In his latest column at the New York Times David Brooks rises to defend the concept of meritocracy. It’s only being practiced wrong:
The essential point is this: Those dimwitted, stuck up blue bloods in the old establishment had something we meritocrats lack — a civic consciousness, a sense that we live life embedded in community and nation, that we owe a debt to community and nation and that the essence of the admirable life is community before self.
The meritocracy is here to stay, thank goodness, but we probably need a new ethos to reconfigure it — to redefine how people are seen, how applicants are selected, how social roles are understood and how we narrate a common national purpose.
I, on the other hand, think that no meritocracy based on attending the right school or getting the right grades in elementary school is worthy of the name.
Let’s take the Supreme Court as an epitome of the sort of phony meritocracy that has come to prevail. All of the sitting Supreme Court justices attended Harvard or Yale Law. There’s a reason for that: the path to nomination lies through having been a clerk for a Supreme Court justice and clerks for Supreme Court justices are overwhelmingly selected from the law reviews for Harvard and Yale. In other words it’s circular. It’s a bunch of Harvard and Yale grads deciding that Harvard and Yale grads are peachy.
It hasn’t always been that way. As recently as 1980 a majority of Supreme Court justices had graduated from schools other than Harvard or Yale Law. IMO there has been a change of ethos (as Mr. Brooks might put it) in the Court and in the country and not for the better.
Here’s another example. My alma mater has been traded on more in the last four years than in the previous forty, not by me but by others. I had never even been asked where I had gone to undergraduate or graduate school prior to the interview with my present employer. How important is where you went to college fifty years ago? Isn’t what you’ve done since then a lot more important? Apparently not.
IMO Mr. Brooks should reflect on something. If the form that “meritocracy” has taken had prevailed thirty years ago, he wouldn’t be a columnist for the New York Times today. He went to a Midwestern school.
Kind of torn on this as what I see in practice is that where people train makes a big difference. It isn’t a guarantee, but it makes the odds pretty good. When I have hired people out of a top 20 residency, they perform well and are more likely to be outstanding. Those I have hired or inherited (we have taken over a bunch of new hospitals and we try to keep the old staff if we can) who went to residencies that were considered average or below average tend to cause problems. There are exceptions both ways, but the general rule holds. (And this is not just for my practice as I see the credentials of everyone the network hires.)
Maybe my caveat here is that I do my homework and don’t just assume that the IVY League programs are always top programs. They are not. Places in the Midwest like U of Michigan, down south like Gainesville and Emory have really good programs.
All that said, have to strongly agree that if I am hiring someone who has been working for 20 years, I don’t have a lot of interest in where they trained. I would also never consider hiring from just 2 programs. Not much room for new thinking if you do that. No wonder SCOTUS is screwed up.
Steve
The situation reminds me of what happened to the College of Cardinals in the 14th century, when a majority of the voting members hailed from France and a majority of those were born in the then province of Limousin. Naturally enough they kept voting in French popes who always favored French interests in their decisions, to the irritation of other nations and their rulers. This state of affairs and a division between the Limousin and non-Limousin factions led to the Great Schism of 1378.
To be fair, Ginsberg went to Columbia, but point taken.
Then there’s the odd fact that all the current Justices are Jews or Catholics and all, except maybe Thomas, are multimillionaires.
I’d meant to mention that all of the present justices are either Jewish or Catholic. I guess that’s what he means by “meritocracy”.
“How important is where you went to college fifty years ago?â€
Not at all, rationally. But perhaps some check off the box type finds it of use. I’ve speculated that Northwestern was part of your past. That should certainly satisfy most boxes.