Michael Sandel’s Great Injustice

I’m in Justice. It makes me fear for the future of the academy.

Michael J. Sandel’s Justice: “Ethical Reasoning in Polarized Times,” being taught to over 800 enrollees for the first time in over a decade, is a relic from a bygone era of higher education.

No phones, no computers, no food, no pyrotechnics. Sanders Theatre, 9:45 a.m. It’s a class — not just in philosophy — but in raw attention.

And students have struggled to pay that price.

Justiced imagined itself in the mold of large-scale philosophy courses immemorial. It imagined students stocking the pews of Sanders Theatre, enlivened by the early-morning chill. It imagined them clutching spiral-bound notebooks and pens, their young minds starved for lively debate on the ethics of Bentham or Socrates.

Critically, it imagined we would willingly forfeit our devices for two hours a week without complication.

Students proved those expectations wrong — either by opting out of the course at first glance of the syllabus, or by demonstrating just how crushing the urge to reach for our phones can become.

Justice has become a daycare, where scores of 18-22 year-olds fidget about anxiously under the eagle-eyed supervision of roving teaching assistants. They while away each lecture reprimanding students for cell phone or tablet use; hoarse reminders of the no-screens policy have become the lecture’s natural underscore.

The response to strict classroom policies is a signal that instruction in the traditional lecture setting is quickly dying. And Sandel’s rosy but effectively flawed attempt at resurrecting that vestige of Ye Harvard of Olde is proof of the rocky road facing attentive, rigorous intellectual engagement in the modern University.

I wish barring laptops made for better education. But, alas, it’s not the screens themselves to blame — it’s the erosion of the University as a place protected from the cares and expectations of the outside world.

Indeed, in my experience, in most lecture courses where computers are permitted, students aren’t playing video games — they’re typically multi-tasking. They’re juggling some supernatural combination of passive listening and participation, note-taking, emailing, scheduling, p-setting, job hunting — maybe even eating.

Almost every student here is guilty of this habit, from time to time — including me: It’s a necessary recourse given the limited hours in each day and the limitless expectations placed upon us. We run clubs. We pay bills. We apply to internship after internship in a labor market that seems more competitive than ever before.

It’s unabated hyper-productivity that got us here. And it’s the only way that many of us continue to excel in an environment that organically values achievement — constant, wide-ranging, achievement — above all else.

Justice, and the frustrating ways students have interacted with the course this time around, should make clear to us all that Harvard, and indeed academia as a whole, have entered into the attention economy at an extremely disadvantaged position.

Society does not reward the contemplation of justice. It rewards chronic LinkedIn posting.

So what are we to do?

We shouldn’t mourn the possibility of an attentive Harvard quite yet. Rather, we should harness the power of Justice and similar courses to restore the academy of attention — but it will take more tact than blanket laptop bans.

To dig into life’s toughest, most timeless questions has never been easy. Devices and the pressures of a world that forever expects our attention have made that harder. But to give up on the project of fully focused instruction and exchange — indeed, the kind that deprives us of our computers — would be a tragedy indeed.

Sandel and professors like him, who surely prefer attentive audiences without surveillance and the alienation it fosters, should do well to convince us of that fact without coercion. Tell us why we should focus — not simply that we must.

Justice’s biggest lesson for the modern age is this: The University is more than just a place of productivity —it is also the slow, meandering process of reflection and debate that gives rise to humanity’s greatest questions and answers.

In essence, it must affirm that it’s no negligible sacrifice to forgo your laptop, but that sacrifice is made in the service of something bigger than now, than us, than Harvard.

Convincing students will be difficult, and I don’t have all the solutions, but it begins by appealing to the importance of justice — and academic subjects more broadly — even as a million distractions pull us in every direction.

The academy urgently needs to remind its students: Justice comes from patience and discomfort and focus.

Failing to teach that to its students would be the greatest injustice of all.

Lorenzo Z. Ruiz ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Winthrop House.