Economic Justice

Christa Mazzone 5-01-2003
Building international and cross-cultural knowledge.
Melissa Snarr 5-01-2003

To borrow a term from social movement theory, universities can be "movement halfway houses" that educate leaders for social justice. Higher education institutions have trained and nurtured numerous social movements and activists that have changed our world. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which played a key role in the civil rights movement, came from a coalition of college students. Northern college students infused Freedom Summer's voter registration drives. More recently, student networks have rapidly expanded protests of corporate globalization and the U.S. Army's School of the Americas. Anti-sweatshop and living wage movements also are building momentum because of students.

These movements emerge, in part, because university faculty and staff are part of the conscientizing process of young people. Universities emphasize systemic analysis of social problems. They prize critical thinking skills. They encourage creative use of language and symbols. Combine these skills with higher education's focus on developing leaders, and we can see the potential of the universities to produce multiple generations of justice seekers.

We find the summons in our institutions' mission statements, the statements that no student, faculty, or staff ever really reads. But it's there, the call to moral learning and social justice. At some schools, the commitment is explicit: "Loyola Marymount understands and declares its purpose to be: the encouragement of learning, the education of the whole person, the service of faith, and the promotion of justice." At others, the call is embedded in an understanding of the proper use of knowledge: "Emory's mission lies in two essential, interwoven purposes: through teaching, to help men and women fully develop their intellectual, aesthetic, and moral capacities; and, through the quest for new knowledge and public service, to improve human well-being."

Universities experience enormous pressure to deliver a marketable product. But higher education is called to be more than a conduit for career-making. Our students are more than clients. Classically, education was meant for the whole person—for "full human flourishing." As University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum notes, U.S. higher education has been devoted particularly to the "cultivation of the whole human being for the functions of citizenship and life generally." At the core, universities are more than service providers with privileged clients. We are moral actors shaping the character and justice of society.

BUT EDUCATING change agents for social justice is not the same as encouraging increased volunteerism on campus, which is embraced much more easily by institutions and a broad political spectrum.

Elizabeth Palmberg 5-01-2003
Exploring social change on the stage, street, and classroom.
5-01-2003
Preparing Christian agents of urban change.
Elizabeth Palmberg 5-01-2003
Local culture meets global issues.
Integrating justice in all fields of study.
Jim Rice 9-01-2002

A victory for vouchers - but who wins?

Rose Marie Berger 5-01-2002

Architecture students at Alabama's Rural Studio raise shelters for the spirit.

Jim Wallis 5-01-2002

For those who care about poverty in America, the coming months are a critical time, a turning point similar to the New Deal of the 1930s or the War on Poverty in the 1960s.

Nathan Wilson 1-01-2002
As the economy heads south, it's the poor--as usual--who bear the brunt.
Bob Hulteen 1-01-2002

Definitional books come around about once a decade.

Jim Wallis 1-01-2002

I just returned from Ground Zero in New York City.

David Shapiro 9-01-2001
What does standardized testing have to do with education?
The refundable tax credit will help 500,000 children in poverty.
Gregory Fritzberg 5-01-2001

'Easy' solutions like standardized testing won't solve enduring problems like economic inequality.

Leading Venezuelan educators and critics of President Hugo Chavez are calling his creation of 500 schools constructed and supervised by the military a political program for "ideological indoctrin

Jim Wallis 3-01-2001

Breakfast in the White House can be dangerous to the prophetic vocation.

David Batstone 1-01-2001

Grameen Bank operates beyond the bottom line to benefit those at the bottom of the line.

Jim Wallis 11-01-2000

Let the good times roll! President Bill Clinton was absolutely beaming as he reported the U.S. Census Bureau's annual poverty statistics.

In these boom times, the wealth gap is getting worse.