The End of Meritocracy

Architects' rendering of plans for a parking lot in Harvard Yard. Just kidding: prank picture from the Harvard Satyrical Press, March 2009, attributed to the Committee For Endowment Preservation by Any Means Necessary.

Looks like the competition for which New York Times opinionist will be first to come out in defense of the millionaires who bribed their kids into Stanford and USC has a winner, and it's not David Brooks, as I was predicting—

Can't wait for David Brooks column explaining how this is a good thing, fostering intimate connectedness among all instead of crass calculation of benefits. https://t.co/QRTXtkNZSM

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 12, 2019

—or Bari Weiss, but Harvard's finest, Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street ("The Scandals of Meritocracy"). Oh, he doesn't quite come out and say it, and he adds a trollish recommendation for racial quotas just to keep you confused as to whether he's joking or not, but I think that's what it is:

The “more meritocracy” argument against both legacies and racial quotas implicitly assumes that aptitude — some elixir of I.Q. and work ethic — is what our elite primarily lacks.

But is that really our upper class’s problem? What if our elite is already diligent and how-do-you-like-them-apples smaht — the average SAT score for the Harvard class of 2022 is a robust 1512 — and deficient primarily in memory and obligation, wisdom and service and patriotism?

In that case continuity and representation, as embodied by legacy admissions and racial quotas, might actually be better legitimizers for elite universities to cultivate than the spirit of talent-über-alles. It might be better if more Ivy League students thought of themselves as representatives of groups and heirs of family obligation than as Promethean Talents elevated by their own amazing native gifts.

That's extremely interesting, the view of what problem "meritocracy" is supposed to solve, the problem of practical improvement, or building an elite of higher quality.

I mean interesting to me, at least, because I've literally never thought of it before, not that it doesn't make some kind of chilly sense.


I've always thought of it as a (more or less inadequate) solution to a problem of corruption and injustice—that there shouldn't be a permanent elite class at all, defined by birth and wealth, and in particular a governing structure you can buy your way into and embezzle your way through to the permanent enrichment of your descendants. The idea, whether for the use of a Han-dynasty emperor or a Gilded Age president, is to stop bribery and cronyism in a way that isn't completely arbitrary, so instead of choosing your officers and judges by a roll of the dice you have them take an exam.

And in that sense it's precisely the obligation and service aspect that I would suggest the elite are lacking; not that they're necessarily too dumb to do their jobs, but that they're too entitled and confident they "deserve" to be where they are. That to me is a really bad arrangement. But to the Monsignor, it's just what the doctor ordered; he thinks if people got their privileges on the basis of family, they would be more likely to cultivate that sense of obligation.

And he really doesn't have any sense of a society-wide ethical issue, of fairness and distributed opportunity. He's totally happy with the thought of a hereditary aristocracy monopolizing the jobs. If he sees any ethical issue at all, it's the personal one of the aristocrats, who might be too inclined to think they're smart if they're forced to work for their positions instead of inheriting them, which I guess in his view would make them more inclined to gratitude.

He doesn't say anything directly about the subjects of the current scandal, but it's clear that in a position where test scores and college essays stopped counting (except I guess for the poors in their quota groups, who would continue to compete), membership and its privileges would be the main thing, membership in the legacy chain, of course, and the proper clubs, and ability to contribute. They could buy their way in openly instead of sneaking, just as they did in the good old days before this goldarned meritocracy took over, and that would be better for everybody, not least the school's endowment.

As worked so well, don't you know, in the Anciens Régimes of France and England in the 18th century. Nothing like selling commissions to the army officers and tax farms to to their older brothers in the local nobility to convince everybody that noblesse oblige.

(I'm not saying I favor making the system more "meritocratic" because I don't; I favor making it more democratic, making the elite institutions socially but not academically less elite than they are, as UK may have succeeded in doing to some extent in the properly academic parts of Oxford and Cambridge when they nationalized them, and other institutions definitely better, and mixing the talent all over the place, in the wider context of consulting all kids' needs rather than status anxieties, which may mean many kids of wealthy as well as non-wealthy backgrounds not going to college per se at all—but maybe getting trained in welding or organic gardening on the same campuses where you could also learn Italian or calculus... Just dreaming out loud but then so is Ross...)