Tuesday, January 14, 2003

What is really at stake here is the preservation of an unavoidably messy but reasonable concept of merit and excellence.


The Merit Myth
Two cases involving the University of Michigan to be heard by the Supreme Court have rekindled familiar passions and resentments over affirmative action. Two white applicants, one to the undergraduate program and one to the law school, claim that they were rejected while less-deserving minority students were admitted. Merit, they argue, was subordinated to the university's desire to promote diversity.

The problem with the way this debate is yet again being framed is that defenders and opponents of affirmative action alike fail to come to grips with a reasonable definition of merit. The truth is, the qualities that make an applicant deserving of admission to a selective university cannot be reduced to a single standard of measurement — certainly not an SAT score or undergraduate grades — nor can they be judged simply on the basis of skin color.

The problem is that universities have for too long maintained a lie about how subjective and imprecise the assessment of merit actually is. Although tests and grades have been granted a dominant role in admissions decisions, they have never been considered alone. Selective universities consistently take risks, recruiting people with unimpressive test scores but brilliant achievements outside school; candidates with uneven grades but stellar skills in, say, music or sports.

Let's face it, in many cases the people who have made the most of college and professional school — as measured by their career success — have not always been those who entered with the highest test scores or the best grades. Motivation, ambition, curiosity, originality and the capacity to endure risk and think independently are essential components of merit. Grades are poor indicators because they are dependent on the whims of teachers and the divergent quality of schools. As for the SAT's, the most persistent correlation has been between high scores and high family incomes.

There are too many institutions that fail to look carefully at each applicant and are concerned only with making the numbers show that they have not been discriminatory. In the most cynical application, any minority student who meets the minimum standards to be considered worthy of protection by affirmative action is good enough. This reveals a pernicious racism under a liberal veneer.

Is it that too many defenders of affirmative action are themselves not convinced that merit is equally distributed throughout the population? One could reach this erroneous conclusion only if one believes that a numerical formula defines merit. Yet, because colleges do stick to the numbers, they are forced to make excuses when they admit minority candidates with relatively low grades or test scores. Instead of explaining the properly complex nature of judging merit, administrators argue about diversity and righting the wrongs of the past.

The defense of affirmative action should not rest on an ideology that celebrates diversity for its own sake, but on the need to protect applicants against societal prejudices that corrupt the capacity of institutions to assess each individual's potential fully.

If colleges were instead to redefine merit in all its complexity, the same expectations of quality could be applied uniformly to all applicants, and the resultant student body in competitive schools would mirror the diversity in the population.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/14/opinion/14BOTS.html

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