This chapter explores the duties of college teachers to teach and mentor undergraduate students. It argues that teaching and mentoring are currently suboptimal because college teachers are not trained to do either, and have little incentive to improve. The result is that students emerge from college suboptimally prepared both to participate productively in the economy and to participate reasonably and responsibly as democratic citizens. This is a cost to them, and to the public good. Reform is needed. But the second half of the chapter argues that, even absent reform, and even absent improvement from their colleagues, individual college teachers have stringent responsibilities to improve their own teaching and mentoring.

Introduction

The family is a problem for any theory of social justice. On the one hand, children born into different families face very unequal prospects. However those prospects are conceived – as chances of social mobility, of lifetime well-being or income, or simply in terms of quality of childhood experiences – the fact that children are raised in families generates inequalities between them that it is hard to defend as fair or just. On the other hand, any suggestion that we should do away with the family for the sake of social justice, instead raising children in centrally organised quasi-orphanages or the like, is immediately regarded as the kind of crack-pot idea that only a philosopher could possibly envisage. The objection is not simply that abolishing the family would be a recipe for disaster, flying in the face of plausible claims made by sociobiologists or evolutionary psychologists. Rather, the family is defended by appeal to the kind of rights and duties with which theories of social justice are themselves fundamentally concerned – a claim about the vital role that familial relationships play in human flourishing and the fundamental interest that people have in being able to experience them.

It seems, then, that the family is both an obstacle to the realisation of social justice (because of the unfair inequality it produces) and a key ingredient of a just society (because of the right to parent–child relationships). This kind of tension is familiar to political theorists who, like us, think of themselves as ‘egalitarian liberals’ (or ‘liberal egalitarians’). For us, achieving social justice is essentially about getting the right balance between equality and liberty. Justice requires that people be treated as equals and that requirement has serious distributive implications. It matters that people have equal resources to devote to their life-plans, or that they have equal opportunity for well-being, and on any specification of the approach (egalitarian liberals differ on the details) it is clear that social justice demands that goods be distributed much more equally than they are in the UK today. But, as liberals, we recognise that it is valuable for people to choose their lives for themselves, and important that they be accorded the freedoms necessary for them to live well.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Nationalism appears to have been on the rise since the mid 1980s. The break up of the former Soviet Union, and the dissolution of the barrier between Western and Eastern Europe triggered the political advance of nationalism in Eastern Europe, as new countries emerged, defining themselves in opposition to the previously existing regimes. Simultaneously, increased immigration from the former communist and from Muslim countries has fuelled nationalist sentiment within Western European states themselves. At its best, the latter development has prompted governments and citizens of those countries to reconsider the meaning of nationality, inducing a more inclusive and multicultural conception of “the nation.” At its worst it has provoked xenophobic backlash.

At the same time, the north–south divide between wealthy industrial and post-industrial and poor developing countries has been an increasing object of political concern. Most developing countries are no longer colonies of wealthy ones, but many bear the marks of a history of domination and exploitation. The post-colonial period in Africa in particular has often been brutal, and the extent of responsibility of the former colonial regimes for what followed independence is not clear, and, whatever its extent, rarely acknowledged by the former imperial countries. The US and the former Soviet Union used Africa and the Middle East as focal points for the Cold War, and it is hard to believe that those regions did not suffer politically and economically as a result.