Networks of Trust - The Social Costs of College and What We Can Do about Them

An eye-opening look at how parents- mistrust of colleges has less to do with what their kids are learning than with whom they come to trust. In today-s culture wars, higher education, a familiar battlefield, faces criticism from both the left and the right. Colleges and universities are accused of indoctrinating conservative students with liberal values and failing to be inclusive of marginalized students. The anxieties expressed on both sides of the political spectrum have much in common. And notably, they are triggered not by the educational mission-s failure, but by its success. ? In Networks of Trust, philosopher Anthony Simon Laden offers a new lens through which to view political debates about higher education. Laden argues that a college education encourages students to inhabit and use new informational trust networks: the complex networks of people and institutions they trust as reliable sources of information with which to think about and understand the world. In doing so, a c