Author: H.Kay Merriman
"Lani Guinier is an idea-woman who does not shrink from controversy," said President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz in introducing this year's John Hamilton Fulton Lecturer. Guinier, a lawyer, author, scholar and activist, spoke to members of the College and community last Wednesday about the ideas included in her forthcoming book, "Challenging Meritocracy, Inc.: The Case for Democratic Merit."
Guinier explained that the term meritocracy originates from the 1958 British sociological satire "Rise of Meritocracy" by Michael Young.
"His argument was that people who have power look for ways to justify that power," she said.
In her lecture, Guinier applied the idea of meritocracy to the modern system of higher education, arguing that the current meritocracy system was failing to meet the goal of universities to produce citizens who actively contribute to the community. The meritocracy of higher education, she said, begins with the unfair and discriminatory college admissions process.
"We hold a set of assumptions or values that those who gain access to elite schools such as Middlebury deserve to be there," Guinier said. "I want to offer an alternative perspective of how we can distribute access to a scarce resource such as higher education."
Guinier employed a variety of metaphors in explaining how college admissions favor the wealthy, which then adds a stigma to the small percentage of significantly less wealthy students who are accepted because of programs like Affirmative Action. The stigma, she explained, is that those students do not deserve "the prize" of higher education.
Guinier's first suggestion for eliminating the meritocracy and reversing the mentality of higher education being a prize or something deserved by those with the highest test scores, best grades and most extra-curricular activities was based on an analogy first developed by journalist Malcolm Gladwell. She explained that there are two means of determining qualifications for admittance. There is the beauty school philosophy or the "selection effect" in which the school seeks people who are already beautiful so that the school can maintain its reputation of having beautiful students, but the students do not necessarily learn, grow or change as a result of their education. The opposite method of selection is the Marine Corps mentality of the "treatment effect" in which the school accepts applicants that meet a set of basic requirements but they expect their students to be transformed into "marines" by the time they graduate.
"We have been thinking about university as if it were a beauty school," Guinier said. "We need to be thinking about it as the Marine Corps."
The beauty school qualifications that universities use, Guinier elaborated, are test scores, but these tests, like the SAT and the LSAT, inherently favor the wealthy. Guinier explained the "Volvo Effect" in which a college student's SAT score can be used to predict more accurately the kind of car that student's parents drive than it can be used to predict that student's first-year college GPA.
Guinier paired the "Volvo Effect" with a University of Michigan study that concluded that the more entry-level credentials a person has when beginning college, the less likely that person is to contribute to society upon graduating. This study showed that the black and Latino students who had received entrance to the University of Michigan because of Affirmative Action, not because of their "meritorious" SAT scores, were actually fulfilling the college's mission to create graduates who possessed financial and career satisfaction and contributed to the community. Guinier thus concluded that the college admissions process needed to start working backwards. Instead of receiving a ranking from U.S.News and World Report and then striving to maintain or increase that ranking by accepting the "beautiful" students, the university should first evaluate its mission and then admit students that it can mold to fulfill that mission, she argued.
In order to illustrate her point, Guinier provided the example to three fictive test-takers - Steven, John and Rose, all who answer 10 questions. Steven receives a seven, John a six and Rose a five. If the university can only accept two students, traditional admissions procedures would advise the acceptance of Steven and John.
However, Guinier said that admissions should examine the questions that the individual students missed. If Steven and John missed the same questions, but Rose correctly answered those, the university should accept Steven and Rose. In this way, the students can learn from each other and work together to produce a group that can correctly answer all the questions, or make the greatest contribution to society.
"Individuals are not diverse - groups are diverse," Guinier said. "Diversity is a key component of merit."
In keeping with her emphasis on group diversity, Guinier championed the Posse Program. In an open forum held in the afternoon before the talk, Will Surrette '10 spoke about his alma mater, University Park High School in Worcester, Mass., a very diverse public high school in a low-income area that has a 100 percent graduation rate and 100 percent college acceptance rate. Although all of University Park's students enroll in higher education, Surrette related, the majority fail to find the same community-feel that they experienced in high school and as a result, drop out after one or two years.
Guinier cited this example in her talk and used it to illustrate her point about the effectiveness of the Posse Program and the need for economic and racial minorities to not enter college alone.
"Your posse is people who share your vision and hold you accountable," she said.
Guinier concluded her presentation with what she called the "miner's canary analogy," relating minorities and those who have been excluded from the college admissions process to the canary that miners bring with them deep into the mines in order to alert them when the air becomes unsafe. The canary is more vulnerable and thus, alerts the miners before the air is too toxic for them.
However, if the miners delay, they too will suffer from the atmospheric conditions. Guinier called for a change in the atmosphere of higher education.
"This is the signal to us that it is time to heed the warning and fix the atmosphere in the mines for everybody," she said.
Guinier talk touches on education, race issues
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