Recent stories featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education reveal a sizable gap between the policies, practices, and procedures guiding some of our colleges and universities and the values enshrined in their mission statements and mottos.
A quick perusal of the Chronicle website reveals recent stories that support this assertion. For example, stories about a prominent vice president of student affairs using Facebook to denigrate the culture of the country that they were visiting; a graduate student advisor who, at the behest of an academic department leader, strongly suggested that international students speak only English on campus; and an exploration of whether the deeply ingrained traditions and practices of fraternities violate Title IX, the federal gender-equity law.
In addition, there is the recent scandal about wealthy parents buying “side door” admissions to get their children into elite institutions. And, of course, we have the plethora of stories about former and current students donning blackface, which may lead one to wonder how many students would rather privately paint their faces black than publicly have an open and honest face-to-face conversation with a Black person.
The gap between our expressed campus values and many of our actions and inactions is undeniable.
For Tracy Davis and Laura Harrison, addressing this gap is one of the metrics we should use to assess whether our institutions of higher education are serious about their social justice imperatives. In Advancing Social Justice: Tools, Pedagogies, and Strategies to Transform Your Campus, Davis and Harrison reject versions of social justice education that indoctrinate liberal thought and polices speech. They fear that such indoctrination both replicates structural oppression and undermines intellectual inquiry, the core mission of our colleges and universities.
Instead of policing language that replaces one dogma with another, Davis and Harrison encourage us to co-create “equitable processes and outcomes that result from efforts to close the gap between what we espouse in our social contract and how we actually enact such a mission.”
If we truly seek to create wide scale and deeply supported change, our social justice actions must remove barriers to equal opportunities, equitable distribution of resources, and liberation from institutionalized oppression and pervasive mistreatment based on one’s group affiliation.
Davis and Harrison are concerned that far too many student affairs professionals “reinforce certainty,” “promote conformity,” and only advocate for technical mastery of vocabulary as they pursue an antiquated and unhelpful form of social justice. Instead, we should firmly plant our social justice practices in what they identify as a "dialectical discourse" that earnestly engages people with different perspectives and establishes truth through the deliberation of well-reasoned arguments.
For Davis and Harrison, social justice requires us to explore new ideas and rigorously interrogate our own beliefs and practices. Efforts to resist oppression that are premised on avoiding countervailing perspectives and prohibiting dialectical engagement across our ideological differences are antithetical to social justice.
Like Davis and Harrison, Steven Sloman’s and Philip Fernbach’s The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone presents deliberation as a powerful vehicle for engaging different ideas and taking advantage of what they describe as the “community of knowledge.” Our individualized experiences and the inability to access and process the ever-expanding amount of knowledge that humans are producing places a profound limit on all our perspectives.
Image by Took from Pixabay
Tapping into the community of knowledge allows us to move beyond our viewpoint limitations. For Sloman and Fernbach, we do this through the slow and methodical use of deliberation, which allows humans to connect to other people and ideas and think together as a community. Deliberative dialogue gives us access to facts and philosophies that we are unaware of – but reside in other people’s heads. It has a vital role to play as we work to find creative solutions to our social injustices.
We should also remain mindful that stifling deliberative dialogue across our differences undermines innovation. Breakthrough innovation, the generation of radically creative ideas, springs up at the intersection of knowledge domains that we often tend to think are unrelated.
Frans Johansson discusses the importance of combining disparate ideas in The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation. The concept is named after the 15th Century political dynasty in the Republic of Florence that inspired the Italian Renaissance by bringing several prominent bankers, artists, and philosophers near each other. The intermixing of ideas across their disciplines facilitated a level of creativity and ingenuity that the world had never seen.
Johansson avers that we can also produce breakthroughs if we are willing to explore and combine ideas from different and distinct fields. For him, connecting diverse ideas drives creativity, and the most remarkable groundbreaking innovations sprout at the intersections of cultures and when disciplinary worlds collide.
The Social+Justice Innovation Institute operates at the intersection of deliberative dialogue and social justice education. We believe that our campuses need more highly engaged deliberative processes as we seek to address the myriad of social injustices that plague our communities. We also believe that our deliberative processes will fulfill their potential if they are guided by fidelity to diversity, inclusion, and equity.
A commitment to the use radically inclusive deliberative dialogue gives us access to potential solutions that reside outside of our immediate purview. New and better ideas are needed as we work to close the gaps between our espoused values and our practices. Davis and Harrison forward that our “failure to innovate, to address concerns in truly new ways that challenge interventions that have perhaps become obsolete” means that we will continue to offer ineffective responses to the social injustices that occur on our campuses.
Emory’s Social+Justice Innovation Institute agrees.
Ed Lee III, EdD
Curriculum Director & Lead Facilitator
Social+Justice Innovation Institute
References
Davis, T., & Harrison, L. M. (2013). Advancing Social Justice: Tools, Pedagogies, and Strategies to Transform Your Campus. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Johansson, F. (2017). The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics can Teach Us About Innovation. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.
Sloman, S. A., & Fernbach, P. (2018). Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.