Social and Economic Justice, Without the Economics or the Justice

Editor’s note: This is Part II of a two-part series on UNC-Chapel Hill’s Social and Economic Justice program and classroom indoctrination. Part I is located here.

It usually doesn’t take much to distinguish indoctrination from education, as explained in the previous article on the topic. But questions remain about whether anything can be done about it, even when a professor’s propagandizing makes a mockery of the very subjects he or she is supposed to be teaching.  

For the most part, the Social and Economic Justice minor at UNC Chapel Hill does just that. As revealed in the previous article, students must choose one of three courses to serve as the foundation of the degree program, and two of them, Sociology 273 (Social and Economic Justice) and African Studies 416 (Social Justice Movements), are largely calls to support or join the left-wing human rights movement.

In fact, it is entirely possible (and very probable) that most of the students who pursue the Social and Economic Justice minor learn nothing about economics and darn little about justice. It is likely that UNC is graduating many students whose comprehension of the way an economy actually works would be better if they had never attended the university.

Students are expected to take three additional electives in addition to the required course on social justice, and many of these courses share the leftist perspective of Sociology 273 and African Studies 416. The list of sixty electives includes many such courses as: History 589, Race, Racism, and America; Women’s Studies 293, Gender and Imperialism; Sociology 444, Race, Class, and Gender; Anthropology 322, Anthropology and Human Rights; and African Studies 430, Comparative Studies in Culture, Gender, and Global Forces.

Such courses deal with economics only in the most superficial manner, with trendy attacks on “neoliberal capitalism” and the like. This is very troubling. Any student in the social sciences who does not gain a decent layman’s understanding of how market forces work remains ignorant of economics and is therefore likely to fall for misinformation about the subject. Only a select few of the elective courses for the program attempt to provide any such understanding, and it is very likely that students who pursue the minor in Social and Economic Justice are more interested in the courses above than in the more rigorous economics and political science offerings that do provide this understanding.

To be fair, there is a third option for the program’s required course on social justice that, for the most part, illustrates what  a college course on social justice should be,  Philosophy 273 (also called Social and Economic Justice) is taught by philosophy professor John Rick. His class is organized around presenting the major—and often opposing—views of what justice is and how it should be implemented. The course is demanding, requiring considerable reading of original texts, and two written reports.

Rick divides the course into six sections, beginning with a reading from British philosopher John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government in which Locke justifies mankind’s right to private property and the existence of inequality. The course then explores four competing visions of justice: utilitarianism, libertarianism, liberalism, and egalitarianism. Several lectures are devoted to the key proponents of each outlook (John Stuart Mill, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin, respectively). Other important writers include David Hume, Amartya Sen, and Michael Sandel. 

That is how every initial college investigation into the concept of justice should be conducted. Perhaps Rick could have dug back a little further in time and included Plato and Aristotle, both of whom wrote on the topic. Still, Locke is certainly a respectable starting point, and according to the course syllabus, Rick covered the topic in a very comprehensive manner.

The final section of the course, however, “Issues in Social Justice and Why Social Justice Matters” takes leave of the prior objectivity. The reading selections are all from writers who are identified with the political left—including one on the need to ration health care by Princeton ethics professor Peter Singer, who is not just on the left, but rather on the left’s extreme “kook fringe” (having suggested that bestiality is not out of bounds). Rick relies heavily on Columbia University philosophy professor Brian Barry’s book Why Social Justice Matters, which begins with a quotation from playwright Harold Pinter that concludes: “socialism can never be dead because these aspirations [the ‘common good’ and ‘social justice’] never die.”

More egregious than the inclusion of any particularly outlandish author is the exclusion of any serious critique of the modern concept of social justice from a conservative or libertarian perspective. Surely Rick could have assigned a couple of reading selections from Law, Legislation and Liberty: The Mirage of Social Justice, by the renowned Nobel laureate economist Friedrich von Hayek, to provide sufficient balance to the litany of contemporary writers who applaud the concept of social justice. People will be reading von Hayek’s take on the subject long after the writers chosen from the course’s final segment are forgotten.

Despite this very serious omission, the inclusion of the major schools of thought regarding distributive justice earlier in the course places Rick’s class firmly in the “education” camp.

In fact, with Rick’s course as a base, it would be possible, by judicious selection of the electives offered, to craft a serious, valuable, and rigorous program that justifies a minor degree.  One could combine, for example: Economics 267, Comparative Economic Systems; Political Science 276, Major Issues in Political Theory; and Journalism 448, Freedom of Expression in the United States.

Yet, sadly, it is likely that most Social and Economic Justice students eschew such valuable information and fill the requirements by loading up on multicultural-diversity or class warfare fluff. Indeed, most of the weightier courses offered as electives require pre-requisites that only a political science, philosophy, or economics major is likely to have taken.

While identifying classroom indoctrination is relatively easy, the same cannot be said for eliminating it. The question remains, what can be done to end such abuses of academic freedom?

There are three potential ways to deal with blatant indoctrination:

1. Schools could adopt a definition of academic freedom that accentuates scholarly integrity. The definition currently in use throughout academia forces officials to flee from making judgments based on content. Some slight change to the definition could perhaps enable administrators to address consistent patterns of verifiable misinformation, as there is in much of the Social and Economic Justice degree, by eliminating courses and programs and firing professors.

However, the possibility of making such a change to the definition is highly unlikely, given that the standard definition of academic freedom is maintained by the left-leaning American Association of University Professors.

2. Label courses taught from a particular perspective as such. This would let all prospective students (and their parents) and all future employers know exactly what the student has been taught. Such “truth in advertising” might cause a market shift away from such classes, since neither some parents nor many employers are likely to be thrilled by a transcript loaded with courses “taught from a Marxist perspective.” 

With enough pressure on administrators, some version of this could eventually come to pass. In the case of the Social and Economic Justice minor, the name alone indicates a high likelihood of political bias, but only to the politically astute.

3. Identify such courses and programs as “lacking quality.” After all, the many factual errors and substitutions of opinion for facts certainly categorize Blau’s section as such, and some of the other sections are likely to be the same. While universities are constantly reviewing programs to eliminate, more often than not low enrollment —and therefore the loss of tuition income—determines such cuts. However, academic quality, or a lack thereof, is often mentioned as another criterion for elimination as well.

This technique could find use somewhere sooner rather than later, given the current economic climate. Shrinking budgets are forcing many universities around the country to explore program cuts, and defining indoctrination as “low quality” would enable schools to make cuts for content.

The minor in Social and Economic Justice in particular offers a fourth alternative: move it out of the sociology department where it doesn’t belong. The study of justice really belongs in the philosophy department. It is a complex topic, with no simple answer, and it has occupied some of the greatest minds in history, ever since Plato penned The Republic. It should also be renamed to simply “Justice,” in order to remove the obvious one-sided socialist connotation of “Social and Economic Justice.”

Since how a society perceives justice is also an important factor in how it forms its government, a case could be made to administer the program in the Political Science Department. It could also be housed in some sort of pre-law program as well.

Additionally, the community service requirement should be dropped. There is no connection between, say, working in a soup kitchen for the homeless and gaining an intellectual understanding of justice. It is simply one more ploy to get students to focus on left-wing concepts such as class and inequality.

Furthermore, the number of electives should be reduced from its smorgasbord-like 60 to just a pertinent few. Rick’s course (particularly if a few selections from von Hayek and other conservative writers were added), combined with the three “good” electives mentioned earlier, would provide a powerful educational experience,

As it stands now, the program mostly attempts to move students to the left. UNC-Chapel Hill can do better than this with taxpayers’ money.