Randall Curren from the University of Rochester’s Department of Philosophy will visit Illinois State University for a colloquium titled “Market Credentialism and the Arc of Opportunity.”
The colloquium is hosted by Illinois State’s Department of Philosophy.
When: 4:30 p.m. Thursday, April 28, 2016
Where: 401A Stevenson Hall
Here’s what Curren will discuss:
Equal opportunity (EO) is commonly understood to require that all children be prepared to go to college, so they can reach the threshold of morally significant self-determination without any attractive life opportunities having been foreclosed. Rawls’s concept of fair equality of opportunity (FEO) seems to endorse the essential features of this common understanding of equal opportunity, and it depends on there being a common pool of positions and offices for which the citizens from different social class origins will compete.
However, in actual societies the pool of positions on offer may continually change, so that the terms of FEO could never be satisfied. This is especially true in a country like the U.S., in which the political pursuit of EO is largely focused on expanding access to college. This talk will argue that credential-led expansion of educational systems is detrimental to the structure of opportunity, and it will examine the significance of this for how we conceptualize and pursue EO.
