Harry Brighouse | Instructional Quality Is the Most Important and Most Neglected Equity Issue on Campus

Students from underrepresented populations deal with numerous indignities on college campuses. Among these is that, on most college campuses, instructional quality is considerably lower than it could easily be. And, while suboptimal instruction harms the learning of all students, students from underrepresented populations are, on average, less well-resourced to compensate, putting them at greater risk than other students of academic failure and other harms. Brighouse argues that suboptimal instruction is one of the most serious equity issues on campus, an inequity in which faculty are seriously implicated. He suggests systemic reforms that would address the inequity, and argue that even without these reforms individual faculty members have a moral obligation to take instruction much more seriously than most currently do.

Supplemental Reading: Becoming A Better College Teacher (2019)

This event is co-sponsored by the Stanford Graduate School of Education, the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, and the Education and the Humanities Workshop.

About the Speaker

Harry Brighouse is the Mildred Fish-Harnack Professor of Philosophy of Education, Professor of Philosophy, Carol Dickson-Bascom Professor of the Humanities, and Affiliate Professor of Educational Policy Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison.

About the Series

Claire and John Radway Research Workshop

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and made possible by support from Claire and John Radway, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities