Members of the incoming Class of 2025 have received a copy of “Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility” by Jennifer Morton, a book Morton says she worked on while serving as a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow in University Center for Human Values (2015–2016). Selected as this year’s Pre-read by Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber, Morton’s book represents the first Pre-read by a Latinx author.
A Class of 2002 alumna of the Department of Philosophy, Morton draws upon her own experiences as a Peruvian immigrant and first-generation college student and those of students she taught at the City College of New York to explore the ethical issues of education for upward mobility and the sacrifices that first-generation and low-income students or “strivers” make in areas of their lives like their relationships to their friends, their families and their communities – and, ultimately, even their self-identities. Morton says she hopes the book will "help members of the Class of 2025 find their own path towards a more empathetic and reflective understanding of each other’s diverse experiences of college.”
Currently the Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, Morton joins a distinguished list of Princeton Pre-read authors with a connection to the University Center for Human Values. Beginning with the inaugural Pre-read in 2013 by Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor Of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values, Emeritus, Kwame Anthony Appiah (“The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen”), the list includes 2007 Tanner Lecturer Susan Wolf (“Meaning in Life and Why It Matters”), Advisory Council member Danielle Allen (“Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality”) and Roger Williams Straus Professor of Politics Jan-Werner Mueller (“What Is Populism?”).