Goodbye Meritocracy, Hello…What?

Is meritocracy just? Just a short time ago, it was commonly accepted that it is the fairest way to determine who wins and who loses in the competition of college admissions. Now, it is one of the most hotly debated questions in higher education. Some believe it is just, as it encapsulates the American dream of “work hard and achieve your educational goals.” Others, however, believe meritocracy is inherently unjust and view it as a cut-throat system rigged against the lower and middle classes.

So, how much should innate intelligence and academic performance factor into who gains admittance into college? Some answer that it should have everything—or at least almost everything—to do with getting into college. After all, it seems highly intuitive that colleges should admit only those students who are the most likely to flourish on their campuses while maintaining high standards.

But a growing number of people wonder whether other non-cognitive factors such as students’ extracurricular activities, life experiences, and ethnic backgrounds should be given greater weight. Others reject the concept of merit-based admissions altogether.

These issues and more were discussed and examined at a February 19 panel event at UNC-Chapel Hill,  organized by the university’s new Program in Public Discourse.

The event, entitled “Meritocracy in Higher Education,” featured four panelists: Anastasia Berg, editor of The Point, New York Times columnists Ross Douthat and Thomas Chatterton Williams, and New York University professor Caitlin Zaloom.

Williams was the only participant who supported meritocracy. The others raised three main objections against meritocracy. The first was offered by Zaloom. She prefaced her objections by stating that “meritocracy is the way into higher education—and really— government.” As such, she believes it is inherently unjust to require people to meet a set of arbitrary standards to climb the social, political, and economic ladder. She said she dislikes the idea of measuring people “on a scale of human value” and is concerned that participation in government is “dependent on achievement based on a hierarchy of values that someone may or may not have subscribed to in the first place.”

The most recurring concern among the panelists, however, was that a meritocratic system unfairly privileges the rich and well-connected. Indeed, some of the panelists claimed that gaining admission into a prestigious university isn’t about intellectual accomplishment, but economic advantage.

For example, Berg claimed that there is a “huge correlation” between students’ socioeconomic status and their ability to perform well on tests. Zaloom also argued that low-income students are shut out of elite universities. She said that the advantages of an elite education are “not equally distributed.” Zaloom continued: “We all know that the way to get your kid into college is to pay for a tutor, etc.”

Yet, despite Harvard’s high admission standards, Berg—a Harvard graduate—does not think the institution’s academics are particularly rigorous. She mocked the university’s introductory math course entitled “The Magic of Numbers,” and argued that there isn’t anything special about the institution’s teachers or classes. She said that the reason to go to Harvard isn’t to receive a stellar education but to gain social and political capital.

Berg, Douthat, and Zaloom expressed concern that a disproportionate number of wealthy people are admitted into prestigious universities because they see an Ivy League education as the golden ticket into the upper or “ruling class.” To them, the result of meritocratic college admissions is a society that stifles social mobility and destines the lower class to be forever ruled by the rich.

The third criticism, voiced by both Berg and Douthat, was that Ivy League and other prestigious colleges drain talent and ambition from local communities and concentrate the highly educated in dense geographic areas, mostly on the coasts. “The college-educated cluster together in geographic hubs in ways they did not 50 or 60 years ago,” Douthat said. “With that division comes economic and cultural stratification that is linked to populist disturbances on the right and the left alike.” He also disliked the idea of a “cognitive elite” that rules over the rest of the country. “Do we really want to be ruled by people with 1600 SATs?” he asked.

While there was no shortage of criticisms leveled at meritocracy, the critics didn’t propose many concrete alternatives to how college admissions should be conducted. Of the solutions that were offered, Berg’s was the most concrete—and also the most radical. She suggested that merit-based admissions be replaced with a lottery system.

“What would happen if you had a lottery admissions?” Berg asked rhetorically. “What effect would it have globally on the experience of people going to college?” She provided the answers:

First of all, everybody would calm down in high school…We would have an actual equal distribution of this amazing resource, we would have a much better way of having an actual representative population within colleges, and finally I think we’d have some chance of people appreciating the amazing privilege of higher education…we forget that it’s not something that we can perfectly earn.

In addition, Berg suggested that colleges need to rely on “human practical judgment” in college admissions by conducting in-person interviews. She also emphasized that academics, not administrators, should be the ones to make admissions decisions—arguing that they are better able to discern students’ full potential. Such an approach, in her view, is better than the “algorithm of the administrator,” by which she means the admissions officer who reviews test scores.

Berg’s proposal, clearly, is absurd. Her suggestions are a misguided attempt at social leveling—one that will do more harm than good. For one, her lottery-admission idea is unworkable because it disregards the fact that people are not equal in talents and interests—a point made by Harvard professor Steven Pinker in this New Republic article:

People vary in their innate and acquired intelligence, their taste for abstraction, their familiarity with literate culture, their priorities in life, and their personality traits relevant to learning. I could not offer a course in brain science or linguist theory to a representative sample of the college-age population without baffling many students at one end and boring an equal number at the other.

Furthermore, Berg’s other suggestion of replacing objective test-based measures of student aptitude with a more personal evaluation won’t have the egalitarian results that she imagines. On the contrary, abandoning objective measures in favor of a holistic evaluation of applicants disadvantages talented minority applicants who rely on standardized tests to demonstrate their ability—an argument made by Williams.

Williams, who is African American, said that his father grew up in the Jim Crow South, which certainly was not a meritocracy. Years later, he taught Williams and his other son “that knowledge and effort are the two most important powers of the oppressed.”

However, Williams explained that he couldn’t showcase his hard work simply by earning good grades. During his K-12 education, Williams did not have the opportunity to attend “a fancy prep school” that offered AP courses and resume-worthy extracurricular activities. He explained that even if he had a perfect GPA, it wouldn’t look as impressive as a perfect GPA from a competitive private school.

As such, Williams argued that the SAT was the only objective measure by which he could demonstrate his academic ability. Doing well on the SAT made him confident that he “wasn’t getting a handout” and that he could do as well as others who had more advantages than he had. Because of his test scores, he was able to attend and thrive at Georgetown University and New York University without feeling as if he did not deserve his spot. “It provides a lifeline for people who need to improve their circumstances,” he said.

Unlike Williams, Douthat was not so confident about merit-based admissions, and even suggested that systemic structural changes are necessary to make the admissions process more fair.

And while Douthat was clearly the biggest name on the panel, he was also the most incoherent.

“I think the inner logic of meritocracy is vicious and terrible, careerist and horrifying,” Douthat said. However, at the same time he admitted that he wasn’t sure that the alternative of getting rid of meritocracy was a good solution either. His argument doesn’t make sense. If something is truly “vicious and terrible…and horrifying,” it should be easy to find better solutions: “Horrifying” is a low bar to surpass. Much of his criticism of meritocracy stems from his fears about politics:

We have a scenario where there are two questions: One is, are there ways to successfully either devolve or claim from below forms of power in our society that aren’t dependent on credentialism?

Douthat’s argument seems inconsistent. In his previous comments, he expressed concern about the rise in populism, which by definition is a way for ordinary people without high-end credentials to gain power against an elite. He continued:

And two: 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 more effectively than the way it’s been governed in the last twenty years or so?

He is rather late to the game on this one. That question was answered long ago—yes, we need to stop educating young people to be socialists and moral relativists. And again, it seems strange that one would want to discard a basic principle of a free society—meritocracy—in order to make government operate “slightly more effectively.”

But his incoherence did not end there. While wondering if we should change the way our elites are educated to improve government, Douthat seems willing to accept that some institutions, like Harvard, aren’t really in the business of educating students. He suggests that their main goal is merely to “form elites” by functioning as a competitive social networking club. This is a valid critique, identifying a problem in need of correction. But Douthat thinks the Ivy League and other prestigious colleges should openly acknowledge this, and therefore should not prioritize merit in admissions. Instead of calling for reform, he seems content with Harvard’s academic mediocrity as the new normal. How, exactly, will that improve anything? And the world does not stay in one place; accepting mediocrity today means an inevitable gradual slide to even lower standards tomorrow.

There has been a groundswell of support in recent years for ending meritocracy in higher education. Perhaps the rise in anti-meritocracy rhetoric is due to the fact that people have lost sight of the ultimate goals of higher education: The acquisition and furthering of knowledge and the pursuit of the truth. While higher education can serve other goals, including opening the doors to the “elite class,” those other goals should be secondary to its primary educational mission.

In the end, admittance into universities like Harvard should be based primarily on demonstrated academic fitness and should be considered a noteworthy achievement—one that reflects the rigor and excellence such an education will demand of and impart to students. Instead of criticizing the advantages a Harvard education affords, critics should demand that it live up to the ideals of intellectual excellence it represents.

All in all, if the critics of meritocracy can’t present better arguments for ending it than Zaloom, Berg, and Douthat, maybe we should keep trying to let the hardest-working and most-talented people win, as best we can.

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What Provosts Get Wrong: A Failed Case for Campus Speech Restrictions

Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus: one might expect a book urging those who dismiss today’s college students’ complaints about institutional racism, persistent sexism, and other societal ills to take them more seriously. To engage with their arguments and to try to empathize with them, rather than ignoring or lambasting them, even when they engage in what seems to many people like unjustified histrionics.

What Snowflakes Get Right is not that book. In fact, on completing NYU comparative literature professor (and former vice provost) Ulrich Baer’s book laying out his views on campus free speech, one can’t help but be struck by its near-total lack of empathy for anyone who disagrees with his political viewpoint, or whose interpretation of the principles of free speech and equality differ from his own, extremely arguable, views.

The result is a book that does nothing to change the minds of those not already disposed to agree with the author, and almost seems intended to alienate them. Baer repeatedly cites Donald Trump’s election, in lurid terms, as a justification for universities to forbid speech that creates “inequality.” Every example paints his ideological opponents in a bad light, and those who agree with him in a positive one.

Perhaps the book is merely meant to stiffen the spines of left-leaning critics of free speech who may be having a hard time justifying their demands for censorship when it’s gobsmackingly obvious that neither the left nor the right have pure motives. But it’s also possible that it is the natural result of Baer’s belief that it’s both right and admirable to refuse to debate certain topics unless the other side has already agreed to some or all of your contentions.

While one should generally be loath to come to such a conclusion, it can’t be ruled out in this case because the fundamental premise of Baer’s book is that there are some arguments that students, and members of minority or marginalized groups more generally, simply should never have to encounter.

Baer argues that while universities should be places where topics are discussed and debated, those who wish to debate certain views, which he repeatedly labels as discredited, obsolete, or both, should be excluded, especially if they are expected to come from off-campus speakers who wish to speak on campus. He writes that on campus, “[s]peech that crosses this line is speech that disputes the inherent equality of all students based on group belonging.”

From this sentence alone, it’s clear that Baer’s version of equality is not the “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” kind of equality that is still revered by untold millions of Americans. Rather, this version of equality specifically builds in the “intersectional” understanding of individual identity as being determined by the combination of one’s membership in an ever-evolving number of identity-based groups. Regardless of whether or not one accepts this definition, to say it is arguable is to engage in considerable understatement. But for Baer, accepting this premise, or at least not challenging its precepts, is the bare minimum qualification for a speaker to be allowed to get his or her foot in the door.

That may be easier to understand if one considers that Baer accords a nearly magical power to speech that he deems racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. To express such views, he repeatedly argues, is not merely to offer bad arguments for discredited and obsolete ideas, but to actively force members of the targeted groups to “prove their humanity,” and by doing so quite literally make them unequal. The most virulent bigots, even those who to all appearances seem the most pathetic of people, are actually enormously powerful. And why in the world would someone try to see things from the perspective of those who are both evil and powerful?

Understanding this perspective is key to understanding Baer’s book, because his ultimate answer to “what snowflakes get right” seems to be that they are correct to demand that people who “deny their humanity” be silenced. Otherwise, they themselves will be unable to benefit from America’s promise of freedom of speech, while bigots, Nazis, and Donald Trump freely enjoy their First Amendment rights.

So, what beliefs and people, specifically, does Baer believe deny the humanity of students, and therefore warrant restriction? Sadly, Baer, in keeping with most of those who write on this topic, does not give us a convenient and easily accessible list. But he does leave breadcrumbs here and there. Donald Trump is an obvious member of Baer’s blacklist of individuals, of course, and is joined by Charles Murray, Milo Yiannopolous, and Ben Carson.

As for beliefs that must be excluded from campus discussion, these include “claims that some human beings…are illegal or unworthy of legal standing,” denial of the “rights of transgender people for legal equality and protection against discrimination,” arguments that women are less skilled in abstract thinking, and many others, stated in terms of varying clarity.

None that I could find would be stereotypically considered to be “left-wing.” If you really needed a heuristic to guess what ideas Baer would restrict from campus—and you might, as Baer was once a college administrator, and many of them demonstrably think the same way he does—you’d probably get 90 percent of the way there simply by assuming that his blacklist includes anything to the “right” of what a conservative talking head on mainstream media would say.

Baer understands the arguments made by both conservative and liberal advocates for free speech, though again, in keeping with his strangely blinkered partisanship, he does not really seem to grasp that free speech advocates from both right and left agree about much more than they disagree about when it comes to the issue. (If this were not true, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, where I work, could not exist, as our staff is made up of liberals, conservatives, and everything in between.) If you wonder how Baer thinks this is working out for our campuses, the title of his chapter discussing this, “An Unholy Alliance,” is a helpful clue.

A treatment of all of the problems with Baer’s book and argument would be longer than the book itself. Some are real head-scratchers, such as where Baer suggests that a law school would decline to host “someone who argues against judicial autonomy.” (Really? I went to law school and I highly doubt that.) Others are likely to elicit a snort, such as when Baer says that college administrators are “almost always trained and experienced in the process of vetting ideas for inclusion in debate,” which is why they are supposedly qualified to determine who may speak.

But most of his arguments are no different than those swatted away by John Stuart Mill 160 years ago in chapter 2 of On Liberty—and make no more headway against Mill now than they did then. (In fairness, Baer mentions and even briefly cites Mill, so presumably Baer just disagrees with him.)

One comes away from What Snowflakes Get Right with a sense of puzzlement. Why write a book arguing that people shouldn’t have to argue about some things, and do it in a way so poorly designed to change minds? Baer is an accomplished and intelligent professor, but he simply is not equal to the task of justifying the restriction of differences of opinion, on college campuses of all places, of some of the most hotly debated issues in our society. I suspect there’s no one out there who is.

But in the end, those looking for a convincing answer to the book’s titular question will not find that answer within its pages.

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New school rules in Australia

Strict new rules have been introduced as children return to classrooms amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Students in New South Wales will be banned from using playground equipment and bubblers when they return to their classrooms for term two next month.

They will also be banned from sharing food or pens, according to Department of Education rules.

Schools will also have to post any new COVID-19 cases that affect their school to their Facebook page to keep parents and caregivers informed, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Teachers will have to watch young students wash their hands to ensure they are doing it properly.

Hand sanitiser will be available in all classrooms and provisions are in place for at-risk teachers to work from home.

Drop off, pick up, recess and lunchtimes will also be staggered to ensure social distancing.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced this week the plan for children to gradually return to schools from May 11.

The plan will see students return for one day a week to ensure they comply with social distancing measures.

The education department plans to increase the number of days students are at school in a staged way and hope to have all children back at school full-time by Term 3.

During the first stage of on-campus learning, parents will be encouraged to keep their children home except on their allocated day of face-to-face learning. Initially, about a quarter of a school’s students are expected to be on site at any one time. 

Classes will be split across schools, allowing schools to appropriately social distance students and teachers.

'We are grateful to all families who kept their children home from school at the end of Term 1 and to teachers who worked tirelessly to deliver education online,' Ms Berejiklian said.

'This allowed us critical time to prepare our schools to develop better online learning options and for considering additional hygiene measures to allow schools to return.

'We know that nothing is more important than a child’s education, and we must begin to return our students to their classrooms in a considered way.'

Most students began remote learning in March after the Premier asked parents to keep their children at home.

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