Is Meritocracy an Idea Worth Saving?

Joan Wong for The Chronicle

Back in February, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Program for Public Discourse convened a forum on “Meritocracy in Higher Education.” The event was hosted by Sarah Treul, a political scientist at UNC, and featured the New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat, the anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom, the philosopher Anastasia Berg, and the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, the latter three of whom had written about meritocracy for The Chronicle Review a few months earlier.

This discussion took place before Covid-19 changed everything. But the topics — the definition of meritocracy, the role of universities in a just society, the composition of socioeconomic class, and the real purpose of education — are as relevant as ever. As we figure out what to make of our university system in the wake of this unprecedented crisis, this conversation offers an urgent and intelligent guide.

Sarah Treul: When I think of the meritocratic ideal — that social and economic rewards, rather than family status, should track achievement — it’s very much in alignment with the American dream, working hard, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. But here, with the exception of Thomas, all of you seem to be against meritocracy, which is an increasingly popular opinion in American culture.

How did we get here?

Caitlin Zaloom: Meritocracy begins with the idea that people have to be measured on a scale of human value. So when we have decided that meritocracy is the way into higher education — or in particular into government, via higher education — it becomes an essential problem, because participation is then premised on the idea of achievement on a hierarchy of values which you may or may not have subscribed to in the first place.

Anastasia Berg: I don’t think I am against meritocracy. Obviously certain roles in society and certain honors should be going to someone who is most competent for them: the Nobel Prize, or a teaching award, or who should perform eye surgery on us.

The question is whether this is the right measure for determining who should be entering universities. There are objections from the left and from the right. I find the left ones persuasive, which is to say, in effect, that the pretensions to meritocracy are not borne out, if we actually look at who gets into colleges. We find out that there’s huge correlation between the kind of material support that people have, and their ability to perform on the kind of exams that allow people to get into colleges.

But what I also find problematic has to do with what has formerly been thought of as a conservative critique, although I think that leftists and liberals and progressives should be as concerned about it as anyone else: The current way of running college admissions concentrates talent, ambition, and competence in very few areas — on the coasts, in a very few universities — and draws potential leaders from communities elsewhere. Moreover, the current system leaves people blind to all the ways in which they owe gratitude to a community, for all the help that allowed them to achieve.

Ross Douthat: It’s useful to remember that the term “meritocracy” was coined as a description of a dystopia, in a book by a British civil servant written in the late ’50s called The Rise of the Meritocracy. It was a tongue-in-cheek evocation of some pompous civil servant from somewhere around our own era, looking back on what he saw as the self-selection of the cognitive elite to rule over a society that was drained of talent, drained of ambition, and had all power centers outside the elite deprived of leadership and talent from within.

It’s reasonable to look at class divisions in the United States and much of the West and say that at least a partial version of that dystopia has come to pass. College-educated and more-than-college-educated Americans cluster together in geographic hubs in ways that they did not 50 or 60 years ago. With that concentration comes a mix of economic and cultural stratification that is linked to populist disturbances on the right and the left alike. You can trace similar geographies in Brexit, and support for the National Front in France, and so on.

There are two questions that hang over meritocratic debates. First, are there ways to successfully either devolve or claim from below forms of power in our society that aren’t dependent on credentialism? And second, is there a different kind of education that we could give to our meritocrats that might better equip them to govern the Western world slightly better than it’s been governed for the last 20 years or so?

Thomas Chatterton Williams: At the risk of being the most myopic analyst here, I want to talk about meritocracy not in the abstract but through the lens of personal experience. My father was a black man from the segregated South, really old enough to be my grandfather — he’s 82, born in 1937. He is the first in his family to get an education, and he did not grow up in a meritocracy. He grew up in an America that told him when he was pursuing his graduate education that niggers don’t get deferments in the state of Texas. So he was getting drafted when every white student was getting a deferment. That, in my book, is not a meritocracy.

But he raised my brother and me with a kind of immigrant’s belief in the idea that knowledge and effort and exertion are the only power of the poor and the oppressed. We attacked everything that was in our control. That really came down to the SAT test for me, because I didn’t even go to the kind of high school that offered AP courses. So my GPA wasn’t going to reflect the same type of effort as people who were going to prep schools. But there was a standardized measure that I could put all my effort into, and that was the SAT. To do well on the SAT also gave me confidence that I wasn’t getting a handout, that I could perform in spaces where other people had greater advantages than I had. I understand that that’s a selfish way of looking at the matter, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it takes a kind of privilege to sneer at meritocratic measures that allow people to advance.

Treul: Why has meritocracy as it relates to college admissions become such a lightning rod?

Zaloom: For families, getting into a prestigious college feels like the way that they can give their kid a shot. But lower-income people are largely shut out or discouraged from elite universities — that’s a background fact — and now, even for middle-class people, 50 percent of middle-class young adults can expect to do less well than their parents. We’re in this very unequal and unstable situation, even for middle-class people who these universities were designed to support.

Treul: How do we strengthen public education before college? I feel like we’re putting a lot on colleges.

Zaloom: There have been incredible funding cuts in public policy, especially since 2008. So the first thing to do is to get back to earlier levels: strengthening the middle, not only at the Chapel Hills of the world but also at state-tier public universities and community colleges. That will make this kind of moonshot less important, so that young adults can get a good education close to home and without meritocratic assessment feeling like it’s going to be a life or death, make or break situation.

Berg: There are amazing, overqualified teachers everywhere, at the 150 top colleges and universities in this country. I went to Harvard, and I don’t remember anything I learned in college. What distinguished Harvard is not the classes, and it’s not the teachers, and it’s not the library, and it wasn’t the reading list. What really distinguished the experience that I had at Harvard was my colleagues or peers.

My experience was seeing a lot of people’s talents being completely wasted by isolation: moral isolation, geographical isolation, cultural isolation. Even people who started out on interesting careers took a hard left to building an app or making more money.

Douthat: That is what Harvard is in the business of doing, the sort of condensation of networking and people having access to each other’s ideas and family connections and all the rest. That’s what Harvard institutionally is committed to, and that’s how the Ivy Leagues made the transition through the 1960s from being finishing schools for a particular elite that had particular power in the Northeast, and over U.S. foreign policy and on Wall Street, but that was not yet a national, let alone an international, elite. So the Ivy Leagues basically said, all right, the age of the WASP is over, we’re gonna commit WASP suicide — a very dignified thing involving boat shoes and Europe — and we’re gonna field an international elite. The way we’re gonna do this is by becoming a networking hub that doesn’t attempt to teach any particular quantum of anything.

There’s no Harvard curriculum. There are great professors and wonderful classes and, God help you, you can cobble it together yourself. But that’s not what the school is there for. Part of the problem with the idea of meritocracy is that it becomes a justification for saying that you don’t need to impart some particular idea, because we’re just in the business of picking the best students — we’re not, like, building an elite or something. Meanwhile, they’re totally building an elite!

It’s the same dynamic with affirmative action. If Harvard is an elite-forming institution, then it isn’t unreasonable to say we want the percentage of students in our classes to reflect the racial composition of America. But you can’t say that with one side of your mouth while, with the other side of your mouth, saying, Oh, we’re just about equal opportunity. That’s a permanent tension in the life of meritocracy.

When I was in school, in 1998-2002, my sense was that the system was in its flower — people believed in meritocracy. My parents’ generation benefited intensely from meritocracy and had a really strong belief in the system. My sense of things since then is that the sort of ruthless inner logic of meritocracy has become such a devouring force that lots of those upper-middle-class white people want out.

And they especially want out because suddenly they’re being outcompeted by mostly Asian immigrants. So you have this strange dynamic of upper-middle-class white people who suddenly are like, Well maybe we should get rid of the SAT! You have to study the whole student!

I’m not sure whether to be sympathetic or not. On the one hand I think that inner logic of meritocracy is vicious and terrible in certain ways. It’s careerist and horrifying. At the same time, if the alternative to it is upper-middle-class white people pulling up the ladder so that immigrant strivers can’t get into the Ivy League, I’m not sure that’s necessarily an improvement.

Treul: I think one of the problems that much of your writings touch on is that in our overemphasis on scores, GPA, a high-powered career after university, we have lost our sense of civic duty. How can we bring that back?

Williams: There’s two questions. One is, what is life for? What is meritocracy for? It can’t be that all of this enormous emotional, financial, and scholastic investment goes toward creating the next meaningless app.

Hanging above all of this is, What is equality? And how can human beings be equal? Are we equal? I’m not sure that you can have a conclusive conversation about meritocracy if we can’t figure out equality, figure out the difference between equality and equity. Figure out how in this extraordinary era of inequality to stem some of that. Meritocracy just reflects much of our inequality — and not just within society. In a family of four, the members are not equal in terms of their abilities. How can you pretend that the city of New York can all be equal?

Treul: And perhaps we shouldn’t be so concerned with equality and outcomes. Perhaps it’s more about opportunities.

Zaloom: One of the problems of focusing on elite universities is that we are privileging one mission in the university over another mission, which is, How do we develop citizens? That is what universities have been for since the beginning: not only producing an elite at Harvard or UNC or whatever, but actually developing citizens and citizenship skills with which graduates can go back into their communities and lead and participate. The conversation around meritocracy has pulled us away from a discussion of the university citizenship mission.

Williams: I do think we are constantly having the wrong conversation. Going to Harvard is cool, but it’s not a human right, you know? My brother rebelled against the kind of meritocratic regime my dad was trying to put us through. He would have benefited from a society like Germany where there was a value placed on vocational training, where you can have path toward a well-paying, dignified career that didn’t require you to pretend you wanted to sit around studying the great books when you don’t.

Berg: If universities could make citizens, that would be nice. But the numbers, which people are quite proud of now, are that a third of Americans go to college — and that’s the highest it’s ever been? I mean if that’s the only way to get citizens….

Douthat: A third finish. It’s closer to half who go.

Berg: Suppose even the half finish. That still leaves the other half. If that’s the way to make citizens, what do we do with the rest? We have to make room for the dignity of other paths.

Zaloom: I don’t think universities can exclusively do this, but they’re one of the places that can do it.

Berg: When we talk about civic duties, there are abstract ideals we can teach our students, but part of civic duty is feeling that you have something in common with somebody who’s radically different than you. And that’s something that Harvard will never give you. And you will never turn back from it. I think getting to actually know people who are different than you is essential to the cultivation of civic duty, and that is not something we can simply do in a classroom.

Zaloom: But it is something that happens in classrooms, and especially in our public colleges and universities. I’m a graduate of the University of California, and there’s no place on earth like the nine schools in the University of California for mixing people who did not think they were gonna end up together. Classrooms are places where citizenship is taught because we enter them and engage across differences — that is an essential part of what teaching is and what our university systems do in their best moments.

Douthat: There’s citizenship as democratic participation. And then there’s a sort of special elite obligation — to whom much is given, much is asked. Those two blur together, but they aren’t quite the same. Some of the arguments that are specific to elite education are about the second. I think you can see some of what gets described as social-justice-warrior activism on campuses as, in part, a response to the dynamic you’re describing. People feel like they’re in a world that is about elite self-dealing and self-interest and never having contact with people outside the elite. There’s a desire for something like religion, or military service, these kinds of things we associate with the older elite.

You can see left-wing agitation on campus as in part a desire to re-moralize. To say, You’re an elite, these are you obligations — you need to scrutinize your own privilege. I have fairly strong disagreements with some of the places those discourses end up, including places that might exclude me from speaking on campuses someday, but I think the impulse is reasonable.

This doesn’t resolve the separate but equally important question of why the elites are all going to Silicon Valley or Wall Street. They do go to Washington, just not in the spirit of service. There’s a sense that opportunity in America exists in the entanglement of Harvard, Silicon Valley, D.C., and Wall Street. That is opportunity in America today. What are the power centers that aren’t connected to that world? Labor unions? No, they’re gone. Religion? No, it’s in decline. Regional elites and power brokers? No, they don’t matter anymore. That dynamic can’t be addressed with the discourse internal to meritocracy. It has to be addressed with political action that involves people who are traitors to their class. It also has to come from below.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.