Social Justice Revival?

Glenn Ricketts

That’s the title of this piece in today’s IHE, although I’ve turned it into a question because I can’t see where “social justice” in college curricula is such big news. We’ve been complaining about the inevitably “progressive” ideological slant in such courses and programs for some time, as you can see here and here, for example. Courses that aim to crank out student activists have been around for quite awhile.

If anything is new, though, it’s the establishment of entire programs and research centers that the IHE article describes, all devoted to imparting “social justice” in one way or another. They seem to be getting some pretty hefty support: At Michigan’s Kalamazoo College, for example, the new Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership just received a cool $23M to underwrite its efforts to change the world, complete with endowed professorships. Whatever “social justice” is, it’s certainly not poor.

Imagine what kind of Great Books program you could get going with even a quarter of that sum. Oh, well.

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