"You all have to bear the burden of carrying the discussion. Are you ready to do that?" Michael Sandel '75 challenged University students last Wednesday at the inaugural lecture of the JustBooks First-Year Seminar Program. Held in the Mandel Center for the Humanities, the Division of Humanities event, "Justice, Money, and Markets," focused on "the connections between the theories of justice on the one hand and the ... positions [people] take ... [on] pressing contemporary political and legal questions that matter" on the other.
In the one-hour conversation with students, Sandel, a political philosopher, bestselling author and the University's first Rhodes Scholar, stimulated his audience as they reflected on tough questions concerning justice, defended their perspectives and ultimately determined what is fair and what is just in our society.
Valarie Timms '16 was fascinated by Sandel's control of the dialogue: "Just how he could take command of the room and ... get so many people involved at once and get so many people to care about ... the topic of justice ... is something definitely a lot of professors try to do here but not in such a ... self-involved way."

Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University and creator of the famous "Justice" course, opened the floor to debate after asking a divisive question: Is it fair for someone drafted during the Civil War to hire a substitute to fight in his place?

Mandel G03 transformed into Sandel's classroom of actively engaged students, eager to answer why the 1862 system was objectionable or reasonable. Sandel compelled students to consider the moral dilemma of a man such as industrialist Andrew Carnegie paying a replacement $1,500: Do both parties fare better in this situation? Or is it unfair that only the wealthy can pay for substitutes? Does it then become a rich man's war and a poor man's fight?

Those are some of the questions Sandel addressed in the ongoing exchange, advancing a larger discussion of what is right and wrong and how philosophy relates to the world-"between long traditions of thinking about justice ... and the hard, concrete choices that ... [people] wrestle with as citizens and ... human beings as [they] go about [their] lives."
Sandel "successfully challenged a lot of notions that we have, pointed out an inconsistency in our thinking in that we think that it is bad for the Civil War era to sell out a place in the army of the draft whereas in this day and age, it's okay ... to hire essentially mercenaries from the American population," said Michael Sklaroff '13.
But Sandel did not only challenge students' moral reasoning about the army; he encouraged them to think critically about organ sales-whether there should there be a free market for them; sweatshop labor-whether it is fair to be paid to work under sweatshop conditions; and jury duty-whether one should be able to hire a replacement.
"In Michael Sandel, you have someone whose scholarship is thought-provoking in a way that has challenged people in how many different languages and how many different countries and has a depth and profundity that yet remains fresh," said University President Frederick Lawrence before Sandel spoke.
In a style that mirrored his discourse at Harvard, Sandel inspired students to expand their thought processes-a feat that University faculty and staff hope to achieve with JustBooks, the result of a collaboration between the Office of the Provost, Dean of Arts and Sciences Susan Birren and English Academic Administrator Lisa Pannella.
"We wanted to do something Brandeisian in the spirit of what Michael has pioneered, and we ended up with small first-year seminars-each with its own topic-and all of them really bringing a deep, intellectual framework around questions of social justice," said Prof. Susan Lanser (ENG).
According to Lanser, Sandel's "Justice" course, one of the most popular classes at Harvard, inspired Brandeis to develop equivalent seminars. The JustBooks program, which began this fall, merges texts from different disciplines with discussions, enabling students to "grapple over big ideas and hone their skills" in the classroom.
"With the launch of the JustBooks program, we can be confident that the graduates of Brandeis University will continue to make a name for themselves as teachers and as seekers of justice," said Provost Steve Goldstein '78 after Lanser's introduction.
As they encourage conversation on campus, Lanser said that she hopes there will be more of these seminars. While they are currently only open to first-years, if there is enough demand, they could be extended to other years.
Sandel agreed with the merits of the program: "I feel that I got not only a terrific education but also ... a sense of engagement with the world, bringing academic questions into contact with the world," which is what JustBooks hopes to enhance.