Curious, not furious

In October, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt ’85 addressed a packed crowd in Battell for the second in 2025’s Presidential Lecture Series. Haidt, founder of the Heterodox Academy and author, most recently, of the bestselling The Anxious Generation, examines social media’s role in two hallmarks of the current moment: the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. 

Haidt traced a line between social media virality—which kicked into gear after Facebook’s “like” button and Twitter’s “retweet” function caught on in the early 2010s—and a new posture of defensiveness he noticed in his students, a “disturbance in the force” that soon played out in public confrontations on campuses across the country (including NYU, where he teaches, and Yale). These well-publicized incidents eroded public trust in higher education, he argued, particularly among conservatives, beginning a shift in public sentiment that made possible today’s heightened taxes on university endowments and potentially disastrous disinvestment in research. And yet, in my reading of his lecture, Haidt—who describes himself as a political centrist—seemed to be saying this so-called wokeness wasn’t a political phenomenon at all. Rather, from a psychological standpoint, he called it the difference between coming to college in “defend mode” versus “discover mode.” 

Students were no longer arriving at universities “like a kid in a candy store,” he lamented, but “scanning the horizon for threats.” And social media—the way it encourages users to seek attention, the way it enables other users to shame them, and the way it both captures our attention and destroys our ability to pay attention to anything for very long—helped birth this new age of anxiety and division.

He urged the audience to delete addictive short video apps like TikTok from their phones—move them to your computer instead, he advised—and to reclaim their joy at the opportunities in front of them. At the end, he led the audience as we repeated together: “I will give less offense. I will take less offense. I will pass on less offense.”

A month later, alumni volunteer leaders came together for Assembly. The two-day event, mandated by the founding documents of the Yale Alumni Association in 1972 to make sure alumni had a voice in their organization, precedes the last home game of the football season each year (and what a year this was—see page 52). I want to thank everyone who attended a breakout session about the magazine’s future. It was wonderful to hear your opinions, and that you value what we do. Thanks, also, to the people who responded to my request last issue to drop us a line, for publication or otherwise. Please keep doing so. We can’t respond substantively to every email, but we are compiling it all as we prepare to refresh the magazine’s editorial format and digital platforms. 

Assembly included a discussion between Yale trustees Joshua L. Steiner ’87, Marta L. Tellado ’02PhD, and Carter Brooks Simonds ’99. President Maurie McInnis had just addressed the crowd—describing some of the challenges facing higher ed—and as the three took questions, Steiner said something that struck me. When talking with Yalies and others, especially those who are upset about something, he reminds both them and himself to be “curious, not furious.” It’s a phrase borrowed from the title of a 2023 parenting book that advocates a “mindset shift” to help young people navigate a fast-changing world in which they often don’t yet have the tools they need to succeed. 

As I walked home, I thought about the sheer privilege of the past couple of days, in which I’d juggled a performance of music inspired by the poetry of William Blake, a Mory’s lunch with a fascinating YAM supporter, and a tour of Beinecke. I thought about how I’d gone many hours surrounded by hundreds of people, not one of us staring at a phone. I thought about how so many of the people I’d spoken with over the previous two days had asked me a variation on the same question: Why did you come to Yale? 

I’d thrown out a few answers, all true, yet none THE answer. Then I realized: I came here because I’m not done learning. I was searching for a community in discover mode. And I found it.

That, I believe and hope, is what unites us all. We’re here on this earth to explore, to learn, to join, as Haidt phrased it, Yale’s telos: the search for truth. We’re curious, not furious. We rush to discover, not defend. Unless we’re talking the goal line at the Bowl, of course. Boola boola!