What to Whom

Funny, the things that stick in one’s mind. My last little reverie got me back to thinking of those student days: chewing on a pencil while trying to unravel the grammar and syntax of a Greek or Latin or Hebrew sentence. For some reason one of the few phrases I remember from my early Greek classes, from Book One of Plato’s Republic, was a description of the function of a physician. The Greek ran something like "he tisin ti apodidousa techne." This would translate roughly as "the art of giving what to whom." The physician is one skilled in knowing how to give to each person what is fitting. This notion comes up in the beginning of a long conversation exploring the definition of justice, or more precisely, of the just person.
It strikes me that increasingly the work of higher education is becoming "the art of giving what to whom." That is to say: we in higher education find ourselves in daily conversations about appropriate levels of academic and social support, appropriate pedagogical approaches, appropriate recruiting, and so on. Put differently, our work confronts us with daily questions of justice. How can educators act justly toward our students? Policymakers, legislators, and trustees all talk about justice at some remove, and one often hears the demand for better access to higher education for people traditionally excluded from its benefits. But the real questions of justice must be answered in the quotidian realities of life in the academy. The push for broader access has brought about a notable shift in student demographics. Students who are the first in their families to attend college (aka "first-gen"), students from under-represented minority groups, students from low-income backgrounds, students who arrive from the foster care system, students of non-traditional age, all require attention to their very particular needs if they are going to have a chance to flourish in their college studies. It will simply not do, as a matter of justice, for professors simply to hurl out their erudition indifferently, letting it stick to whom it will and slide off the rest. Nor can those who offer support outside the classroom be insensitive to the particularities of students.
If American higher education is to fulfill its immense promise and continue to be an engine of social improvement, it must, I think, come to a clear understanding of itself as an agent of justice, of providing what is fitting and appropriate to each and every student. To say this is not to commit the higher-ed enterprise to any political agenda of either the left or the right; it is rather to call those of us who work in colleges and universities to a more circumspect vision of our shared mission and calling.