cc
talk is on unequal access in the >> Sara Goldrick-Rab: Today's
Harry is a professor in the mphilosophy department and an
affiliate of educational policy studies.
Most of his teaching is in
ethics, and he has a variety of poresearch interests spanninged
political philosophy, philosophy
policy. We're very happy to have him
here today. Harry's going to talk for about
30 minutes or so at the most, and, unfortunately, his
scheduled discussant wasn't able
to have more time to engage tHarry in provocative Q&A which
I'm sure that we can count on.
Harry Brighouse: So I was very touched by Cory Mason's
comment yesterday, and I should just sort of say he's not here
today, but he didn't effect what I do a little bit.
He effected what I do quite a lot when he bugged me about the
Wisconsin Idea. I'm going to tell you a story,
basically, and it's not a very
I agree with what they said, by nice sthe way.ally.
Maybe I should just sit down. Unequal access is a fact and
it's a fact that won't go away
society, which I don't think are absent really radical changes in
frame I have. I don't mean in the next half
hour. I mean the time frame that I
have to do anything myself. Maybe my children, maybe my
children's children, but I don't
And because of that fact of unequal access and the facts
about the world around it which I think are bad facts, I think
we live in an unjustly unequal
that's going to change much in society, but I don't think
in, 20, 30, 40 years. Because of that, we, in public
flagships, play a role we'd like
This is Richard Vedder's that's a bunch of bull comment, and
I'll spend a bit of time
And that role, the role that we actually play that we wouldn't
like to play, because we play it
obligations that we have that are stringent and they're a bit
more demanding than we'd like them to be.
I think Sheila talking about we don't want to change what we do.
I think because of what we
obligations to change some of actuallwhat we do.ve some
I'm going to start by just
These are principles of justice. introducing two principles.
recognize them. ThThe first principle is whatll
Rawls calls the difference
what Rawls calls the difference principle, principle.version of
And it's a principle, really, when you think about it in
relation to education, about the
the uses to which human capital develoare ultimately put.tal and
The second principle, a quality of opportunity principle, this
is the bunch of bull principle
about the distribution of the fdevelopment of human capital.l
What the second principle says
development of human capital is that the distribution of the
people's social origins. should be independent of
was talking about should be Thgetting just as high qualitye
experiences in schools and in colleges as similarly smart,
wealthy kids and
than dumb, wealthy kids. maybe better experiences
agree with Richard. There is a distribution of human
capability among people.
don't think can take a bunch of I kwhat we offer in higherle I
education or what we should offer in higher education.
I will say that coming from Britain, which I do, I always
think of that group as being
people do because we have Prince much smaller than I think some
[LAUGHTER] Charles.
are visibly not very great, Andand yet he's a remarkably,lly
in fact, remarkably capable functioning person.
[LAUGHTER]
investment went in there. A >> George Bush.nal
Well, yeah. But he didn't take advantage of
it. Prince Charles was actually
taking advantage of what was
And has a sense of obligation too, which is maybe part of what
my story is.
it takes me a little while to Okget to the point here, but Ik,
hope you'll bear with me. So those are the principles I
want you to be thinking about.
theory of justice, equality of Now, I'm just saying Rawls'
priority over the priority opportunity, has absolute
It's so important to get quality principle.
anything that might harm a of opportunity that you don't do
sake of benefiting the least quality of opportunity for the
I think that that's a totally implausible view, that quality
of opportunity is that
world. important, even in an ideal
were plausible in sort of ideal theory, it would be the wrong
way to think about things in our
these principles are very poorly actual world in which both of
Okay, this is the only instantiated.
you. principles I'm going to show
more straightforward. So, here is a question: what do
universities do?
This is the answer that we have when they evaluate us for
tenure, this is sort of the answer that we have on our
sheets. What we do is we teach
undergraduates ,and you have to do it pretty badly not to get
tenure, but I think you can do
tenure. We do research, and that's
really important because that's what we like to do, and the
world really needs that 25,000th article on Shakespeare
in the last 20 years. Then we do service.
It's not quite clear what service is.
I think these interact, and I think of a lot of undergraduate
teaching as being service.
which is not for undergraduates I also as being teaching.service
Going out and talking to people in the community or writing
op-eds or whatever, that's
people who didn't ask to be teaching, taught.st teaching
[LAUGHTER]
like to say about what we do. I think that's a nice answer.
In fact, it's not exactly what
full story. wSo there's a certain normative
story about higher ed in the US which higher ed is a motor of
social mobility.
opportunity. It's a mechanism for equality of
I don't know the over time And it really is not.
time changes in Britain. changes but I do know the over
Ward said is that over time the Aproportion of working class ord
lower class kids in university
population compared with the relative to their proportionate
has not changed in a hundred proportion of upper class kids
Higher ed has done nothing to increase relative mobility.
The extent to which it has
hasn't changed over a 100 year effected relative mobility
I imagine in the US it has a period.
And it may have done in the last bit.
doubt that. 1Let's just look at the social I
origins of kids.
remember who said this but I think Richard, I can't
If you look at the percentage of somebody said this.
colleges, thankfully is us and a students in the 150 elite
3% from the bottom quartile, lot of state flagships, only
And then the next 256 that are 74% from the top quartile.
or moderately selective, somewhat selective
That's the top 10% or so you get 46% versus 7%.
of colselectivity.ms of
This actually could change some,
Sheila. bI think higher ed in a worldh
that is stratified in a way that
to be, higher ed performs this ours is and is going to continue
political pressures for it to fucontinue to perform thisge
function, of essentially
Now, you take those kids from the more advantaged parts of our
population and, I'm pointing
there we are, and what do you do this in the wrong direction,
So there are three things that for them?
I'm really interested in colleges do for students, but
I'm not really interested in the undergraduate education here.
We can talk about that later if you want to, but it's the
teaching undergraduates function
So, we do a number of things that I'm interested in.
One is that increase their that benefit undergraduates.
desirable positions in society competitiveness for the
them. When college recruiters go out
to high schools, or middle
tell them, my daughter got this when she was in middle school,
they came and told us why we
I said, why is that? should go to college there.
And I just looked at them Sand I think who the hell
told you that?
Yeah, there are lots of people [LAUGHTER]
that, but you should not be wgoing to college for that.r
That's outrageous.
college for this. SI'm glad to say I didn't geto
that. I really had a horrible time.
[LAUGHTER]
I am glad they do, it's just But most people seem to, and
There's also the intrinsic value not the point of going there.
this is going back to Sheila. In a world in which only, first,
of all, I think there would be
people in college if the only people who went to college were
the people who really wanted to get just the intrinsic value of
learning. So actually there wouldn't be
that many jobs. But the truth is, lots of people
go to college and get the intrinsic value of doing the
learning even though it's not what they wanted.
And if we do our jobs properly, and I'll say something about
what that would mean later, then
want to or not, they're going to it doesn't matter whether they
You get these kids, all they get it.
competitiveness, but you force want to do is increase their
of learning, and they think, them to get this intrinsic value
fantastic. wow, that was great, I got that,
Seduced by the pleasures of analysis, yeah that's great.
I know people in this room...
for whom I'd like to think
So, there's a premium that I played a role in that.
This is the higher earnings, and attaches to going to college.
and we talk about higher we think about higher earnings
But, in fact, and by the way, professional degrees are really
a good deal in terms of higher
But we'll just say that philosophy PhDs...
[LAUGHTER]
bit of my business, don't. Which is sort of the secondary
grad school site, "We will If they say on the philosophy
they're lying." increase yo[LAUGHTER] potential,
And they just might be
with the real world enough not sufficiently out of contact
So we think about that a lot. But, in fact, that's only a
small part of what going to college gets for you.
What does money matter? Money can't buy you love, right?
People who care about money and so care about what I just talked
about, they're kind of shallow
But there are lots of other things that you get.
Maybe if you care about status, you're a shallow person too, but
it gets you higher status.
higher status is attached. You get the position to which
about your job being Now, it's not so shallow to care
People care about having interesting.
competitive helps you get a more interesting jobs, and being more
Control over your daily life, that's something everybody cares
about and everybody should care about.
It's really important for avoiding stress.
And one of the reasons that poverty is so awful, it's not
really because you don't have any money, it's because you lost
control over your daily life. You're at the beckon of
a landlord at the beckon call of a low level manager who is,
A, incompetent and, B, doesn't care about you.
It also gets you better health. The education seems to get you
better health, and being in the more interesting job and having
the highest status and more control over you life gets you
better health and a longer life.
people who care about higher And I'm willing to say that
I have to say that having a relatively high income myself I
feel kind of safe to say that.
who had lower incomes and cared I wabout higher incomes, butople
nobody's shallow for caring about better health and a longer
life. Those are important goods that
everybody cares about and should
Except for totally weird care about for themselves.
because it gets them to heaven, rebut that's actually a smalldie
proportion of even totally weird
I'm not implying the religious religious people.
Weirdness is well distributed between religious and
nonreligious people, in my
[LAUGHTER] opinion.
elite education. So, this has all been about
count as elite in the terms that Most public flagships would
schools that are not flagships, I gaetc., but what, is thereese
something particular, specific, about the public flagships
relative to other elite institutions.
Well, it's really, public flagships are established and
supported directly by the state.
subsidized by the state, or at And they're more heavily
Richard told me that Princeton least I thought they were until
the state with respect to the wasundergraduate teaching.d by
This is what elite universities did.
This is the not so nice answer. This is the answer we don't want
to tell ourselves.
subsidies to help relatively What we do is we use public
relative advantage for their advantaged parents secure a
rewards of which are fairly unequal and the rewards of which
are really important. They're not like winning, my
little boy, my 5-year-old, is very concerned about getting a
trophy, about winning a trophy. And we're not talking about a
trophy, we're talking about longer life, health, status,
things that really matter.
I was really struck by this quote in Zemsky/Wegner/Massy's
book, Remaking the American University, because this is
what I always thought higher
encountered these people who education was about until I
the liberal arts and improving talk about liberal education and
When I went to college, I thought I was learning how to do
philosophy and everybody else was learning how to make money.
Going through a process they had
into the positions that they to go through in order to get
I went to a relatively elite wanted to get into.
and it always seemed to me that collelots of people sort ofite,
misunderstand the core business.
competitive advantage Tat necessarily high prices.ng
One of the reasons that tuition at elite institutions has gone
up so much is because so much more money, relative to 30 years
ago, is in the hands of a very
now can outbid everybody else and want to be able to outbido
everybody else. And those top elite institutions
actually, I'm friends with
institutions and have senior people who are in those
they're my friends so they're posinot bad people because Ions,
wouldn't be friends with bad
They're trapped partly by this, and they try and do their best,
in fact, to use the resources they get to do good things.
But, still, this is what they're
And to some extent, we're doing that too, but we're doing that
not as a private institution
a public institution that is set that's set up to do that but as
The state authorizes us and, to some extent that I don't know,
I'm sure Sara can tell exactly, but to some extent it
subsidizes. So what could possibly justify
us in existing? The first answer is there's
nothing.
should privatize, we nearly did, We should just get rid of, we
institutions. wMichigan, Virginia havee
effectively done that or nearly done that.
Or abolish them.
is hard, but I bet you could do Abolishing soit.hing this size
So the state shouldn't, it's bad
private institutions doing this enawful thing, the publicse
institutions with public money
unforgivable. We're not going to privatize,
well, we might, but we're not going to abolish public
flagships.
privatize them fully. And I don't evWhy?hink we should
There are a number of reasons.
things about public flagships, One is there are lots of good
of general sense. I think, basically, human beings
are quite good at destroying
quite a long time to create good good things, and it takes them
And when there are good things, even when they're attached to
bad things, you want to be
rid of the whole things that pretty cautious about getting
you may end up replicating the you're getting rid of because
good. So just a general conservative
principle makes me reluctant to abolish these institutions.
I also think that nothing would fundamentally change.
The injustices would be just as bad without them.
I don't think that privatizing
would suddenly, would do UW Madison a high state, etc,
more equal access or to improve the quality of what happens in
the colleges and what happens beyond them.
It may be easier to exert pressure to diversify access to
elite positions.
is what I want to talk about the And it may be easier, and this
to orient developed talent rest of the time really,
through public institutions. to socially valuable ends
institutions exerts some And it may even be the public
to do this. pI would just say, this is mores
about the diversify access to elite positions, actually,
contrary to what you said earlier, in the last 10 years on
any measure of disadvantage, the
of students at UW Madison propoundergraduates who arebers
disadvantaged has increased.
increased for those students as And the gradwell.n rates have
Not dramatically in either case,
Okay, so what could justify but ithe institution--orse.
sorry-- There's a joke about a really
horrible old man who dies and people come to his funeral and
the preacher says, look,
an exaltation about him noand nobody says anything.ve
He says, somebody must have something nice to say about him.
And they sit there in absolute
man at the back stands up and she says, "I knew his brother,ld
he was worse."
How much worse things would be [LAUGHTER]
institutions depends on what, that is to say, it depends on
what we currently do and what we
abolished, what we decide we're going to do in the future.
So, let's see.
it to do? WI've already talked for a long
time, and I've got a couple of
Maybe that's it. things I want to say.
I've got to fiddle with that. OkaSo, maybe.it.
I just want to make an
missions of elite institutions, oand in particular the missions
of public undergraduate colleges, should be.
So I'm at mission variability,
I think it's right. I think it's absolutely fine
that there should be religious
missions. It's absolutely fine that even
public institutions that are
missions. flagBut the fact that we'rerent
complicit in a system that
obligations. incurs unfair advantage incurs
unequal access, that is the Ondecrease of unequal access.al
I don't think we can do a lot about that, but we can do some
about it. And by real access I don't mean
getting low income disadvantaged
can drop out after a year. students on to college so they
so they get taught in ways that I enable them, actually, toege
graduate after however many years it take people to
graduate, five-year, six-year rates.
The thing I want to focus on is service to the public, service
to the public interest. This is something I think we
could do a lot more about.
like, some institutions sort of miss some of what they could be
doing.
Sorry, I'm gothis.o skip through
How is it that undergraduate
interest? So, how we serve the public
interest depends. Assume just to stratify entry.
So assume the same students are coming from the more advantaged
places. Whether we're serving the public
interest in teaching them depends on these factors.
Are we just passing them, credentially passing them, or
are we actually building their
That's the first question. human capital?
building their human capital, we To the extent that we're
capital available for everybody are increasito use.pool of human
Then, to what extent do they use
their own interests, their own that human capital simply for
use them to the public benefit, ein particular, the benefit ofey
the least advantaged? And to what extent, however they
use it, does the human capital
dispersed. and its uses get widely
different institutions. ObvioSorry, this is reallys for
frustrating.
up on this. Well,I'll just tell you.t give
I just thought I'd give you an
Harvard. example of two institutions.
Harvard graduates, I've actually In 2007, the proportion of
not sure which is the right one, got two different figures, I'm
graduate school but who got jobs who didn't attend law school or
65% depending on who you listen on Wall Streetto.s either 47% or
Now let's compare that with the UW Milwaukee School of Nursing.
The proportion of those graduates who got jobs on Wall
Street in 2007 is zero percent. I called them up and asked.
[LAUGHTER]
And I said, how many of them And they told me zero percent.
And they said, somewhere between went into nursing?
sure. 9One of those institutions isy
attempting to build a capital of
capital to widely dispersed use. people who are going to put that
institution, well, not so much. Now I seem to be on it.
I really don't think this is my incompetence.
This is a rare case where I don't think it's me just not
being able to do it.
Oh, yeah. >> Just use the keyboard.
Oh, yeah. That doesn't work.
Oh, yeah it does. I want to do five more minutes.
Is that all right?
education serve the public So, how might undergraduate
currently does? How might flagships serve the
public interest better than they
I've just given three main, just do?
we might do better, what we tmight be doing better than wew
do. The key thing I wanted to talk
about is the last, the fourth,
you know that it's the one I which is in red, which is how
If you think about to improve undergraduate education,
yesterday David Ward was saying a lot of this falls on us, and I
think that's right. I wish it wasn't right, but I
think it is right because I don't think national and state
level policymakers, certainly as
little control over what they a faculty memdo. I've got very
I don't think they are going to respond particularly well to the
crisis we're in, or if they do, as I've indicated, I don't
think they're going to do it in ways that really are about
building human capital, getting it disperse properly, and
diversifying access and making
Institution level administrators for better public service.
think institution level aadministration leaders have I
relatively little power in
Though, I also think, my universities.
campus has been that they are well willed and competent ands
just not very powerful. So I'm not worried about them.
I think they've got things
But I'm an individual faculty member within a department, and
that's what I can really do.
some sort of space for action. Whatever those guys do, I have
extent, as can all of my I can change what I do to some
And what we could do, we can colleagues.
I think we need to have, maybe improve our instruction.
but whether we teach two-two or four-four or whatever it is, we,
could be doing it better, in my opinion, than we do.
Think about, those of you who do
at and provides feedback on your research, think about who looks
And how you do this. research.
other people do who are really What you do is you watch what
and you learn how to do it and experts at it and you mimic them
and you change what you, you put you get feedback from experts
energy, and effort into this and enormous amounts of time,
with the teaching. then think about what you do
essentially, from students and The feedback is some numbers,
you bother to read what they can some of the things they say, if
And some of what they say is say.
But you don't have continuous feedback, that happens at the
end of the semester.
class coming up to you at the end of every class saying youe
did this wrong and this wrong and this wrong.
That would be a rude way of saying it.
But you know what I mean. [LAUGHTER]
We could have people who do that.
We could have people who, we
we could just spend 10 minutes could be watching each other or
out and said at the beginning of with a student that we've picked
people teach, I'd like to know class, okay, you watch a lot of
think I did right and what you at the end of the class what you
You don't get to control what I think Ido.d wrong.
I get to listen to what you do, and then make more own judgment.
We could be putting, if you thought about changing faculty,
tenure track faculty have enormous power I think in these
institutions, tenure faculty, sorry.
Tenure faculty have enormous
If you thought about having them power in these institutions.
15 hours a year, to talking to a devote maybe 10 hours a year,
themselves teach, say, twice on a video with a group of students
who point out all that you only did was talk to her, or you're
going back and forth like a ping
them talk to each other, or have pong ball rather than letting
interrupting them as they you noticfinish. you keep
These are all things that students have said to me.
[LAUGHTER]
interrupting them every time No, I did not notice I was
She did. they said anything.
we can do that would, there are also other things that we could
be doing. We can think about how we
mentor, who we mentor.
tend to think about students who Do we, as in the disciplines, we
professors eventually, which is, are going to become philosophy
a minuscule proportion of the students we teach, and mentor,
them. I'm not saying we shouldn't
mentor them.
Or should we think about people who are not like us?
Think about finding students, or at least be very open
to students who are going to do other kinds of things in the
world that are valuable things, not that philosophy isn't
valuable, but that are valuable things in the world where we
could really play a role in improving the quality of their
human capital and influencing how they use it, as well as
seducing them with the pleasures
I'm just going to stop there. >> Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]