Rob Jenkins is a Higher Education Fellow with Campus Reform and a tenured associate professor of English at Georgia State University – Perimeter College. The opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his employer.
For all their talk about “progress” and incessant posturing as the smartest people in the room, campus leftists haven’t had an original idea in decades. They just keep recycling the same tired theories in the hope they might seem fresh to a new generation of students.
Take “social justice,” for example. Blessedly, I hadn’t heard that phrase in a while, so I wondered if it had been eclipsed by trendier ones like “white supremacy” and “decolonization”—themselves rebrandings of Obama-era “systemic racism.”
Fortunately, Campus Reform is on the job, recently publishing not one but two articles on the resurgence of “social justice.” The first reports that the University of Oklahoma allegedly mandates a “social justice curriculum” for education students, in defiance of state law, while the second exposes a DEI apparatchik at Brandeis University who touted the institution’s commitment to “social justice” in a campus-wide email.
I’m not sure why this particular expression is now being resurrected. Perhaps, with the Left’s two major franchises—DEI and “transgenderism”—collapsing, they need a “new” rallying cry. But this is a troubling development. “Social justice” is an abomination, as well as a complete misnomer.
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If by “social” we mean “bringing people together,” it certainly doesn’t do that. Nor does it have anything to do with justice as commonly understood. Indeed, “justice” is a word that allows no qualifiers. Placing another word in front of it does not enhance its meaning but rather detracts from it or negates it altogether.
It’s kind of like “smart.” Either someone is smart or they’re not, and adding a qualifier only confuses the issue. To say, for instance, that someone is “book smart” just means they have no common sense—in other words, they’re not smart. Calling someone “street smart” means they might be cunning but not truly intelligent.
The simplest meaning of “justice,” the one we all intuitively understand, is that people get what they deserve. And by “people,” I mean individuals. Because justice, in its pure form, can only apply to individuals.
“Social justice,” in contrast, is supposedly for groups—like blacks or women or men who pretend to be women. The implication is that people in those categories have historically been treated unjustly, and so everyone in that group must now be afforded certain advantages to even things out.
It’s true, for instance, that at one time, blacks couldn’t get into some colleges solely because they were black. That was clearly unjust. The remedy, according the “social justice warriors,” is to admit more black students even if they’re less qualified than other applicants.
The problem is that “justice” for groups is manifestly unjust, for a couple of reasons.
First, not every member of a group is the same, and the challenges they face change over time. All black Americans in the Jim Crow era dealt with discrimination, but some more than others. Today, practically none do, at least in the realm of higher education. No campus in America is turning people away solely because they’re black.
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When we apply the concept of justice to groups, then, we may be “righting” past “wrongs,” but we are also “wronging” present-day rights. We may appear to be treating some people more justly, but we are treating others unjustly by denying them something they deserve or handing them something they haven’t earned.
And that’s the second reason group-based “justice” doesn’t work: because justice is not a zero-sum game. You can’t provide “justice” to some by taking it from others. It’s for everyone or it’s for no one.
Justice for an individual does not require depriving anyone else of something they deserve. It may be true that when one student is admitted based on merit, another didn’t get in. But we can’t claim the failed applicant was wronged, because the successful applicant deserved it more.
Conversely, attempting to manufacture justice for any particular group always entails treating other groups—and individuals—unjustly. A “selective” institution’s “commitment” to admitting more black students because they’re “underrepresented” sounds nice, but it necessitates admitting fewer white students—regardless of how deserving they are. That’s unjust.
But that is exactly what “social justice” means. And like practically all left-wing ideas, it’s hardly new. It’s merely injustice by another name.
Editorials and op-eds reflect the opinion of the authors and not necessarily that of Campus Reform or the Leadership Institute.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
