From Justice to Social Justice
"Why Colleges Have Become Cults" w/Dr. Lyell Asher
From Justice to Social Justice (Part 9). A decade ago, if you'd heard the word “justice” in a discussion of higher education, chances are someone was talking about Harvard Professor Michael Sandel.
In 2009, Sandel's course on justice at Harvard had been turned into a television series and broadcast across the country on PBS. From there, it went online and found a worldwide audience, especially in East Asia, where a course that mixed lecture and discussion, and focused on moral and social problems, was considered so groundbreaking that universities in China started their own courses modeled on Sandel's.
In 2011, Sandell was named by China's Newsweek magazine, "the most influential foreign figure." And in this country too back then, Sandel's justice course was considered just as revolutionary: not because of the mix of lecture and discussion, or the historically grounded study of moral and social problems—those were common enough. What was revolutionary was the idea that online courses could bring Ivy League superstars like Sandel to tens of thousands of students for a fraction of what second-tier brick and mortar colleges were charging.
As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in an opinion piece celebrating the online revolution in college education, "When outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over."
Fast forward ten years to the present, and we don't even have average. The word "justice" on a college campus now means "social justice" —but not social justice in the sense of an intellectual tradition in which Plato, Jefferson, Marx, and Martin Luther King are part of an ongoing and contentious conversation. No, this "social justice" isn't an academic subject at all because you don't really have to know anything. It's not a topic for debate, because all the questions have been answered. That's why this social justice is something you can receive "training" in by self-styled "experts" in the same way you might receive training on how to host a meeting on Zoom. It's so simple you can even get trained in social justice by the R.A. (Resident Assistant) in your dormitory.
So what happened? Well, the champions of the cyber college of the future were planning a high tech revolution, there was a low tech revolution already underway. This revolution was undermining all the things that made residential colleges special in the first place: face-to-face encounters with informed discussions of real issues, in real time, where freedom of thought and speech were paramount.
This revolution was spearheaded by a huge influx of more and more administrators, mostly trained in ed schools, at a time when the number of students and professors was actually in decline. Just in that short period between 2013 and 2018, for example, while instructional faculty members decreased by 14,000 administrators in student affairs and student services increased by 24,000. And what most of these administrators brought with them was a cookie-cutter ideology of Social Justice handed to them by ed schools, the weakest and most political academic institutions in the nation.
More than two decades ago, having a so-called disposition for social justice was made a requirement for students in many of the nation's ed schools. In the year 2000, even the nation's largest accrediting agency for ed schools, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, made measuring students' dispositions for "social justice" one of the criteria by which ed schools themselves would receive a passing grade, or not.
Pause for a moment to really think about that. Measuring students’ dispositions for social justice—in other words, making sure students have a positive attitude toward a particular ideology, and toward narrowly partisan definitions of diversity, equity and inclusion was one of the factors that determined whether an ed school would become accredited.
In 2005, the education writer and researcher Diane Ravitch commented on this political litmus test and accurately predicted what's happening in K through 12 education today: "Once that becomes the criteria for institutions as a whole, it gives free rein to those who want to impose it in their classrooms." Had she known about the ed school move into higher education, she might have added: "It also gives free rein to ed school trained administrators who want to impose it in college dormitories, in first-year orientation meetings, in social justice training sessions, and throughout the entire university."
So what is this ed school version of social justice that in a mere decade, displaced the intellectually vibrant discussion of justice that made Michael Sandel so famous ten years earlier? I'll explain that in the next video.
Watch this video and all previous videos on YouTube, Odysee, or Rumble.
Video shot and edited by Travis Brown | The Signal Productions (Locals, Twitter, YouTube); Motion graphics by Gav Patel (Twitter, Instagram)