Shifting Networks, Changing Identities: The Hidden Social Costs of College Education

You are warmly invited to attend “Shifting Networks, Changing Identities: The Hidden Social Costs of College Education,” with guest speaker Professor Anthony S. Laden, Centre for Ethics and Education, University of Illinois.  

This lecture is presented by the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy, in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance and Professor Kevin McDonough, McGill University Faculty of Education.  

The event is open to all – no registration required.  

Abstract 

“Drawing on material from my recent book, Networks of Trust, I argue that colleges and 
universities impose hidden social costs on some of their students through the very 
process of educating them. I focus on the role education plays in shaping the set of 
sources of information that students trust (their “informational trust networks”) and the 
grounds they have for deciding what kinds of sources to trust (their “informational 
ideology”). While one effect of this process is to improve students’ capacities for 
knowledge, it nevertheless pulls some students away from the communities in which 
they grew up, communities who occupy and are held together by different trust 
networks. Political criticisms of higher education from both the left and the right can be 
understood, then, as giving expression to the anxieties this process provokes.”