There is something very appealing about the idea of merit. Fantasies about merit abound in Utopias where everyone is graded in comparison with one another and rank rewards on what they are. That happens in Plato’s Republic and even in the Social Darwinist point of view presented in nineteenth century America or its derivative ideas of Ayn Rand, however many people who lose in the competitive race get squashed. That too is a kind of justice. No wonder the rejection of that idea by the New Deal that however low people score in tests or in the struggles of life, everyone should have a safety net, able to get by even if not prosper. Think of chess competition as this meritocratic regime. The recent miniseries “The Queen’s Gambit” shows how an orphan prospers from winning local, then national and then world status because of her grit, drive and brilliance, innate features honed by hard work and application. She moves up the rankings where everyone knows where they stand with regard to the other competitors and she comes quickly enough to outshine a state champion who falls into being her chess coach, himself giving up the competition and then also turning a national champion into her aide in helping her to become world champion. Everything is fair and clean and other activities allow similar rankings where merit reigns. Think of baseball and academic medicine and nuclear physics and, to some extent, academia, where the brighter do best, though there are some slippages in academia because of the way rankings are distorted by ideologies. Merit even serves a role in the grocery store business where some people are savvy enough to see what locations to rent, how to merchandise and where to get supplies regardless of their prior education. The smart ones get ahead, as was true in my high school, where people felt the pressure to compete up to the level of their abilities and to learn to be satisfied with that (or not) and accept the justice of this ranking.
Apply the idea of merit as the yardstick in the present political debate about affirmative action. Some argue that only merit should be considered in giving applicants admission into fancy schools because to do otherwise is to discriminate against certain protected groups such as Asian applicants while others suggest that preferential treatment for Black students is a way to redress past forms of discrimination even if some forms of discrimination such as preferences for legacy students or the children of big donors should be abolished. Both seem to be against anything but merit except for necessary exceptions and this exception may not hold indefinitely and not therefore to be treated as a matter of principle. And that is where the debate seems to stand, the Supreme Court having to decide one way or the other. A Justice who is inclined to the merit only requirement makes fun of colleges that think diversity includes having a good squash team or awarding an applicant to admission because his or her father can buy an art museum, which are clearly frivolous ways to award spots.
I wonder once again the extent to which legal training gets in the way of thinking clearly about a matter, however bright and merited these jurists started out. Justice Gorsich treats this question about squash and art galleries as a hypothetical question so as to clarify what is at stake, but does not bother to consider what actually happens in the world of university administrators who fully know that they need to spend on a stadium and a football program so as to satisfy the alumni donors and to attract students to their football famous campus, and also know that you can’t have much of an art history program, unless it is in a major city, unless you create something of a museum which art history majors and other students meetings distribution requirement can wander through. Admission of the child of a donor or fielding a football team is cheap as a way to get the university to flourish. The “serious”’ students are deprived of some so that they get what they need. Private universities have to follow their business models, which is to pile up tuition so as to increase the endowments while treating financial aid and merit scholarships as a way to discount the prices so as to get the mix of students they want, including those limited achievers to fill out the bottom third of the class.
It isn’t that merit based admissions alone are flawed. It is that it might be the wrong ideal. A friend, mentor and colleague of mine, Joan Gordon, suggested something very different. Take a pool of applicants who meet minimum standards, whatever they might be, and let a lottery decide who gets in. The lottery system seems legitimate, after all, in a military draft, and there the decision can be a matter of life and death. Those who get into college in a lottery can get something of their education though not as much as perhaps would be the case if only the most meritorious were awarded seats. There would be consequences. If there was a national lottery, then able bodied students would be distributed throughout the schools and so would equalize these schools, so that abler people could shine because there are so many less able people around, and that might be a kind of democratization whereas the present elite down to local colleges stratify groups of ability. That would provide a truer distribution of diversity than would be the case by making sure that Black people or football players are to be included. Another advantage to this system would be to spread able faculty around the country and not just in elite colleges, but that is happening anyway because people want to get into the higher education academic profession even if they have difficulty finding permanent positions and so will go anywhere they can or remain academic nomads going from one place to another. Or else and to be less radical, provide a lottery for groups within a set of universities that are ranked just as colleges are divided into Division I, II and III sports and so highly ranked universities would get the better students without them having to be ahead of one another by just a few points on the SATs so as to get in. The elite would be the elite but wouldn’t have had to jump through so many hoops to fine tune an application as if it were an apologia pro vita summa.
But the discussion in the courts and in public opinion is about merit, not about alternatives to merit alone. There are three substantive reasons to think that affirmative action does not accomplish some necessary exception for the merit based system for college admissions. First of all, affirmative action works largely at the top. It means to ensure that enough Black and Hispanic students are included in the elite colleges so that these students can shine and become models for their race and to pepper the elite political and cultural figures so as to find a voice into the national discourse. But that has largely happened even though accomplishing that was engineered by having Lyndon Johnson appoint Thurgood Marshall onto the Supreme Court and equally self consciously have Joe Biden appoint Justice Jackson as the first female African American. Fine. Supreme Court appointments are political. But what about jiggling the pool so that enough people of color get into the Ivie?. Justice Sotomayor was an affirmative action acceptance to Princeton who only with difficulty learned how to write term papers, but she caught on and found her way to a fancy law school and henceforth to the Supreme Court. But what if she had not been given preference over merit and had to go to Rutgers, let us say, rather than Princeton? She might also have flourished and found a way into an elite law school. Does that Princeton title abrogating the merit principle reduce the quality of education? It is certainly the case that a higher level student pool will lead to higher level discourse among students and lectures from professors, but don’t cut it overly fine so that an Ivy League pedigree leads to brilliance, of being above the bar, even if an Ivy League pedigree is an entrance way whereby people can decide to go to Harvard and Yale law schools so they can become Supreme Court Justices or at least Supreme Court law clerks and go on to careers in major law firms. Jiggling or fine tuning admissions through affirmative action is like working for Americans for Disability Act provisions so as to deal only with the wheelchair bound by giving them elevators and ramps when most of the disabled are concerned with care that will keep them housebound because of cancers and other organic difficulties. Affirmative action just worries about whether the skim on the top is distributed equitably among itself.
A second problem of adjusting fitness to include applicants for appointment into the elite is that it provides a fix so that distribution is “fair” without considering the inequities that lead to differential results if various ethnicities are compared. Affirmative action is a response to the outrage of inequitable admissions of differing ethnic groups rather than responding to the causes that create it. The reason students of color need affirmative action is that they do not compare well with other populations all the way back to the beginning of schooling, to the earliest grades where merit is measured and assigned grades. From the earliest grades, Black and Hispanic children do not do as well as white and Asian ones and those differences persist, decade after decade, and in spite of innovations in teaching methods or even by covering up failure by decreasing standards such as when math is to be approximated sor talked through rather than calculated to arrive at correct answers. The mechanisms for increasing minority student learning has been appreciated for half a century though not enough money has been spent on doing so: create significantly smaller classes; additional welfare workers to manage student lives even to the extent of counseling parents, providing nutrition and medical care and perhaps most important providing prenatal nutrition and medical care so that babies are not born already struggling with low birth weight and bad nutrition. If that would happen, I suggest, a generation later they would not need affirmative action which is a way to recognize another generation's failure to compete on its own.
A third problem that greets affirmative action is that it is antiquated. As I said in a previous blog post, the basic assumptions of higher education have changed. Previously, college meant a core curriculum, distribution requirements and a major, which all put together would make a graduate poised to evaluate evidence and apply an open mind to facts and concepts.That was the royal road to upward mobility ever since the GI Bill of Rights started working right after World War II. But it is now difficult to recruit minority students without affirmative action and the obvious explanation is that they do not find a liberal arts curriculum appealing. Why do they have to learn about anthropology or foreign languages when they want to study accounting or nursing? Students may not need any but vocational education that can be supplied in community colleges. Affirmative action is despite the point except for those who aspire to the Ivies. So why perpetuate what seems a non-meritocratic criterion when it is not even useful, much less necessary, supposedly to compensate for past generations of inequity? When are the generations of reparations to end, for that is what that amounts to even if they are not called that?
Put aside these three issues of what might be called social problems analysis, which deals with how to remedy social situations that are troubling and which policies can be designed to alleviate. Those are not the reasons why people are deeply disturbed at affirmative action. Those have to do with violating a basic idea or image or trope of American life. There are many ways in which America was seen to have liberated itself from Europe, to have unshackled to American people so that they breathed free. There was the idea that a social compact made people free of monarchy, and that is best enabled by the creation of the U. S. Constitution but derives all the way back to the Mayflower Compact, which the travelers thought it necessary to declare so as to start their community in America rather than just letting a community start as ever it might be, as had happened in Jamestown. There was again not much later the idea that a pearson was free when they, let us say, crossed the Alleghenies and could settle far enough not to see the smoke of their chimneys, and not far much later again, thought that the six shooter was the great equalizer, everyone capable of establishing justice or righting wrongs, a sense of freedom that still lays deeply at heart for major gun activists. More recently, the New Deal has made freedom to consist at least in part to providing economic and health and wage security for workers si that they are free frim exploiters and can live out their lives in peace, and also the idea that sexual liberation, an idea as old as the Eighteenth Century pre revolutionary French, was also a way to be unshackled and free.
The particular sense of freedom I have in mind as well established but challenged by affirmative action originates at the time of wholesale immigration from Europe to America in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. The idea was that ethnic groups would over the course of a number of generations assimilate into becoming part of the American population, their still remaining cultural customs quaint or familial rather than threatening, and so like the gens in Rome, people able to identify their own ancestries but it being in later centuries of no major consequence. That was very different from ethnicity in Indonesia where the Chinese, the Muslims and the Polonesians remain in a stratified society or where, in the Balkans, ancient rivalries go to war with one another as they have repeatedly done for a thousand years. America was going to be different. The best example of that is the Irish, arriving as ruffian peasants, and living for generations of ethnic enclaves, what with their own insular and intermingled institutions, such as the Church and Fordham University in the Bronx, and local political control, and then expanding out to commerce and, finally, accomplished as fully American when John Kennedy became President. That was the assimilationist model. Remember that Joe Kennedy sent his male children to WASP schools, while his daughters got Catholic schooling. JFK could out WASP anyone in his accent, his demeanor and his celebrity and bravery. You are American, whether Jew , Catholic or even Nisei, if you risk death in battle.That same thing, of transitory ethnicity, held for Jews, Italians and, more recently, Asians and Hispanics, but somehow that does not apply for African Americans, maybe because so scarred was the transport into America through enslavement or because preliterate peoples do not divest themselves of their tutelage as well as the other immigrants, though the success of African Americans since desegregation have been so spectacularly successful, filled with high level cabinet secretaries and military and corporate leaders, crowned buy a President who like JFK was also a model integrationist: soft spoken, articulate rather than showy like a preacher, sophisticated, clean cut.
But what sticks in the craw to white Americans is that of favoritism for African Americans because of race. That violates the compact whereby people get no special advantage because of their gens. Rather, affirmative action suggests as a principle that this group, now an ethnicity rather than a race, gets special advantage and so violates the principle that an ethnic group is to be assimilated except for its associated and subsidiary sensibilities. Violating that principle makes us all less free.
Georg Simmel says that one form of competition is a set of contestants viewing against an objective standard, as happens in a set of contestants trying to run a race in the shortest time or tossing a hammer throw for the longest distance-- not its arc or style, but just distance. (The other competition Simmel notes is between teams and so one team wins while another loses or the two are tied.) College admissions are a meritocratic race in that everyone, like those in a foot race, can be ranked from winner to last completed, invidious comparisons made as to where you rank even if all are to be honored for having competed or even for those who do not finish a Marathon race. Even a recreational tennis league assigns rankings and members feel pride at moving up a little bit, but violating the rules of competition is seen as a serious matter.Ruby Ruizwas regarded to be a cheat rather than an innovator for having gone by subway to make time on one of the early New York Marathons. People are sent to jail for giving contributions to get their children into college in violation of admission protocols even though there is a nice way to make such contributions. The basic premise is that everyone suffers if there are ways to bend the meritocratic comparison even if there are some recognized exceptions as when a veteran is given an extra ten points on a civil service exam in respect for his or her, as we now say, as a thank you for their service. But what happens in affirmative action is that only very special categories of people, Blacks and Hispanics, are given that leeway. To make it more general would require all ethnic groups to be given some weight, as happens with horse handicap weights, to compensate for their historical disadvantages, but that would require some body deciding how much to weigh Holocaust survivors’ children (or grandchildren) versus many generationally distant children of slaves and whether som Irish ancesters survived the Famine before coming to America. It seems ludicrous, just as is whether to accept a student as an affirmative action candidate is on the basis of self-designation rather than proof of race, clearly a distasteful request, though veterans would need to provide proof of such to get a civil service bonus. By and large, stay away from race, except when letting people into college.
That is very different from the seemingly similar controversy dealing with same sex marriage where some opponents claim that the sanctity of different sex marriage is diminished by allowing same sex marriage. That is because marriage is not a competition in that any couple gets the chance, as the joke goes, to quarrel about how to load the dishwasher. Every marriage is a marriage rather than a comparison, an inclusiveness for privacy, as Simmel put it, so no couple knows what isn’t happening next door, while competitions are subject to referees to see to it where people place on the rankings. A marriage is whatever it may be except when it is so inferior to gain public attention to domestic abuse or child neglect. Merit, on the other hand, requires more intrusive rules and affirmative action markedly seems to violate the sense of fairness even if people are not willing to go so far as Joan Gordon and get rid of them.