Peter Singer offers up a provocative article in the Chronicle of Higher Education imploring us to spend more of our time in academe addressing global poverty across the board, not simply in Sociology or International Relations courses:

We should not limit so important a topic to specialized courses on international development (valuable as they are). The issue should be prominent in anthropology, cultural studies, economics, ethics and sociology. In political-science courses, we should ask why we pay so little attention to people living in poverty outside our borders.

His concern for the neglect of the global poverty issues is so profound that he thinks we should prioritize areas of study that emphasize pressing social issues (Yay for Social Scientists! Peter Singer for Provost of the World!)

we should give a lower priority to areas of study that have no obvious connection with world poverty or with, say, climate change or avoiding war or, indeed, with any similarly large and pressing problem. That will no doubt incense some of my colleagues who think that we should study art, languages, history, mathematics, or philosophy for its own sake. I agree that, in an ideal world, studying epistemology, classical music, and Italian Renaissance art would be part of every cultivated person’s education. But we live in a world in which 27,000 children die every day from preventable causes.

While I wouldn’t go there, I’d submit that a move towards more engagement with the world through the study of its social dynamics is preferable to a move away from it. There are examples of institutions that are eliminating social science programs altogether. Contrast Singer’s view with Wisconsin Lutheran University’s decision to drop their political science major because they determined it wasn’t central to the liberal arts mission of the institution to offer (HT: The Monkey Cage).

I would caution however, as we thrust headlong into saving the world that we use Harold Bloom’s controversial reading/misreading of Plato in which he suggests the point of the Republic is to point out that “political idealism is the most destructive of human passions.” We should enter conversations with students in about how best to alleviate global poverty with profound humility regarding the complexity and contextuality of global problems and be wary of magic bullet solutions to hard, vexing problems. At the same time, I agree with Singer that we must act as if what we did mattered, whether it’s ultimate outcome actually produces desires results. I’m struck by a parallel he uses in his courses:

I draw a parallel with a situation in which you come across a small child who has fallen into a pond and is in danger of drowning. You know that you can easily and safely rescue him, but you are wearing an expensive pair of shoes that will be ruined if you do. We all think it would be seriously wrong to walk on past the pond — in fact, most people think it would be monstrous. Yet most people don’t think it wrong to buy expensive shoes that they don’t need rather than give the money to an organization that would put it toward interventions that could save a child’s life.

This intriguing thought exercise illustrates my point. One one hand, it seems monstrous to ignore mass suffering just because we don’t observe it directly. On the other, we have no way of know if contributing money to a charity would necessarily produce the desired effect. In fact a case could be made that charity has deleterious effects on economies in the developing world. Donated clothes, for instance, creates a secondary market in resold goods that undermines the development of a local textile industry in African countries.  Of course doing nothing wouldn’t necessarily mean an indigenous textile industry would thrive and would ensure that many millions continued to go hungry.

Again, this example doesn’t mean we should act or engage our students in discussions of global poverty. It means we should be intentional about having broad-based discussion about how to address them. But they should take place.