CRITIQUE Seminar – Syllabi and Social Justice with Michael Frazer (2 April)
Wednesday 2 April, 3pm – 5pm, Conference Room 3.15, Chrystal Macmillan Building
Demands for curricular reform are often defended by asserting a link between the principles that ought to determine the selection of material that academics teach and the principles that ought to govern a just society. This article considers five possible models of the relationships between university curricula and social justice. The first four models each capture important facets of the relationship between good syllabi and just societies, but each is incomplete and potentially misleading when taken in isolation from the others: 1) Identification, in which good curricular design is part of social justice; 2) Isomorphism, in which a good curriculum must take the same form as a just society; 3) Instrumentalism, in which a good curriculum is a means for achieving a social justice; 4) Isolationism, which seeks to protect good curriculum design from undue social influence. After critically examining each of these, I propose a fifth model designed to incorporate the insights of the other four while avoiding their individual weaknesses. Under the model of Interdependence, the quality of a syllabus and the justice of a society depend on each other in a wide variety of complex ways while nonetheless remaining importantly distinct.
Dr Michael Frazer, University of Glasgow
Dr. Michael L. Frazer’s research focuses on canonical moral and political philosophy, with a focus on its relevance for contemporary political theory, ethics, and the philosophy of social science. He is the author of ‘The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today’ (Oxford University Press, 2010), as well as articles in the “American Political Science Review,” “Perspectives on Politics,” “Political Theory,” “The Review of Politics,” and other journals. Dr. Frazer received his BA from Yale University, his PhD from Princeton, and has previously held positions at UEA, Brown and Harvard.