The day after April Fools’ Day in 2014, a Princeton University freshman named Tal Fortgang published a piece in the institution’s conservative magazine, the Princeton Tory, titled “Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege.” A few weeks later, Time republished it under the title “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege.” One might think the magazine was trying to be provocative.
Long story short, Fortgang didn’t like being told to check his privilege. “The phrase, handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laser-like at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung,” he wrote. Fortgang condemned his Princeton classmates for having diminished everything he’d accomplished as the product not of his hard work, but rather of “some invisible patron saint of white maleness.” He’d taken his classmates’ challenge, investigated his family history, and determined that it was the opposite of entitled. His grandfather had fled Poland and done hard labor at a Siberian displaced-persons’ camp. His grandmother had been marched through the freezing cold to Bergen-Belsen, where she’d have died had the Allies not liberated the concentration camp in time. “I have checked my privilege,” Fortgang concluded. “And I apologize for nothing.”
Fortgang’s frustration was connected to a broader ideological framework — on his telling, the challenge to him was more broadly a challenge to the American Dream, the Constitution, and even to our collective sanity. “Check your privilege,” he wrote, paraphrasing his critics, “and realize that nothing you have accomplished is real.” It’s easy enough to imagine him holding a copy of Atlas Shrugged in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other as he rails against the looters in a late-night, dorm-room bull session. “I condemn them,” Fortgang wrote of his classmates, “for casting the equal-protection clause, indeed the very idea of a meritocracy, as a myth.”
Unsurprisingly, Fortgang’s piece triggered strong responses. Katie McDonough offered a typical one in Salon:
It’s likely that Fortgang will have the opportunity at Princeton to learn about the racial wealth gap, the legacy of red-lining, the unemployment rate among college-educated men of color versus their white counterparts, the convergence of racism and sexism that leaves women of color disproportionately impacted by domestic violence, the gender pay gap experienced by Black women, the deadly violence faced by Black children and the myriad other manifestations of racism in the United States. Basically all of the things that he will never have to experience as an extraordinarily privileged white man.
Maybe Fortgang deserves McDonough’s contempt, but his views didn’t come out of nowhere. The real villains are the institutions that indoctrinated him. Allow me to present a prime suspect: Just seven months earlier, at Princeton’s opening exercises, Fortgang and his classmates got a clear sense of what the institution valued. Princeton honored seven students in the university chapel that windy September afternoon — including four for the George B. Wood Legacy Sophomore and Junior Prizes. As the dean of the college presented the winners, she announced where each had gone to high school. Five had attended prep schools — Groton, in Massachusetts; Archmere Academy, in Delaware; San Francisco University High School; Dalton, in New York; and Bolles, in Florida. One had attended Chaparral High School, in Scottsdale, Ariz., where 2 percent of the students are Black. The last attended Horace Greeley, in Chappaqua, N.Y., where less than one percent of the majority-white student population is Black, and the average family income exceeds $200,000 per year.
Princeton president Christopher L. Eisgruber, the son of an academic and himself a graduate of the university, as well as of the University of Oxford (on a Rhodes) and the University of Chicago Law School, praised the 1,286 entering freshmen as an “extraordinarily accomplished” group. “All of you have been blessed with exceptional talents,” he said, “and your time on this campus is itself a great gift. When, four years from now, you graduate from Princeton, you will find it easier than most people to be successful at whatever career you pursue.”
No one said anything that day about the unique importance of public-service careers or the students’ good fortune in being born into wealthy families. No one was summoned to the pulpit for holding down a full-time job while going to college, or for getting good grades while studying in their bathroom. No, they were instead honored for their prodigious talents and accomplishments. The message could hardly have been clearer: You deserve this.
Over the past five years or so, criticizing meritocracy has become a cottage industry, led by Harvard University’s Michael Sandel and Yale University’s Daniel Markovits. These authors do not advance the nihilistic straw man that Fortgang envisions and rebuts in his essay. They don’t say that no accomplishment is deserved, or that it’s impossible for a white male to have suffered adversity. Each believes, for different reasons, that meritocracy is bad. Each is also a professor at an elite college.
The self-taught sociologist Michael Young coined the term “meritocracy” in 1958 as a sarcastic critique of Great Britain’s postwar Education Act. His The Rise of the Meritocracy is an odd book. Young drafted it in the form of a Ph.D. thesis written from the perspective of a sociologist in 2030. A publisher urged him to turn it into a work of fiction, then, after reading the resulting novel, urged him to turn it back. One detects shades of Aldous Huxley in the finished product, if only Huxley had styled Brave New World as Bernard Marx’s dissertation. In Young’s counter-history, the landed gentry are displaced by a superiorly educated (but similarly inbred) new elite of the super-intelligent, who are debatably more deserving of their status but inarguably more arrogant because they believe in the myth of their own superiority. “The upper classes,” wrote the sociologist of the future, “are no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism.”
“Meritocracy” is sometimes employed prescriptively — and often persuasively — as a rallying cry against an unfair status quo. Civil-service exams, which the U.S. government put into effect after President James A. Garfield’s assassination in 1881, may have their problems, but they were way better than the spoils system they replaced. Former Harvard president James Conant’s advocacy of the SAT was similarly progressive in its 1930s context.
The trouble starts when the term is used descriptively, as in “college admissions are meritocratic.” Almost inevitably, when used in this sense, it’s to rationalize an inequitable status quo — and often, it’s liberals making the excuses. Meritocracy is a seductive temptress: It’s particularly alluring to the successful, says Sandel, author of The Tyranny of Merit, because it affirms their freedom and soothes any ambivalence they may have about whether they deserve their position.
The more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility.
Meritocratic belief makes elites smug. That’s annoying. The bigger problem is what it leads them to believe about others. If one believes that they deserve their place at Harvard or the yacht club, then, as Sandel says, “it means that those who are left behind deserve their fate as well.” Indeed, social psychologists have found that college-educated elites look down on “less educated” people more than they do on the poor. Ironically, these less-educated people internalize the judgments of the elite and blame themselves for their situations.
Markovits, author of The Meritocracy Trap, argues that meritocracy’s implicit framing of disadvantage as a failure of skill and effort leads to a sort of politics of humiliation. Unemployment is seen as a reflection of personal failure, rather than a societal or economic flaw. More than twice as many Americans as Europeans — approximately 70 percent — believe that poor people can escape poverty on their own. This opens the door to populism and nativism. When whites who can’t get ahead are told that they’re deficient, Markovits says they develop “a deep and pervasive mistrust of expertise and institutions.” When they simultaneously hear cries for affirmative action, which suspends meritocratic principles, Markovits argues that they devolve into identity politics.
It has become standard fare for Republican politicians to exploit this resentment of elites. Ironically, many of them, including Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, graduated from elite colleges themselves. Nevertheless, among Republican voters, faith in the academy is eroding. In 2012, 53 percent of Republicans said colleges and universities had a positive impact on the country. Seven years later, that figure dropped to 33 percent. (By contrast, 67 percent of Democrats said colleges have a positive effect at both the beginning and end of that period.)
Sandel argues that belief in meritocracy erodes the national moral fabric. “The more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility,” he writes. “And without these sentiments, it is hard to care for the common good.” In her 2015 book, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, the late Lani Guinier, who was a professor emerita at Harvard Law School, held that meritocracy has similarly degraded colleges, and that belief in meritocracy places emphasis on who wins the admissions beauty pageant over what is learned. It treats intelligence as static, instead of something that can be nurtured. Colleges, she argues, should be measured not by test scores, but by how their students contribute to society — a shift from “testocratic” to “democratic” merit.
At a psychological level, social scientists have shown that belief in meritocracy makes people act more selfishly and less self-critically. At an organizational and sociological level, meritocratic cultures are more prone to discrimination. In a 2010 sociology experiment, participants playing the role of managers awarded more money to men over equally qualified women when their hypothetical company was described as embracing meritocratic values and practices like performance-based raises. In The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein describes a similar dynamic in affluent suburbs: “The false sense of superiority that segregation fosters in whites contributes to their rejection of policies to integrate American society.”
Michael Sandel reports that more and more of his students believe, like Fortgang, that their success is earned. “Among the students I teach,” he writes, “this meritocratic faith has intensified.” This is ironic since Sandel devotes a significant part of “Justice,” his famous course, to the teachings of the American philosopher John Rawls, who believed that ethical questions should be analyzed from the standpoint of a hypothetical “original position” in which race, gender, class, or position in society is taken as unknown. From behind this “veil of ignorance,” it’s clear that a college-admissions system in which legacy status, wealth, and athletic prowess are excessively rewarded is unjust, since they’re the result of what amounts to a natural lottery. Yet, the students in “Justice” think they deserve to be there.
Sandel is hardly alone in his observation. For her 2016 book, The Diversity Bargain, Natasha Warikoo, a sociology professor at Tufts University, interviewed students at Harvard, Brown, and the University of Oxford about their views on race and merit. She found that Harvard and Brown students have a firmly held, implicit belief that they deserve their position: “They express strong faith in the way that their college selects students. They obviously have gotten in and they believe in that system pretty strongly.” Ironically, elite U.S. students had greater faith in meritocratic admissions than their European counterparts, even though admissions to Oxford are based solely on academic criteria. That’s perhaps because Ivy League colleges propagate an ideal of diversity, which Warikoo calls “collective merit.” “Students will say things like ‘we all bring something different, so what makes me meritorious might be different than what makes you meritorious,’” Warikoo told me. “I might have a lower SAT score than you, but I’m an athlete — that’s my contribution. And they buy into that.”
At the City University of New York, where I teach, I see almost none of this. I’ve never seen or heard anyone boast that their college status is deserved, or look down upon someone who dropped out or didn’t make it past high school. Some of this comes down to parenting styles. Wealthy parents concertedly cultivate their children with an eye on the types of opportunities that will preserve their child’s class position. This, for the would-be-elite teenager, involves substantial rigors — AP exams, SAT tutors, leadership in clubs. This gauntlet of stress, as Sandel calls it, makes success feel earned and predisposes concertedly cultivated kids to succumbing to the temptation of meritocratic belief.
I’ve never met a student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice whose mother or father engaged in this style of parenting. In fact, other than at graduation, I’ve never met a parent at all. In 20 years, I’ve had two students complain about their grades. My friends who teach at elite colleges tell me they are frequently challenged on grades by parents and students alike.
Compounding matters, meritocracy is a very sticky belief. It’s deeply embedded in American culture through Horatio Alger-type novels, folktales like The Little Engine That Could, and marketing slogans with near-gospel status, like “Just Do It.” Researchers have found that meritocratic beliefs can be easily enhanced in experiments, suggesting it’s a narrative that people are predisposed to believe. And once someone has adopted a belief in meritocracy, it’s tough to let go. The psychologist Alison Ledgerwood found that people were more likely to judge a scientific study positively when it confirmed the idea that hard work leads to success, and less likely to believe a study contradicting that premise. It’s thus hardly surprising that, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Americans believe — by a 71-to-21 margin — that hard work and determination influence economic mobility more than external conditions like the economic circumstances in which someone grew up.
To fight the human tendency to see one’s place in the world as deserved, elite colleges would have to try to keep meritocratic beliefs from forming in the first place, and, after they arise, combat them vigilantly. However, they do almost precisely the opposite.
You won’t find the word “merit” in Clayton Spencer’s inaugural address upon becoming president of Bates College in 2012, or in any of the commencement speeches she’s given since. Part of that is because the concept is difficult to defend, she says, “once you’re not so naïve about what standardized tests are measuring — vocabulary, analogies — things that are so culture bound.” Spencer thinks the concept of merit has been interpreted too narrowly and overlooks potential and creativity. “I think to use the word is deeply ignorant,” she says, “and you’ll never find me using it.”
Spencer is the exception to the rule. Far more typical is the welcome that Drew Gilpin Faust offered at her final Harvard commencement as president in 2018. “Heartfelt congratulations to you, our graduates, and to your families,” she said, “for the hard work and many accomplishments that have brought you to this day.” Stanford University’s president Marc Tessier-Lavigne must have hired the same speechwriter the following year. “To the class of 2019,” he said, “I want to express how proud we are of all that you have accomplished during your time at Stanford, and of all the hard work that brought you to this stadium this morning.”
These speeches, and the hundreds like them offered each spring, say many noble things about the ethical obligations of the university and its graduates. Few, however, question the contradictions of the institutions themselves. Yale president Peter Salovey delivered a rousing commencement address in 2019, titled “What Are You For?” It was really about what Salovey was for. “I am for the American Dream in all its rich promise,” he proclaimed, “the idea that opportunities are shared widely and that access to education is within reach for the many, not the few.” Conspicuously absent from Salovey’s speech is any mention of the fact that, per Raj Chetty’s 2017 Mobility Report Cards, more students come from families in the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent.
When psychologists at Arizona State University, examined the content of commencement speeches in 2011, they found a fair amount of consistency. The most popular theme was a call to “give back” or “serve humanity.” Almost as many speakers urged graduates to act ethically. Just over half encouraged them to improve themselves by seeking challenges and expanding their horizons. Being humble and grateful appear nowhere on their list.
The graduates of Harvard and Yale are not the best and the brightest or the hardest working. They are, more precisely, some of the best, brightest, and hardest working among the very rich. An honest speech would balance recognition of students’ hard work with a healthy dose of humility and recognition that they are winners in a game that had been tilted in their favor from the start.
This essay is excerpted from Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us (The New Press, 2022).
