“The Costs of Transformation” with Jennifer Morton

Morton considers the transformative potential of higher education, arguing that strivers, her term for first-generation/low-income students, find that pursuing higher education can lead to a transformative experience that cleaves their evaluative outlook. These students are torn between old sources of value — family and community — and new ones — education and career. This is not due to some inherent features of the values at stake but, largely, the unjust opportunity structure in our society. This unjust distribution makes it expensive for strivers to continue to hold on to some existing values if they want to pursue mobility. But it is not only strivers that pay the costs of our opportunity structure. Morton argues that reflecting on the case of strivers also shows us that this same system makes it too easy for non-strivers to disengage from those sources of value. Although strivers bear the brunt of the cost of how this system undercuts our engagement with the value of community, non-strivers are not exempt from its consequences.

Jennifer Morton is the Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Philosophy with a secondary appointment at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a senior fellow at the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Please note: Complimentary copies of Morton's book will be given to first registrants. Details about book pickup to follow!

Location details to come.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Education Research at Stanford (CERAS).