“Instructional Quality is the Most Important and Most Neglected Equity Issue on Campus” with Harry Brighouse

Students from underrepresented populations deal with numerous indignities on college campuses. Among these is that, on most college campuses, instructional quality is considerably lower than it could easily be. And, while suboptimal instruction harms the learning of all students, students from underrepresented populations are, on average, less well-resourced to compensate, putting them at greater risk than other students of academic failure and other harms. I'll argue that suboptimal instruction is one of the most serious equity issues on campus, an inequity in which faculty are seriously implicated. I'll suggest systemic reforms that would address the inequity, and argue that even without these reforms individual faculty members have a moral obligation to take instruction much more seriously than most currently do.

Supplemental Reading: Becoming A Better College Teacher (2019) 

Harry Brighouse is Mildred Fish Harnack Professor of Philosophy and Carol Dickson Bascom Professor of the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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