Mitigating Ethical Costs in the Classroom

Author(s): Jennifer M. Morton

Source: Daedalus , Fall 2019, Vol. 148, No. 4, Improving Teaching: Strengthening the
College Learning Experience (Fall 2019), pp. 179-194
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences

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 Mitigating Ethical Costs
in the Classroom
Jennifer M. Morton

Students from disadvantaged backgrounds often find that succeeding on the

path of upward mobility through education requires that they distance them-
selves from their communities, family, and friends. This distancing often in-
volves the weakening or loss of aspects of their lives that are meaningful and
important to them: their relationships with family and friends, their connec-
tion to their communities, and their sense of identity. These goods, by their na-
ture, are not ones that are easily replaced. Yet their loss can be mitigated by the
development of new relationships and new communities. In this essay, I argue
that colleges and universities have an obligation to facilitate the mitigation of
these costs for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Doing so, however,
is not as simple as it might seem. These students often feel alienated from cam-
pus life outside of the classroom and many do not even attend residential col-
leges. These two factors suggest that universities and professors will need to take
more seriously the classroom as a central site for giving students from disadvan-
taged backgrounds opportunities to enter into new relationships and find new
communities.

T
he degree to which students feel connected to each other, to facul-
ty, and to campus life has important implications for student reten-
tion, academic engagement, and learning.1 Well-endowed colleges
and universities invest significant resources in fostering community on cam-
pus by building student centers, financing student clubs, and enabling a rich
array of extracurricular activities. Some organize the first-year academic ex-
perience around learning communities: cohorts of first-year students who
take several classes together or, as in my institution, are enrolled in a small
and academically intensive writing seminar with a faculty member, ideally
one in the tenure-stream. Learning communities are intended to encourage
students to develop relationships with each other and with a faculty member.
But for universities with limited resources, learning communities are an ex-
pensive scheme. On my own campus, our tightening budget inevitably leads

© 2019 by Jennifer M. Morton

Published under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license 179
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Mitigating Ethical Costs in the Classroom

administrators to question whether we should reconsider raising the student

cap on first-year seminars.
The small, discussion-based seminar with a tenure-stream faculty mem-
ber can easily seem like an expensive luxury rather than a necessity. There
are excellent reasons to resist this thought. As William Bowen, former presi-
dent of Princeton University, and Michael McPherson have argued, one of the
biggest problems confronting higher education is the alarmingly high drop-
out rates, especially for low-income students.2 If, as the research suggests,
learning communities can lead to higher graduation rates, then they are an
important investment. In the City University of New York (CUNY) system,
where I teach, the four-year baccalaureate graduation rate is around 25 per-
cent and the six-year graduation rate hovers around 50 percent.3 These data
give institutions like mine sufficient reason to continue to invest in learning
communities.
I argue that there is an additional yet often overlooked ethical reason for
institutions of higher education to foster community in the classroom. It is a
way for them to mitigate the ethical costs that students from disadvantaged
backgrounds bear in the path of upward mobility. Strivers, as I call those stu-
dents who seek mobility through education, often find that succeeding on
their paths requires that they distance themselves from, and thus weaken or
lose, aspects of their lives that are meaningful to them: their relationships
with family and friends, their connection to their community, and their sense
of identity. This is what I call the ethical costs. Unfortunately, the nature of
these costs is such that they are not easily replaced by the many gains that a
college degree affords. Nonetheless, universities have a compensatory obli-
gation to mitigate these costs by facilitating the development of new relation-
ships and new communities for these students. Doing so, however, is not as
simple as it might seem. Strivers often feel alienated from campus life and cul-
ture; many do not even attend residential colleges. These two factors suggest
that universities and professors will need to take more seriously the classroom
as a central site for giving students from disadvantaged backgrounds opportu-
nities to enter into new relationships and find new communities.

I
teach at the City College of New York (CCNY), which is part of the City
University of New York system, one of the largest public systems of high-
er education. CUNY comprises community colleges, four-year colleges
(like my own), and a graduate center with internationally renowned schol-
ars. Our students are as diverse as the city we serve. Forty-two percent of
them are the first in their family to go to college, 38.5 percent come from fam-
ilies that make less than $20,000 a year, and 78.2 percent are students of color.

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 Jennifer M. Morton

Beyond the numbers, my students are a joy to teach. They have full, compli-
cated lives and, when the circumstances are right, those experiences enrich
the classroom in immeasurable ways. But they also struggle to complete their
degrees. Many of them work more than twenty hours a week, live at home,
and have obligations and responsibilities that pose obstacles to their academ-
ic success. Students will miss exams and assignments for a myriad of reasons:
taking their grandmother to the hospital, working full-time to support their
family, or escorting a cousin on her first day of preschool. In the most recent
class I taught, I was offered all three of these reasons. Many of my students
are caught in a difficult dilemma: prioritizing their obligations to their fam-
ily, friends, and communities over their education can set them behind and
endanger their academic success, but reneging on those responsibilities also
comes at a significant cost.
Strivers are much more likely than other students to face conflict between
their relationships with their family, friends, and community and their educa-
tional paths.4 Upward mobility for strivers often involves sacrificing aspects
of their personal lives that are important to them. These are ethical costs be-
cause they concern those elements of a life–friendship, family, community,
identity–that are valuable to most of us. Many college students make difficult
sacrifices in the pursuit of higher education, but these ethical costs are dispro-
portionately borne by strivers.
Understanding why these costs fall on strivers requires that we situate the
ethical costs in their socioeconomic context.5 Briefly, I’d like to draw our at-
tention to three factors: socioeconomic segregation, the inadequate safety
net for poor families, and the mismatch between the culture prevalent in mid-
dle-class institutions and that of lower-income communities. We have good
evidence that a large share of students born into disadvantage grow up in com-
munities where poverty is concentrated.6 These are communities in which
educational opportunities are limited and middle-class professional jobs and
housing are rare. Furthermore, it is not unusual for students born into pover-
ty to also be a part of families that lack adequate health care, elder care, child-
care, and other forms of support. Students born into these circumstances, like
many I have encountered at CUNY, end up filling these gaps in the safety net
by providing care or financial support to their families. Finally, there is com-
pelling evidence that many students from disadvantaged backgrounds experi-
ence a cultural disconnect in college.7 They have little familiarity with the cul-
ture that dominates the college campus, which can hinder their social and ac-
ademic paths through college.
Against the background of these factors, finding opportunities for further
education and socioeconomic advancement requires that strivers distance

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Mitigating Ethical Costs in the Classroom

themselves from their communities literally and metaphorically. They must

find their way into other communities–in which educational and career op-
portunities reside–that are very different from their own. In the process, they
are often unable to continue to provide the same level of support to their fam-
ilies. And as they make their way through college, they have to navigate a cul-
ture with which they are unfamiliar. This process can require painful sacrific-
es in relationships and identity, yet these ethical costs are often overlooked in
discussions about the challenges low-income and first-generation college stu-
dents face in pursuing higher education.
One might be tempted to treat these ethical costs like other costs that stu-
dents face on the path of upward mobility, such as time and financial invest-
ment. But ethical costs are not easily accounted for. The financial cost of go-
ing to college, for example, can be offset by the economic gains that a college
degree affords. When one’s relationship with a family member or friend is
lost or weakened, however, a new relationship does not simply erase the loss.
We value people in their particularity: it is this sibling or friend who matters
to me, not just anyone who plays that role.8 An important part of our well-
being is composed of goods that cannot be simply substituted or swapped by
other similar goods.9 I have provided extensive arguments for these claims
elsewhere, but the important point here is that strivers often pay painful eth-
ical costs to find a better life through education, and these costs are not easily
compensated for by the material gains that a college degree may bring.

M
uch of the meaning and value in our lives, from very early on, is
derived from our sociality.10 Friendships and our connections to
others in our community are central to leading good lives. Conse-
quently, the ethical costs that strivers shoulder concern deeply important as-
pects of their lives. For many students, the initial financial cost of college is an
investment that is offset by the many economic, educational, and social gains
of a college degree. But it would be a mistake to try to account in a similar way
for the ethical costs that disadvantaged students bear.
Notwithstanding this crucial point, ethical costs can be mitigated to some
degree. A cost is mitigated when a new value or good comes into a person’s life
that makes his or her life better in a similar dimension to that undermined by
the loss. Consider the immigrant who leaves his home out of necessity. In the
process, he loses his connection to his community. This loss is not fully com-
pensated or replaced by what he has gained from immigrating, but finding a
new community can mitigate the loss. To see this point more clearly, consid-
er what would happen if the community he seeks to join is hostile and rejects
him; even if his life were greatly improved materially, immigrating would

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 Jennifer M. Morton

have made his life worse along a very important dimension. In contrast, if he
had found a new welcoming community, he would have gained something
valuable that would not replace, but would mitigate, what he had lost.
Ideally, colleges and universities could mitigate the ethical costs that striv-
ers bear by offering value along a similar dimension to the loss, such as new
friendships and communities. Indeed, colleges often portray themselves as
places where students can enrich their social lives; this is an important part
of their marketing strategy. Residential colleges often feature student clubs,
activities, and socializing prominently in their brochures and websites. And
large public universities persuade out-of-state students, who often pay full
price, to enroll by promoting Greek life on campus.11 Unfortunately, though
this might be good advertising, the reality for strivers bears little resemblance
to the social world of college depicted in marketing materials. There are many
reasons for this, but let us focus on two here: cultural mismatch and nonresi-
dential colleges.
Psychologists and social scientists have been studying the cultural mis-
match between the culture that dominates many colleges and universities
and that with which low-income students have grown up. Psychologist Nicole
Stephens and colleagues have shown that first-generation college students are
much more likely to have an interdependent cultural model that emphasiz-
es one’s relationships to others and one’s place in one’s community, whereas
students who are better off tend to arrive at college with an independent cul-
tural model that emphasizes individual achievement. Stephens suggests that
because colleges and universities tend to be built around the independent cul-
tural model, first-generation college students tend to find college a difficult
place to navigate academically and socially, with negative effects on first-gen-
eration students’ academic achievement.12 But Stephens’s work also helps us
understand why many strivers find it difficult to make those connections that
would mitigate the ethical costs they bear.13
Some of the barriers strivers face are the result of cultural differences, but
some of them are quite directly the result of the ways in which universities or-
ganize the social life on campus. Sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura
Hamilton have shown how large public universities that seek to attract out-
of-state students (and their tuition dollars) end up organizing the campus to
serve those well-off students’ social needs in ways that marginalize and un-
derserve low-income and first-generation college students.14 Greek life, for
example, attracts students who are shopping for a college that offers a certain
kind of social experience. But the creation of what Armstrong and Hamilton
call the “party pathway” attracts students from wealthier families at the ex-
pense of serving those students who see the university as a path to upward

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Mitigating Ethical Costs in the Classroom

mobility. Students from lower-income backgrounds either end up participat-

ing in the party pathway at the expense of their academic and professional
success, or they are alienated by it at the expense of their social and emotion-
al well-being.
These barriers also affect the ability of strivers to develop relationships
with professors. For students who have not had the opportunity to interact
with many upper- and middle-class professionals or with wealthier peers, it
can be difficult to figure out how to talk to their professors outside of the class-
room. As one student explained to sociologist Anthony Jack:
My being uncomfortable going to office hours: that’s the [social] class thing. I
don’t like talking to professors one-on-one. That’s negative because [Renowned
University] really wants you to be proactive. And raise your hand. And talk. Fresh-
man year, I didn’t say a word. People who I had small classes with, if I see them on
the street, I recognize them. They won’t recognize me because I didn’t speak.15

The kind of mentorship that a professor might offer is not only important
to one’s academic success, but to feeling a sense of belonging. And it is these
forms of socializing that are the entry point into building the relationships
and communities that could provide new sources of meaning in a striver’s life.
As we have seen, cultural and organizational barriers can make it difficult
for strivers to find new communities and build friendships. But even if we
were to set aside those factors, there is another reason why strivers can have
a hard time mitigating the ethical costs they face on the path of upward mo-
bility: many do not attend residential colleges. Among all college students,
more than half live off campus, while one in four lives at home with their fam-
ilies to save on costs.16 Many are nontraditional students who have children of
their own or are working many hours a week.17 For these students, the culture
around which the university is organized poses a challenge, but the biggest
obstacle to finding those meaningful connections is that their time on cam-
pus is a precious resource. Commuting, obligations to family, and work all im-
pinge on a student’s ability to do anything but focus on schoolwork while on
campus. Participation in student clubs, campus events, and other activities in
which students might socialize requires students to find time in their already
overburdened schedules. For some students, the “campus community” is a
misnomer.
I have suggested that colleges and universities cannot assume that striv-
ers will find those friendships and communities outside of the classroom. If
we are going to provide students with entry points to building those relation-
ships and finding those communities, we need to seriously consider the class-
room as the place where ethical costs can be mitigated. But this requires that

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 Jennifer M. Morton

we rethink what obligations universities and professors have to facilitate cer-

tain experiences for students in the classroom.

B
efore considering how the college classroom can play a role in mitigat-
ing the ethical costs of upward mobility, we need to establish that col-
leges and universities do have an obligation to mitigate these ethical
costs. One might argue that because the factors that lead to disproportionate
ethical costs for disadvantaged students are structural features outside of the
university’s control and purview, no university or individual professor has an
obligation to mitigate those costs.
Let me articulate this concern more vividly. Consider a student who is fail-
ing my class because she has to work a full-time job to support her family or
misses an exam because she has to take care of her sister’s children. It’s hard
to see why the obligation to mitigate these costs should fall on the university
or on me as her professor. The argument is not that I have an obligation to give
her a pass on her assignments or to give her a grade she does not deserve. The
argument is rather that, should this student cut back on her work hours or re-
ject her sister’s request for help in order to do well in my class and succeed
in her path through college, the university and I have an obligation to struc-
ture her experience in the classroom to foster her sense of connectedness to
the college community. That is, if the students who are making these diffi-
cult trade-offs do prioritize their educational paths over these other aspects of
their lives, then we have an obligation to mitigate what they’re losing.
Philosopher Gina Schouten has argued that an important function of high-
er education is to play a compensatory role in our society.18 Wealthy parents
can invest in better education for their children, educate them with the cultur-
al capital that will give them a leg up in college and beyond, and advise them
about how to get the most out of the college experience. Meritocratic admis-
sions into university is meant to mitigate these inequalities by facilitating so-
cial mobility and improving the life prospects of those who are talented and
willing to work hard but are born into disadvantage. The university is sup-
posed to counteract those deep and pervasive inequalities, even though oth-
er social institutions, such as K–12 education, income inequality, and hous-
ing policy, are more directly responsible for them. Based on this argument,
Schouten makes a persuasive case for why elite universities have an obligation
to steer their students toward public service as a way of compensating for the
significant positional benefits they confer on students who are already privi-
leged by other institutions outside of the university.
Yet we care about equal access to higher education not just because we
hope to counteract financial or educational advantages that are available

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Mitigating Ethical Costs in the Classroom

to those who are fortunate to be born into positions of privilege; we aim to

equalize life prospects. Family, friendship, and community are crucial to lead-
ing good lives. Sacrificing in these areas of one’s life for the sake of education-
al and career opportunities is a serious form of inequality borne overwhelm-
ingly by students who are already disadvantaged. While a few strivers might
come back to their communities as teachers or social workers, the socioeco-
nomic structures are such that a middle-class life is more easily found away
from their home communities, effectively making these sacrifices permanent.
Consequently, if institutions of higher education are in the business of coun-
teracting inequality in access to good lives, mitigating ethical costs is well
within the purview of that compensatory function.
But we need not even resort to this compensatory argument in order to
understand why the university has an obligation to compensate for the ethi-
cal costs disadvantaged students pay. Universities play a direct role in exact-
ing these costs from students. As we saw in the previous section, the culture
around which universities organize their operations often assumes a cultural
model that is difficult for students from less advantaged backgrounds to nav-
igate. Selective colleges and universities admit a disproportionate number of
students from the wealthiest sectors of society and enable the operation of so-
cial clubs and fraternities that exclude and marginalize those who have grown
up in disadvantaged circumstances. Furthermore, universities and colleges
often make it difficult for students to attend part time or transfer between in-
stitutions; they provide little flexibility for those with family obligations. All
of these factors make it difficult for strivers to keep their connections to their
families, friends, and communities and succeed at school at the same time.
And, as Laura Hamilton has argued, many universities increasingly rely on
parents to do much of the advising and networking for their children, but this
unfairly benefits those students with college-educated professional parents.19
Strivers who need college to offer them an introduction to professional com-
munities end up being left behind. Thus, universities have a duty to foster re-
lationships and a sense of community for those strivers on their campuses,
not just because universities generally play a role in our society as compensa-
tory institutions, but because they play quite a direct role in exacting ethical
costs from strivers.

T
he research on campus climate and belonging suggests that foster-
ing a sense of belonging is important for the persistence and academ-
ic achievement of minority, first-generation, and low-income stu-
20
dents. My argument in the previous section is different insofar as I’ve made
an ethical case for why universities have an obligation to mitigate the ethical

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 Jennifer M. Morton

costs strivers might incur on the path of upward mobility. I have suggested
that enabling strivers to find new friendships and new communities in the
classroom might be the most effective way of doing so. One might ask wheth-
er universities should focus on structuring activities outside of the classroom
that achieve this goal instead of putting the onus on professors to change what
they are doing in their classrooms. I argue, however, that professors do have an
obligation to mitigate ethical costs in their classrooms.
The first reason why they have such an obligation stems from how much
control professors have over the dynamics in their classroom. Professors of-
ten play a direct role in making the classroom environment a place in which
strivers are at a disadvantage. A class in which the professor mostly lectures
and only takes questions from the most eager students is bound to replicate
the class and racial inequalities we have discussed thus far. It is the students
who already know how to navigate the campus culture that are more likely to
participate in such a class and to take advantage of opportunities to attend of-
fice hours as a way of developing a relationship with the professor. Unfortu-
nately, this kind of teaching is the path of least resistance for many in the acad-
emy who have themselves been educated in this way and who have succeeded
despite it. For example, as a graduate student assistant at Stanford, I was told
explicitly by the professor for whom I was teaching a section that I would only
really teach the top 10 to 15 percent of the students who “got it.” The rest, pre-
sumably, had to figure it out on their own. But the rest are often the students
who have not gone to the private schools or upper-middle-class high schools
where they were taught how to get the most out of a college classroom. A pro-
fessor that teaches in this way is replicating problematic inequalities in his
or her classroom that universities were meant to combat, and should take re-
sponsibility for doing so. In order not to replicate those problematic inequal-
ities, a professor has to create a teaching environment that is inclusive of all
students. Allowing strivers the opportunity to build connections with other
students is one solution.
The second reason why professors have an obligation to think careful-
ly about building an inclusive classroom community stems from their peda-
gogical obligation to be effective teachers for all of the students in their class-
room. One might worry that seeing the classroom as a place for students to
gain those interpersonal connections is incompatible with effective pedago-
gy. But, as I will suggest, it is in fact crucial to being an effective instructor.
For the final week of class, the students in my philosophy of race course
were required to choose an artifact from contemporary pop culture such as a
song, an advertisement, or a clip from a TV show, and explain in a five-minute
presentation how it connected to one of the ideas we had discussed in class.

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Mitigating Ethical Costs in the Classroom

The point of the exercise was to get students to draw a connection between
what they learned in class and what they were experiencing outside of the
classroom. Students chose a diversity of cultural artifacts–episodes from the
ABC show Scandal, lyrics from Migos and Kendrick Lamar, and even Kim Kar-
dashian’s cornrows–and most presentations, like my students, were engag-
ing, thoughtful, and funny.
A few of the presentations challenged the class to approach the reading
we had done in a different way. I had assigned philosopher Tommie Shelby’s
groundbreaking work on the inner city.21 Shelby argues that those in the inner
city often do not receive their fair share of the social contract and so do not
have the same civil responsibilities as those of us who do benefit from society.
A handful of my students had grown up in the Bronx and still lived there. Shel-
by’s work was, in a sense, about places like their home. For his presentation,
one of those students told us about how he was the only one in his neighbor-
hood living a “civilian” life; so many of his friends had had encounters with
law enforcement, it was as if they lived outside of civil society. He connected
Shelby’s works to the lyrics from a song he liked, but it was the tears in his eyes
as he told us about how difficult life was for those friends, whom he so clearly
loved, that left the class silent. I held back my own tears. And after a few sec-
onds of silence, the class erupted in applause.
This moment was pedagogically important, but it was also the culmina-
tion of something that had developed throughout the course of the semester:
the class had bonded. And it was this feeling of belonging that contributed
to this student feeling comfortable enough to share his experience with his
peers. It is this sense of connection or community that is so elusive and, yet,
so critically important to the strivers’ college experience. Another student in
that class sent me an email after the course was over to thank me. She wrote
that she learned a lot in the course, “but also about the students in our class. . . .
I . . . also formed valuable friendships which is actually quite hard in an urban
college where a sense of community is almost non-existent.” This is only an
example, but it lends support to what research on effective pedagogy already
shows: that a classroom in which all students, including strivers, learn is one
that is inclusive of the perspectives of all students.22
Connecting what students learn to their lives and sharing those connec-
tions with other students is just one example of good pedagogical practice
that enables student learning while also making the classroom more inclu-
sive. There are many more than I cannot detail here. 23 The point is rather that
the pedagogical obligation that teachers have is not incompatible with the
goal of building community in the classroom; it is reinforced by it. Of course,
one has to balance the different goals at stake. For example, the success of

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 Jennifer M. Morton

the presentations in my philosophy of race class relied on there being a back-

ground of knowledge that students had acquired in more traditional ways:
reading, a bit of lecturing on my part, and asking questions to get clear on the
concepts. But fostering an inclusive classroom community was a critical part
of the pedagogical process.
Even if one grants that professors have an obligation to create inclusive
classrooms in virtue of the power they hold in the class and their professional
obligations as teachers, one might worry that professors lack the skills needed
to fulfill this obligation because they are not trained to engage in community-
building in the classroom. This is a genuine worry. However, we should note
that professors are also generally not trained in conventional pedagogy either.
As Harry Brighouse argues in this issue of Dædalus, the academy is an odd in-
stitution that rewards professors for developing knowledge and skills that are
not centrally related to their capacity as teachers, though teaching is a prima-
ry part of the job. Tenure committees at many universities and colleges ex-
pect excellence in research, but only minimal competence in teaching. This is
not true across the board, of course; some community colleges and a few lib-
eral arts colleges expect excellence in teaching. Yet across much of academia,
teaching is disvalued. The answer to this situation is not to give up on our
pedagogical goals, but to change graduate student training and the incentive
structure within the university to encourage pedagogical development among
faculty.24
This last point shows us that mitigating ethical costs in the classroom in-
volves institutions, administrators, and professors working in tandem. In or-
der for professors to successfully foster inclusive communities in the class-
room, they must receive adequate training to do so. But we also need to think
about who is being hired to teach. Educationalist Lisa Delpit has made the ar-
gument, in the context of K–12 education, that teachers from communities
similar to their students’ are more likely to recognize the cultural competen-
cies that students bring to the classroom. Consequently, teachers who mir-
ror the diversity of the student body are likely to be better teachers for those
students who come from marginalized communities than those who do not
share those experiences.25 Might the same be true at the level of higher edu-
cation? Perhaps university students are different because they are older and
thus able to advocate for themselves in a way that children are not. But as we
have seen, cultural mismatch can be a barrier to students’ achievement even
at the level of higher education. The evidence on this point is by no means
conclusive, but I venture to suggest that having professors who are first-gen-
eration and/or low-income themselves might play a significant role in creat-
ing more inclusive college communities for strivers.

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Mitigating Ethical Costs in the Classroom

T
he same semester that I taught the philosophy of race class described
above, I taught an eighty-person introduction to philosophy course.
That course was meant to fulfill the writing requirement, yet I had no
teaching assistant. I did not learn my students’ names except for those of the
few who talked to me after class or came to office hours. I lectured, a lot. I was
behind on several research projects and I was investing a lot of pedagogical
energy into my other class. My guess is that most students learned a bit about
philosophy, few improved their writing, and even fewer got to know each oth-
er. Their experience of the classroom was starkly different from that of the
students in my other class.
College students experience this kind of subpar classroom experience too
often. I am not proud that I occasionally fall prey to it. But it is important to un-
derstand what factors contribute to this situation at precisely the sorts of col-
leges and universities that disadvantaged students attend: cash-strapped pub-
lic institutions. The first semester I arrived at CCNY, introduction to philosophy
courses were capped at twenty-five students; as the financial situation at our in-
stitution worsened, the cap increased. It is now thirty-eight to forty students.
Double courses, like the one I taught, used to have a teaching assistant, but the
university can no longer afford to pay for one. Financially strapped institutions
often end up saving money by increasing teaching loads and student caps per
course. Though this means that professors are teaching more students, it under-
mines the quality of that teaching and it makes it less likely that those professors
will find the time to invest in pedagogical development, mentor students indi-
vidually, or participate in campus activities. In fact, data suggest that increasing
the funding that such institutions spend per student has a greater effect on stu-
dent completion than giving that money to the students themselves.26
Financially strapped colleges and universities are also increasingly reli-
ant on adjunct teaching and online learning. But these methods of cost-cut-
ting make it more difficult for students to find those elusive connections. Ad-
juncts, who are underpaid and overworked, are often working multiple jobs at
various institutions and unable to fully invest their time on any one particular
campus as a consequence. This makes it difficult for them to mentor students,
participate in campus life, or feel a sense of belonging within the college com-
munity. In other work, I have criticized online courses for not providing stu-
dents with the space in which they can do much of the social and emotional
learning that college can provide.27 Another problematic dimension of online
learning is that it does not require students to be on campus where they might
find the kinds of relationships and community connections that might miti-
gate what they have lost. This is not to say that strivers cannot find communi-
ties or form friendships online; clearly students do. What I am suggesting is

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 Jennifer M. Morton

that these are unlikely to provide a source of value in the same dimension as
the friendships and communities that strivers sacrifice on the path of upward
mobility.
Public universities and community colleges serve the vast majority of striv-
ers and yet they are the institutions that have the most challenges in building
community on campus. But without a flourishing community, students are un-
likely to find the friendships and connections that will mitigate the ethical costs
they bear. In addition to the research showing that the feeling of belonging is im-
portant for strivers’ persistence and success in college, there is an ethical imper-
ative for making sure that students develop deep connections with each other.

I
have suggested that strivers are likely to face ethical costs–weakening of
family relationships, loss of friendships, and severing of ties with one’s
community–on the path of upward mobility. Some of these costs are
due to structural factors that extend well beyond the campus walls, but some
of them are the result of social and cultural dynamics within the university.
These costs affect important and valuable dimensions of a striver’s life. Uni-
versities and colleges can be places where strivers find new connections that
can mitigate, though not replace, the costs they pay. However, as I have sug-
gested, it is difficult for strivers to find those elusive connections outside of
the classroom. The college campus is often not a welcoming place for them,
and many do not live on campus. Institutions of higher education and profes-
sors have to take the classroom more seriously as the place where those con-
nections are fostered. However, doing so requires reconceiving of the role of
the professor. Confronted with the far-reaching changes that such a refash-
ioning of the classroom and of the professor’s role in it would require, some
might reject the role that the university should play in fostering community.
But as I have suggested, the university has a compensatory obligation to do so.
Let me close with one further reason why it is important that strivers enter
these new communities. A key factor in the ethical costs that strivers face is
entrenched segregation in American society along class and racial lines. This
segregation starts early with the neighborhood in which a child grows up and
the school she attends. If we want to build integrated neighborhoods and inte-
grated schools, we have to start with building integrated communities where
they can thrive. Strivers are uniquely positioned to foster such communities,
and universities are uniquely positioned to encourage them to do so. But it is
not something that universities do simply by admitting more students from
marginalized communities; it requires that administrators and professors be
purposeful about encouraging those connections on campus and, in particu-
lar, in the classroom.

148 (4) Fall 2019 191

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Mitigating Ethical Costs in the Classroom

about the author

Jennifer M. Morton is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the City Col-
lege of New York and at the Graduate Center–CUNY. She is the author of Mov-
ing Up without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility (2019) and has
published in such journals as Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Ethics, and Journal
of Political Philosophy.

endnotes
1 See Vincent Tinto, Student Retention and Graduation: Facing the Truth, Living with the Con-
sequences, Occasional Paper 1 (Washington, D.C.: The Pell Institute for the Study
of Opportunity in Higher Education, 2004); Vincent Tinto, “Learning Better To-
gether: The Impact of Learning Communities on Student Success,” Higher Educa-
tion Monograph Series 1 (8) (2003); and Vincent Tinto, “Taking Retention Seriously:
Rethinking the First Year of College,” NACADA Journal 19 (2) (1999).
2 William G. Bowen and Michael S. McPherson, Lesson Plan: An Agenda for Change in
American Higher Education (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016).
3 CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, “System Retention and
Graduation Rates of Full-Time First-Time Freshmen in Baccalaureate Programs by
Year of Entry: Total University” (New York: CUNY Office of Institutional Research
and Assessment, 2018), https://www.cuny.edu/irdatabook/rpts2_AY_current/
RTGS_0007_FT_FTFR_BACC_UNIV_TOT.rpt.pdf.
4 The argument in this section is drawn from my book Moving Up without Losing Your
Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2019).
5 I discuss this in much more detail in chapter two of Moving Up without Losing Your Way.
6 Gary Orfield, Mark D. Bachmeier, David R. James, and Tamela Eitle, “Deepening
Segregation in American Public Schools: A Special Report from the Harvard Proj-
ect on School Desegregation,” Equity and Excellence in Education 30 (2) (1997); and
Gary Orfield, John Kucsera, and Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, E Pluribus . . . Separation:
Deepening Double Segregation for More Students (Los Angeles: Civil Rights Project/
Proyecto Derechos Civiles, 2012).
7 Nicole M. Stephens, Stephanie A. Fryberg, Hazel Rose Markus, et al., “Unseen Dis-
advantage: How American Universities’ Focus on Independence Undermines the
Academic Performance of First-Generation College Students,” Journal of Personali-
ty and Social Psychology 102 (6) (2012); Nicole M. Stephens, MarYam G. Hamedani,
and Mesmin Destin, “Closing the Social-Class Achievement Gap: A Difference-
Education Intervention Improves First-Generation Students’ Academic Perfor-
mance and All Students’ College Transition,” Psychological Science 25 (4) (2014);
Anthony Abraham Jack, “(No) Harm in Asking: Class, Acquired Cultural Capi-
tal, and Academic Engagement at an Elite University,” Sociology of Education 89 (1)
(2015); Anthony Abraham Jack, “Culture Shock Revisited: The Social and Cul-
tural Contingencies to Class Marginality,” Sociological Forum 29 (2) (2014); Antho-
ny Abraham Jack, “Crisscrossing Boundaries: Variation in Experiences with Class

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 Jennifer M. Morton

Marginality among Lower-Income, Black Undergraduates at an Elite College,” in

College Students’ Experiences of Power and Marginality: Sharing Spaces and Negotiating Dif-
ferences, ed. Elizabeth M. Lee and Chaise LaDousa (New York: Routledge, 2015);
and Anthony Abraham Jack, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvan-
taged Students (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019).
8 See Harry G. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2004); Troy Jollimore, Love’s Vision (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2011); and Monique Lisa Wonderly, “Love and Attachment,” American Philo-
sophical Quarterly (forthcoming).
9 This sets my view apart from other notions such as Amartya Sen’s capabilities or
John Rawls’s primary goods, which are not particular in the way that the goods in
question here are. Thanks to Michael McPherson and Sandy Baum for urging me
to clarify this point.
10 Nel Noddings, Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2013); and Inge Bretherton, “The Origins of Attach-
ment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth,” Developmental Psychology 28 (5)
(1992).
11 Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton, Paying for the Party (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).
12 Mickaël Jury, Annique Smeding, Nicole M. Stephens, et al., “The Experience of Low-
SES Students in Higher Education: Psychological Barriers to Success and Interven-
tions to Reduce Social-Class Inequality,” Journal of Social Issues 73 (1) (2017); Ste-
phens et al., “Unseen Disadvantage”; and Stephens et al., “Closing the Social-Class
Achievement Gap.”
13 See also Jack, The Privileged Poor; and Krista M. Soria and Michael J. Stebleton,
“First-Generation Students’ Academic Engagement and Retention,” Teaching in
Higher Education 17 (6) (2012): 673–685.
14 Armstrong and Hamilton, Paying for the Party.
15 Jack, “(No) Harm in Asking,” 9–10.
16 National Center for Education Statistics, Profile of Undergraduate Students: Atten-
dance, Distance and Remedial Education, Degree Program and Field of Study, Demographics,
Financial Aid, Financial Literacy, Employment, and Military Status: 2015–16 (Washington,
D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, 2019).
17 Regina Deil-Amen, “The ‘Traditional’ College Student: A Smaller and Smaller Mi-
nority and Its Implications for Diversity and Access Institutions,” in Remaking Col-
lege: The Changing Ecology of Higher Education, ed. Mitchell Stevens and Michael Kirst
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015), 134–168.
18 Gina Schouten, “Higher Education, Distributive Justice, and Positional Goods,”
unpublished manuscript.
19 Laura T. Hamilton, Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College Women’s Success
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
20 Sylvia Hurtado, A. Ruiz Alvarado, and Chelsea Guillermo-Wann, “Creating Inclu-
sive Environments: The Mediating Effect of Faculty and Staff Validation on the

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Mitigating Ethical Costs in the Classroom

Relationship of Discrimination/Bias to Students’ Sense of Belonging,” Journal Com-

mitted to Social Change on Race and Ethnicity 1 (1) (2015).
21 Tommie Shelby, “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto,” Philosophy & Public Affairs
35 (2) (2007).
22 Robert B. Barr and John Tagg, “From Teaching to Learning–A New Paradigm for
Undergraduate Education,” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning 27 (6) (1995).
23 See Cathy Davidson, The New Education (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
24 Harry Brighouse, “Becoming a Better College Teacher (If You’re Lucky),” Dædalus
148 (4) (Fall 2019).
25 Lisa D. Delpit, Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom (New York: New
Press, 1995).
26 Thanks to Michael McPherson for calling attention to this point. See Commission
on the Future of Undergraduate Education, The Future of Undergraduate Education,
The Future of America (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
2017).
27 Jennifer M. Morton, “Unequal Classrooms: Online Higher Education and Non-
Cognitive Skills,” Philosophical Inquiry in Education 23 (2) (2016).

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