The Students Are Lying

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, May 14, 2026

 

The Nazi swastika flew proudly over New York City’s West 4th Street this week. It was hoisted over New York University’s Greenwich Village campus on a banner that, at its center, also featured a Jewish Star of David with NYU’s emblematic torch in the middle. The flag’s white and blue color scheme left no doubt that it was designed to mimic Israel’s national banner — a ham-fisted visual metaphor intended to accuse the Jewish State and its supporters of mirroring the Third Reich’s genocidaires.

 

NYU’s spokespeople were, of course, appalled. So, too, were staffers and students who frequent the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, over which the flag was raised. But where was the mass outpouring of aggressive fragility? What happened to the cascade of voices that can be counted on to tell anyone willing to listen that they felt unsafe? How is it that a campus environment so attuned to and supposedly fearful of the rise of fascism in America was unmoved by the Hitlerian semiotics just over their heads?

 

NYU’s students took this antisemitic incident in stride. But do you know what this college’s undergrads do find “deeply unsettling”? The scheduled selection of NYU professor and author Jonathan Haidt to address his own students, among others, at the university’s upcoming graduation ceremony.

 

In an open letter authored by NYU’s Executive Committee of the Student Government Assembly, students contended that commencement speakers should “serve as a source of collective inspiration.” In their estimation, figures like singer Taylor Swift, comedienne Molly Shannon, and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor fit that bill. By contrast, Haidt’s selection “is not merely anticlimactic; it is a regression.”

 

Haidt has been “accused of making homophobic remarks,” the letter read, citing hearsay. He has internalized “misconceptions about transgender identity,” it added. And he has “promoted disturbing rhetoric around antiracism, social justice, and diversity, equity, and inclusion,” by which the authors mean that Haidt has challenged the conceptual frameworks undergirding each (in other words, what a professor of social psychology does for a living).

 

Worst of all, Haidt is an outspoken advocate for “device-free” learning environments, “an initiative that some students find reductive and oblivious to far more pressing matters than digital distraction,” the letter added. Clearly, Haidt was not the “safest option” given his “critiques of liberal ideology,” the missive continued.

 

Haidt’s worst offense lies in how he has supposedly made students feel. “Since the announcement on Thursday, April 30, many students have reported feelings of disappointment, disgust, unenthusiasm, defeat, and embarrassment,” the letter closed.

 

In its coverage of the open letter, the New York Times adopts a chiding tone. After all, the psychology professor is the author of a book that accuses the education system of “cocooning” a generation, protecting them from encounters with “ideas they might find distressing.” The “symbolism” of Haidt’s censure by the very creatures that he warned the higher education system was cultivating “is unmistakable.” The subtext of the report is clear: Don’t these students know that they’re playing right into Haidt’s hands?

 

But that is an instrumentalist argument that questions only the practical utility of this student-led crusade. More important is the fact that the Executive Committee’s open letter is a collection of lies.

 

The students at NYU do not feel unsafe in the professor’s presence. They do not care about “collective inspiration.” They do not believe Haidt is at war with higher education broadly, and they don’t think he’s contributing to the “deepened inequities” that they assume followed when DEI initiatives fell out of fashion. They want to intimidate him and his employers to the extent that he might be forced out of the public square.

 

That’s what the open letter was: an intimidation campaign. That’s what the mock Israeli flag adorned with swastikas was, too — a threat aimed at getting the school’s Zionists to shut their mouths. These are aggressive tactics, none of which register with the school’s allegedly fragile students. They have no problem with sharp elbows, as long as those who are throwing their weight around are on their side.

 

We don’t know which subjects these students studied at NYU. We do know what they have learned, though. They know how to use the rhetoric they were taught to manipulate their schools’ administrators and faculty. They have been indoctrinated in the language of the human resources department, and they are wielding it like a weapon.