More house on an ever-shakier foundation: An administrator’s perspective on institutional reforms in the context of Christopher Martin’s ideal Right to Higher Education

Abstract

In this paper version of the response I offered to Christopher Marin as part of the symposium on The Right to Higher Education at the 2022 North American Association for Philosophy & Education Conference, I present some practical challenges of post-secondary reforms in the context of Martin’s theory of the right to higher education. Specifically, I address Martin’s three jointly necessary distributive conditions – non-exclusion, adequate options and full public funding – as necessary conditions and significant constraints on meaningful reform toward his ideal of higher education within individual institutions in light of resource constraints in the nonideal, real world. I argue that we ought to aim toward fully realizing adults’ right to higher education yet to do so requires restructuring and reprioritizing post-secondary education on systemic scale.