Abstract
Many college teachers believe that teaching can promote justice. Meanwhile, many in the broader American public disparage college classrooms as spaces of left-wing partisanship. This paper engages with that charge of partisanship. Section 1 introduces the charge. Then, in Sect. 2, I consider what teaching for justice should aim to do. I argue that selective institutions of higher education impose positional costs on members of a generation who do not attend them, and that those positional costs accrue not only in terms of distributive equality but also in terms of civic equality. Teaching for justice, I argue, should be understood as an attempt to lessen those costs. But the civic equality costs that selective higher education imposes can be meaningfully lessened only by a radical version of teaching for justice: educational consciousness raising for institutional reform. This sets up a high hurdle for any defense against the partisanship charge, because the kind of teaching for justice we have most justice-related reason to engage in seems especially susceptible to that charge. Section 3 gives a public reasons case in favor of teaching for justice so understood. Because civic equality is a commitment we all ought to share as free and equal citizens, teaching for justice aimed at restoring civic equality enjoys a public reasons justification. Still, an all-things-considered assessment of our permissions or obligations to engage in this teaching project awaits a careful thinking through of the case against it.
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Notes
To give just two examples: A report by the National Association of Scholars explains that “a body of ‘social justice educators’ has come to power in American higher education,” and it offers “recommendations on how to prevent colleges and universities from substituting activism for learning.” (Randall 2019, 17). David Horowitz’s Indoctrination U details cases of alleged left-wing propaganda in college classrooms, punctuating each story with a variation on the refrain, “this is not education; it is indoctrination.” (Horowitz 2007, 67).
I refer to “left-wing” partisanship instead of “liberal” partisanship to reserve “liberal” for the other use of that term, which I invoke later in this paper. I use “partisanship” to mean commitment to or promotion of values characteristic of a particular end of the political spectrum, which does not necessarily involve loyalty to a particular political party.
Another potential problem bears mentioning: We may have a legitimate social justice aim but fail to achieve it because we fall short pedagogically. This paper sets aside problems of execution in order to focus on worries about partisanship and public accountability.
John Rawls famously applied his theory of justice primarily to the institutional structure of society. See (Rawls 1999). He did not include universities in that institutional “basic structure,” but no matter: “Teaching for justice” might increase the extent to which the social arrangement realizes principles of egalitarian justice even if (on the strictly Rawlsian view) those principles don’t technically direct teachers to engage in it. See (Rawls 1993, 261).
On one prominent account, this means we must avoid inculcating close-minded belief. See (Callan and Arena 2009).
By “consciousness raising,” I simply mean “a collective activity—done with others,” that “prompts a paradigm shift in one’s orientation to the world” (Haslanger, 2021, 44; see also references following this quotation).
See (Callan and Arena 2009).
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Acknowledgements
This paper had a long life as a work-in-progress, and I am fortunate to have received wonderfully helpful feedback over the course of several drafts. I regret that I can’t list everyone who helped me as I developed these thoughts, but I would especially like to thank Harry Brighouse, David O’Brien, Randall Curren, Jeff Behrends, Julie Reuben, Tony Laden, Cain Shelley, Jennifer Morton, David Plunkett, Charles Beitz, Liam Shields, Rob Reich, Mitchell Stevens, Ben Kotzee, Meira Levinson, Tomer Perry, Nir Eyal, Leah Downey, Danielle Zwarthoed, Philippe Van Parijs, Daniel Halliday, Tamar Harel Ben Shahar, and three thoughtful and generous referees who reviewed the paper for Philosophical Studies.
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Schouten, G. The case for egalitarian consciousness raising in higher education. Philos Stud 179, 2921–2944 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01808-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01808-3