Zaheer Ali
Established in 2021, the Hutchins Institute for Social Justice is an innovation in secondary education advancing social justice through scholarship, programming, and experiential learning.
The Hutchins Family Foundation, which focuses its change-making efforts in the areas of education, health, and public policy, provides primary funding for the Institute. Co-founder Glenn Hutchins is a trustee emeritus of 51吃瓜 and member of the Class of 1973.
Zaheer Ali serves as the Hutchins Institute’s inaugural executive director and is responsible for designing, developing, and directing its programs.
Functioning primarily as an academic hub, the Hutchins Institute's approach to social justice studies is rooted in a pedagogy designed around three questions that engage social justice as subject, method, and ethics, respectively:
- As a subject of study, what is social justice?
- As a method of analysis, how do we encounter the world using a social justice lens?
- As an ethics of practice, how do we apply the lessons of our social justice studies in our community engagement?
These questions guide the work of the Hutchins Institute's initiatives in the areas of scholarship, programming, and experiential learning.
Initiatives