“Something Special to Offer”: Meritocracy in the Universities

Extract

Life, as the poets have observed, imitates art. Nicholas Lemann has produced the most fascinating brief against meritocracy since Michael Young's 1957 novel that gave the world the term. And Lemann's critique is in a way prefigured in the populist “Chelsea Manifesto” that appears near the end of Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy:

The classless society would be one which both possessed and acted upon plural values. Were we to evaluate people, not only according to their intelligence and their education, their occupation, and their power, but according to their kindliness and their courage, their imagination and sensitivity, their sympathy and generosity, there could be no classes. Who would be able to say that the scientist was superior to the porter with admirable qualities as a father, the civil servant with unusual skill at gaining prizes superior to the lorry-driver with unusual skill at growing roses?

The Lemann Manifesto, so to speak, does not appear until the Afterword of The Big Test, but its message permeates “The Master Plan,” the second part of the book. In this section, Lemann takes on the postwar rise of the University of California system and the transformation of old “Episcopacy” institutions such as Yale into academic powerhouses with highly selective undergraduate admissions. He also introduces the issue of race and the apparent contradiction that low African-American SAT scores pose to the idea of meritocracy as a fair system of social mobility.