Moral Knowledge, Higher Education, and the Public

In this episode of the For the Good of the Public podcast, we present two sessions on the topic of moral knowledge. In the first session, Dr. Steve L. Porter, senior research fellow and executive director of Martin Institute for Christianity and Culture at Westmont College, moderates a theoretical conversation about moral knowledge, in context of higher education, with Brandon Paradise, Associate Professor of Law and Professor Dallas Willard Scholar at Rutgers Law School; Dr. Cheryl Sanders, professor of Christian Ethics at the Howard University School and the senior pastor at Third Street Church of God in Washington D.C.; and Matthew Scogin, president of Hope College. This panel reveals the differences in approaches about moral knowledge as they discuss ways to combat the abandonment of moral formation and if moral knowledge can be taught. In the second conversation, Anne Snyder, editor-of-chief of Comment Magazine and founder of Breaking Ground, interviews President Scogin about Hope Forward, a pilot program that is reimagining a way of how students pay for college. Matthew shares the five specific areas the school is studying in this gift-based system and the impact and transformation they have seen in the students as a result of this gift.

Watch the video recording of this talk on YouTube!

“You don’t have to go to school to learn how to be good.” -Cheryl [16:26]

“We want to be able to produce good people, so when Michael, in his opening remarks, talked about the state of our politics and its quality, partly tied to the quality of the people who make it up and the quality of the soul, that’s directly relevant to us today.” -Steve [21:47]

“I’m perfectly content with young people being taught very early on that you treat people equally with high respect and regard, independent of what we now call in the legal world–suspect classifications.” -Brandon [26:09]

“I think we live in a society that often likes to say, ‘You need to put skin the game to really get invested’–and I’m sure you get that critique from time to time–but what I just watched was students from all over the world from all kinds of backgrounds suddenly having an aha moment of ‘I am so humbled by this. I am clearly part of some broader fabric out there of goodwill and trust and belief, and I am now going to pursue medicine in that same spirit.’” -Anne [49:33]

“There’s 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. If we had all 4,000 presidents in the room, every single one of them–with the exception of the very elite institutions who have ginormous endowments–every single one of the presidents knows the business model is broken. And yet, no one is doing anything about it. And what we decided is how about instead of waiting for somebody else to solve our problem, let’s just do it.” -Matthew [55:23]

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00] Intro

[00:13] Two sessions as a coherent whole

[02:10] Difference of approaches

[03:33] Meet the panelists

[05:05] The disappearance of moral knowledge

[15:24] Can moral knowledge be taught?

[20:22] Moral knowledge tied to virtue

[28:04] Power and accountability

[34:16] Where they see hope

[38:45] A conversation with Anne and Matthew

[41:51] About Hope Forward