The Right to Higher Education: A Political Theory by Christopher Martin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022

As its title suggests, Christopher Martin’s The Right to Higher Education aims to establish that there is a moral right to access to higher education. At a moment of abundant academic and political controversy about higher education’s purpose and social role, Martin’s book is especially timely. In academic and political debates about education, it is all too easy for talk about rights to proliferate. But rights are morally heavyweight items. It is difficult to establish their existence in general, and it is initially surprising to think that there could be a moral right concerning higher education in particular. Recognizing these facts, Martin faces up with admirable forthrightness to the task of defending a right to higher education (RHE), identifying autonomy as the value that underwrites such a right. Along the way, he develops an intriguing – indeed, an inspiring – vision of the role that higher education can play in a free society. Martin’s case that there is an RHE is not, as I will suggest below, unquestionable. But his arguments are clear, powerful, and rigorous. They deserve to be widely read and discussed. Martin’s case for an RHE is motivated by the shortcomings of two standard views about higher education, laid out in the book’s introduction and first two chapters. According to the first of these standard views, discussed in the first chapter, higher education is morally significant in the first instance because it mediates access to scarce and high-paying jobs and social positions. This standard view, Martin argues, should be rejected. Higher education does play such a mediating role, but it does not follow that that is the fundamental reason why higher education matters – and, consequently, it does not follow that principles of distributive fairness are the most fundamental normative principles that apply to higher education. According to the second of these standard views about higher education, discussed in the second chapter, the moral significance of higher education is roughly continuous with the moral significance of compulsory education – that is, it is something that citizens in a liberal democracy are owed. The dominant version of that view, too, Martin argues, should be rejected, on the grounds that it inadequately captures the value of higher education itself. The view does, however, contain an insight, which Martin’s own view takes as its starting point: the thought that access to education can be something citizens in a liberal democracy are owed, and so something to which they have a moral right. But, if there is a right to higher education, it has to be grounded in some morally significant interest in higher education that has yet to be satisfactorily identified. That is what motivates developing a positive case that there is an RHE. Developing a positive case that there is an RHE faces two prima facie challenges. First, how could the interest both be morally significant and nevertheless be one that is properly left up to people whether or not to pursue? Second, how could promoting the interest in question be consistent with liberal commitments against paternalistically promoting a person’s good? Martin dubs these twin challenges the “normative weight problem” (p. 8) and the “paternalistic aims problem” (p. 9). The core of Martin’s positive case that there is an RHE, developed in chapters 3 and 4, can be summarized as follows. First, if something x is a necessary condition of autonomous flourishing over a whole life, then each person has a right to x. Second, having lifelong access to higher education is a necessary condition of autonomous flourishing over a whole life. The first step expresses the familiar …