017.

Weinstine’s former employer, Evergreen State College, thought it reasonable to have one day per year where light-skinned students and staff were not allowed on campus. This idea was supported by anti-racism activists at the school, including some staff.

Weinstine objected, and activists at the college went berserk. Students patrolled the campus with baseball bats and prevented campus officers from entering the premises. A mob locked the head of the university in a room and gave him an ultimatum to accept their demands or expect violence.

Weinstine escaped without harm and eventually resigned from the college.

“What is occurring on college campuses is about power and control,” he later said while testifying to congress about his exile.

“Am I alleging a conspiracy? No. What I have seen functions much more like a cult, in which the purpose is only understood by the leaders, and the rest have been seduced into a carefully architected fixture.”

“Most of the people involved in this movement earnestly believe that they are acting nobly – to end oppression.”

“Only the leaders understand that the true goal is to turn the tables of oppression. Something is seriously and dangerously amiss.” 

A 2016 study found that there are more than 11 times as many professors who identify as left-wing than as right-wing among top American universities. Researchers from this study went on to say that the disproportional ratio would further increase left-leaning employees, and cause would-be right-leaning professors to avoid applying for open positions.