by Jennifer Morton
Jennifer M. Morton is Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her research areas are philosophy of action, philosophy of education, and moral and political philosophy. Her book Moving Up Without Losing Your Way (Princeton University Press, 2019) focuses on the ethical challenges faced by first-generation and low-income college students.
I taught a version of this course in 2013 with the title Self: Discovery and Transformation. That course was inspired by an article in New York Magazine by Kathryn Schulz called “The Self in Self Help” that does a fantastic job of touching on philosophical issues that bear on the sorts of concerns that animate most of us, philosophers and non-philosopher alike: Do we have it in our power to change ourselves? And, what do we need to understand about the self in order to even be able to answer that question? I thought that organizing the course around these questions would be a wonderful way to introduce students to philosophical thinking. It allows us to discuss core readings in the philosophy of action and agency and the metaphysics of self while also reading memoirs and non-philosophical texts that show students the significance of those topics.
In the intervening years, two things happened. The first is that I got very interested in the experience of first-generation college students and wrote a book about how education for upward mobility can be experienced as a threat to aspects of students’ identities that they hold dear, that is, as a kind of challenging transformation. And I also read Agnes Callard’s brilliant book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming.
When I was thinking of a course that I would teach during my first semester at UNC, I knew I wanted to teach first-generation/first-year college students and that I wanted to provide those students with the tools and opportunity to reflect on their own evolving identities. I choose memoirs that I thought might speak to some of the ambivalence they might be feeling, and that I myself have often felt as a first-generation college student. But I also wanted them to feel confident understanding and engaging with meaty philosophical texts. I now think, a couple of weeks in, that I might’ve started the course too far in the deep end of philosophy of action, but we’ll see, students are warming up to it.
Since these are first-year students, much of my job in class is to get them excited about college and to prepare them for the challenges they might encounter. But, based on my work, I think it is also important that college is a place where students can sit with any ambiguity they might feel about what is expected of them without undermining their confidence that they can and will succeed. The best way to do that, I think, is to give students the space to attain some critical distance from their education when necessary, but also help them develop the tools they will need to feel confident about their ability to ‘do’ college. It’s a difficult balance to strike and I don’t know if this class will do that, but I’m excited to try.
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An impressive, ambitious syllabus, and very cool that you assigned Westover. I loved Educated, and have been pondering ways to work her ideas on self-examination, the necessity of new perspectives, familial coercion, etc. into an assignment and/or phil lecture vid. The entire book doesn’t seem philosophically relevant. But it’s definitely engaging, and of course fantastically written. And actually, a teacher could use her family’s isolationism to consider questions on citizenship, their approach to medicine to broach the usefulness of evidence and logic, Tara’s relationship with her siblings (some wonderful, some benign, some horrific) to add nuance to Care Ethics. So maybe it’s philosophically rich after all. Last, as a self-help buff and phil prof, looks like Schultz’s book is a must-read – thanks so much for sharing it. P.S. Kudos and thanks to UNC for continuing to support and host the National High School Ethics Bowl!