Structural Information Justice

This chapter engages information from the perspective of structural justice using a case study of learning analytics in higher education, drawing heavily on the “Drown the Bunnies” case at Mount St. Mary’s University in 2016. This case suggests the outlines of an increasingly common approach to promoting student “success” in higher education in which early academic and non-cognitive data, often from students at other universities, are used to build a student success prediction algorithm that uses a triage approach to intervention, targeting middling students while writing off those in most need of help as inefficient uses of resources. Most common ethics approaches—privacy, individualism, autonomy, and discrimination—capture at best only part of the issues in play here. Instead, I show that a full analysis of the “Drown the Bunnies” model requires understanding the ways that social structures perpetuate oppression and domination. Attention to more just organizational, politico-economic, and intellectual structures would greatly attenuate the likelihood of cases such as the Mount St. Mary’s University case, adding an important dimension to information justice. I conclude by contrasting the “Drown the Bunnies” model with an implementation of learning analytics at UVU, which did much better in part because of structural preconditions that support justice.