One of the centerpieces of new student orientation is the an opportunity for incoming students to engage in an intellectual pursuit together.
While this years shared experience will take place over Zoom instead of in a lecture hall, the discussionled by , the Joel Parker 1811 Professor in Law and Political Science and the Hans 80 and Kate Morris Director of the Ethics Institutepromises to give the Class of 2024 and transfer students a taste of the academic culture theyll be joining as members of the 窪做惇蹋厙 community.
Bedi is asking the students to read chapters from his recent book, Private Racism, and respond to questions hes posed on Canvas, 窪做惇蹋厙s learning management system. On Sept. 13, the students will tune in to Bedis live Zoom lecture, which he is organizing around their answers.
I want to use this book to engage students in what Im calling a practice of disagreementand to model this as we discuss issues of racial justice, Bedi says.
Private Racism looks at racial justice from the perspective of two prominent methods of approaching political theory. On the one hand, theres an ideal society approach, which says we should treat race as morally irrelevant, Bedi says. That is, in an ideal world, racial differences would have no impact on the application of justice.
On the other hand is what Bedi calls an actual society approach, which looks at racial inequality and racial stereotyping in our actual society to see how we can address that.
These two methodologies often generate vigorous disagreement among scholars, but part of Bedis thesis is to show the places where they agree. I show that theres an overlapa moral consensus that private racism is wrong, he says. And so my argument is not beholden to one approach or the other, but arises from both approaches.
Bedi hopes to challenge students to think about and apply both theoretical frameworks to a hypothetical problem, such as how to create a racially just process for casting a Hollywood movie.
The idea is that they can practice the kind of disagreement that scholars engage in when theyre discussing these issues, he says.
The book itself benefited from a practice of disagreement Bedi encouraged in his own classroom. Three years ago, in his Race, Law, and Identity seminar, he says, I had students read earlier versions of the chapters and told them they could discuss them in their final papersbut they had to be critical of what I was saying. I got some great papers.
That student feedback helped inform Bedis revisions. And now first-year students are going to be reading the final product that in part is based on what their fellow students had a hand in, Bedi says. I want them to see that what theyre reading and what theyre engaging with is a product of 窪做惇蹋厙of the academic experience that we have in the classroom.
Bedi says this kind of intellectual practice is the same for faculty as it is students, regardless of academic discipline.
I want the 24s to see that faculty are students of their discipline, he says. I consider myself a student of the law, a student of the Constitution. I may have more information or knowledge that I can impart to students, but were all students. Were all engaging in learning in the classroom.
Hannah Silverstein can be reached at hannah.silverstein@dartmouth.edu.