The term “meritocracy” was coined by the British sociologist Michael Dunlop Young as a spoof. In his 1958 satire, The Rise of Meritocracy, 1870-2033, Young gave an imaginary account of a smug elite: Instead of ancestry, ability had determined their social position. Rule by this select few appeared both benign and bountiful because of a talent-based formula for assigning status. Test scores (or other suitable substitutes for innate talent or aptitude) mattered the most. Because those who had risen in the status hierarchy had attained their positions through talent and effort, they were better able to justify their continued rule—they had earned it.
To Young, such a testocracy was not a shining vision but a nightmare. And more than 40 years after the publication of his book, he was “sadly disappointed” at how the word he coined has “gone into general circulation, especially in the United States.” He intended to warn society about what might happen if, in assigning social status, it continued to place formal educational qualifications over all other considerations. In Young’s fictional world, anyone unable to jump through educational hoops would be barred from a new, exclusive social class as discriminatory as older ones based on inheritance.
And that is exactly what has happened. Through their admissions criteria, our colleges and universities have adopted Young’s nightmarish meritocracy. Cocky boys and girls internalize success and take personal credit for the trappings of privilege, including the educational resources and networks of their college-educated parents. The rise of the testocratic meritocracy has enabled those already at the top of the heap to continue to preside without a sense of moral or political accountability. They believe that their “advancement comes from their own merits,” as Young writes, and thus that they are entitled to their power.
But that is not the only possible definition of merit. The Latin deservire means “to devote oneself to the service of.” In Vulgar Latin, that came to mean “to merit by service.” We need to revive that notion of “democratic merit.” Democratic merit would provide access to education to those who serve the goals and contribute to the conditions of a thriving democracy. It does what our current meritocracy fails to do: creates an incentive system that emphasizes not just the possession of individual talent and related personal success but also the ability to collaborate and the commitment to building a better society for more people.
Our nation has always prided itself on overthrowing tyranny. We now have a new one in our midst: the tyranny of our current understanding of meritocracy.
In 2012, universities, businesses, advocacy organizations, and communities of color held their breath as they waited for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin et al. The case had been brought by a white applicant who argued that the university’s race-conscious admissions program was unconstitutional because it had denied her admission on account of her race. When the court released its opinion, on June 24, 2013, proponents of affirmative action breathed a sigh of relief. The majority opinion was anticlimactic, even reassuring. While it vacated a lower-court ruling in favor of the university, it upheld diversity as a compelling issue in admissions. Justice Clarence Thomas agreed, albeit on different grounds. He wrote separately that any naming of race was tantamount to bigotry. He described race-conscious admissions as a type of “discrimination [that] has a pervasive shifting effect” because the “University admits minorities who otherwise would have attended less-selective colleges where they would have been more evenly matched than the white and Asian students with whom they must compete.”
Justice Thomas’s argument—about what some like to call the “mismatch effect"—is a stark reminder that our universities have drifted away from their public mission to create active citizens in a democratic society. They have shifted their attention, instead, to that single moment in a student’s college experience: the moment of admission.
If, as Justice Thomas argues, students must be admitted only to those places that “evenly match” them, what responsibilities are left to higher education? Colleges would perform little more than sorting functions, cherry-picking students who have come up the escalator of excellence and arrived at their doorsteps presumably prepackaged and pre-equipped with everything they need for success.
The drift from a mission-driven to an admissions-driven system of higher education should give us all pause. Admissions to postsecondary education in Canada provide a stark contrast to the way things work in America. In Malcolm Gladwell’s October 2005 New Yorker article “Getting In,” he tells his own story of how, as a Canadian teenager, he applied to universities in his country. He recalls filling out an application one evening after dinner, when he spent “10 minutes” ranking his preferred universities. His high school sent in his grades; there was no need for an SAT score or to ask anyone to write a letter of recommendation. “Why would I? It wasn’t as if I were applying to a private club,” he recounts.
Robert Paul Wolff and Tobias Barrington Wolff make a similar argument in a law-review article, “The Pimple on Adonis’s Nose,” published a few months before Gladwell’s essay. In it, they paint a picture of the tiny imaginary island republic of Invertia. The father-son professors then take the reader on hypothetical visits to two of Invertia’s pre-eminent national institutions: a world-class hospital and a top-flight university.
In the hospital’s emergency room, the visitor sees two patients: one suffering from an apparent heart attack and one complaining of a small pimple on his nose. Unexpectedly, the emergency-room staff leaves the heart-attack victim to die, turning its attention to the second man, a tall, tanned figure whom the Wolffs call “a veritable Adonis.” The Invertian minister of health tells the Wolffs: “Invertian society needs an elite core of superbly healthy men and women whose every last imperfection or blemish has been meticulously removed by the most modern techniques of medical science.”
Admissions procedures at the university the Wolffs visit, however, are quite the opposite. There they describe the summary rejection of a straight-A scholar-athlete who, in her free time, performs as a concert pianist and volunteers with inner-city and disabled youth. An underachieving, semiliterate young man is chosen in her place. A university representative explains that “the young woman is already so well developed intellectually that she does not need what an elite university can offer.” By contrast, the young man needed help: “Imagine the thrill we all feel when one of those young people, whose mind had all but ceased to exhibit curiosity and creativity, begins to read, to write, to think, to argue, to question a world that has, until then, been closed to him.”
The authors use the fantasy to show two stark alternatives: a world in which resources are used to improve even further those in near-perfect health versus one in which even the lowliest of citizens are given the tools to cultivate their intelligence, to excel, and to contribute to their society. I find it extremely disturbing that our universities resemble more closely the hospitals that take in classes full of Adonises to treat them for a pimple than they do mission-driven institutions that are engaged in educating and nurturing all of their students.
I want to make it clear that I am not talking about affirmative action here. The loud debate over affirmative action is a distraction that obscures the real problem, because right now affirmative action simply mirrors the values of the current view of meritocracy. Students at elite colleges who are the beneficiaries of affirmative action tend to be either the children of immigrants or the children of upper-middle-class parents of color, children who have been sent to fine prep schools just like the upper-middle-class white students. The result? Our nation’s colleges, universities, and graduate schools use affirmative-action-based practices to admit students who test well, and then pride themselves on their cosmetic diversity.
How do we move from admission to mission? How do we move past that moment of admission, which may only confirm one’s present status, to granting an opportunity for a diverse and worthy group of individuals to learn how to work together collectively and/or creatively to help solve the deep challenges confronting us?
I need to qualify what I said about affirmative action. I am not advocating an affirmative action that refuses to challenge the current meritocracy, nor an affirmative action that relieves universities of their responsibility to mentor and nurture their students. I do not propose affirmative action that wrongly holds at fault its so-called beneficiaries for the fundamental flaws of our test-driven merit system.
However, when we redefine merit by those characteristics that indicate a student’s potential for success in our democracy—leadership, the ability to collaborate with others, resiliency, a drive to learn—then we might be able to make use of actions that give a high priority to such traits.
No standard of merit can avoid involving a choice about which characteristics of applicants are valuable. The measures of democratic merit may take some getting used to. But the vast majority of colleges and universities say in their mission statements that higher education is a public good. Let’s take them at their word. Admissions criteria should continuously be reassessed for the degree to which they help the institution and its constituents make present and future contributions to society.
I have seen the benefits of democratic merit firsthand. At Harvard University, the final exam for my “Law and the Political Process” class permits, but does not require, small groups of students to volunteer to work together in teams of three or four. Working in teams generates confidence and, most important, bolsters students’ understanding of the assigned reading over the semester.
I’ve seen some group finals that were not very good and some individual finals that were terrific. It’s not as if I’m going to give more credit to a group final than to an individual final. But I see a final exam as a learning opportunity rather than just a judging opportunity. Working with two or three other people, you have to explain why you’re doing X or Y so it makes sense to your colleagues. In the process, your colleagues may give you feedback that can refine and expand your thinking.
I have been at this for a long time. In 1966 (I realize I am dating myself), I wrote a letter to the College Board about what was then called the Scholastic Aptitude Test:
“Gentlemen: In regard to the December 3, 1966, SAT, two of the questions asked were rather ambiguous,” I began. “Since this type of problem is an attempt to determine a student’s power of logical analysis, information is given to answer the question without giving the student taking the test an opportunity to give the reasons for one’s decision.”
I went on to detail the problems with the questions. I don’t think I ever received a response. When I got to Radcliffe College, at Harvard, the SAT followed me. During one of our first conversations, my freshman-year roommate immediately explained that she was worried she would never get married because she would never find a man as smart as she was—after all, she had perfect scores on the SAT! Even then the conflation of self-worth, or other-worth (in terms of whom you wanted to spend the rest of your life with), with test scores struck me as odd.
Instinctively I sought out my posse of black women at Radcliffe. We wanted to express our concern that there were very few black women being admitted to the college. We sat in the corridor leading up to the dean’s office. We were told to be very “ladylike.”
I graduated from college and then from law school, and early in my career I took a job as assistant counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. That was my first experience in collaborating with co-workers in a way that the whole really was greater than the sum of its parts. We were a group of people committed to helping make a sustainable change, not just for blacks but also for Latinos and for poor and working-class white people.
When I introduce my students to that kind of environment now, I’m not summoning them to support the NAACP. What I want them to feel is what it is like to work with somebody else to change the status quo. You are part of a group of people—some of whom are similarly situated, and some of whom are differentially situated, but all of whom have a common goal.
People who say giving a group final exam is cheating most likely have never practiced law. You don’t usually write a brief by yourself. It isn’t as if each member of a team is given one witness to prepare and question on the stand. Everybody works together.
When we don’t encourage collaboration and the whole host of complementary skills relevant to greater understanding, we lose out. Instead we choose people who excel at the same, limited things; admit them to the best colleges; and send them off to do their own individual work in their own individual careers.
Testocratic is not democratic merit. Yet when you look closely, it’s everywhere.
Lani Guinier is a professor at Harvard Law School. This essay is adapted from her book The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America, published this month by Beacon Press.
