Networks of Trust: The Social Costs of College and What We Can Do about Them - Softcover

Laden, Anthony Simon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022683719X ISBN 13: 9780226837192

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2024

Synopsis

An eye-opening look at how parents’ mistrust of colleges has less to do with what their kids are learning than with whom they come to trust.

Higher education is a familiar battlefield in today’s culture wars. The right accuses colleges and universities of indoctrinating conservative students with liberal values; the left, with failing to be sufficiently inclusive. The anxieties expressed on both sides of the political spectrum have much in common, however, and they are triggered not by colleges’ failures but by their successes.
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So argues philosopher Anthony Simon Laden in Networks of Trust. He highlights how a college education shapes students’ informational trust networks: the complex set of people and institutions they rely on for the information they use to think about and understand the world. While the networks that colleges build for students have great value, learning to inhabit them pulls some students away from their families and communities. If many people distrust institutions of higher education, this is one reason why. Networks of Trust offers a path forward, one that preserves the value while reducing the harms of a college education. It includes concrete suggestions for how colleges and universities can educate students in a manner that inspires and deserves trust: one that bridges rather than deepens our social divides.

About this title

About the Author

Anthony Simon Laden is professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and co-directs, with Harry Brighouse, the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Reasoning: A Social Picture and co-editor (with David Owen) of Multiculturalism and Political Theory.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022683719X
• ISBN 13: 9780226837192
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 149