Harvard's Sanders Theater is the venue for Sandel's Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? (Photos: WGBH.)
Justice: intense argument but no food fights
A WGBH and Harvard University partnership is turbocharging the traditional lecture series with Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? In the dozen programs on ethical decision-making, top political philosophy professor Michael Sandel regularly hands the microphones to students for debates that become intense. The series, shot in HD with three cameras, also comes with a website where visitors can continue issue-oriented debates.
Distributed by American Public Television, the programs will be available for broadcast in mid-September, about the time Sandel’s new book by the same name will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
In Sandel’s Socratic-style classes, students learn about famous philosophers of the past, then apply the lessons to argue such present-day issues as affirmative action, income distribution, immigration and same-sex marriage. The program is shot under the stained-glass skylight of Harvard’s historic, 1,200-seat Sanders Theater. Harvard estimates more than 14,000 students since 1980 have participated in Sandel’s lectures. That makes his course one of the most highly attended in the institution’s long history.
Sandel has a particular interest in communitarianism, which emphasizes the balance between individual rights and the good of a community as a whole. He is the author of several books and served on the President’s Council on Bioethics during the recent Bush administration.
Through his engaging lectures, “he has become something of a legend at Harvard,” said Brigid Sullivan, WGBH’s v.p. for children’s, educational and interactive programming. Sullivan thought Sandel’s unique style and the enthusiastic response of his diverse students would make for good television.
Conversations about Sandel’s questions may continue in cyberspace on the Harvard-designed website, justiceharvard.org, where a preview is online. All episodes will be available, as well as discussion guides, quiz questions, readings and interactive forums. There’s audio of Sandel’s Reith Lectures on citizenship on BBC Radio; he’s the first Harvard professor to give the Beeb’s famed annual lecture since John Kenneth Galbraith in 1966. There’s also a link to his new book that bears the title of the WGBH series.
The site also puts a twist on issue polling of web visitors. After choosing an answer, users are presented with a “challenge question,” sort of an electronic devil’s advocate, prompting them to defend their stance.
Sandel told Current that through the program and website, he hopes to, “in a small way, offer alternatives to the shouting matches and ideological food fights that too often pass for political discourse today, and show that there is an alternative. People can disagree on deeply contested moral and political questions and still discuss those differences respectfully in a way that contributes to richer public debate.”
WGBH has a long history with Harvard—the university owned the land on which its old headquarters was located, for one thing. The online WGBH Forum Network offers numerous faculty lectures, and the partnership produced next year’s PBS title, This Emotional Life, hosted by psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, author of the bestseller Stumbling on Happiness. That three-episode series, set for early 2010, explores the elusive emotion. Nova and other WGBH docs also have drawn on the university’s faculty.
But Justice takes this Harvardivity “to a whole new level,” Sullivan said. “We’re really delivering a Harvard course.” Twenty-four of Sandel’s lectures were recorded between September 2005 and April 2006 and condensed into 12 episodes.
Many students in the hall signed broadcast waivers; those that didn’t sat in a specific area and could participate but were not filmed, according to WGBH spokesperson Kathryn Hathaway. Sandel noted that “very few” students opted out.
Harvard shot the lectures. The full footage was edited by WGBH to create a more viewer-friendly program, Hathaway said.
The series is set to air in the 10 largest markets and 85 percent of the top 20, Hathaway said. It’ll also be available on the Teachers’ Domain website.
Web page posted Oct. 7, 2009
Copyright 2009 by Current LLC