• Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America, Beacon Press, 2015, 160 pages, $24.95.
As Harvard Law School professor Lani Guinier sees it, we stand at a turning point in history, in need of a cultural shift from “testocratic merit” to “democratic merit,” which is “the foundation on which our national values truly ought to rest.” Her main beef is with the Scholastic Assessment Test, which she sees as a “proxy for wealth” and “normed to white upper-middle-class performance.”
The SAT, the author explains, is part of the status quo of “built-in biases that privilege those who are already quite advantaged,” a narrow band of values that are “the production and reproduction of privilege but without obligation or shame.” The SAT is supposed to pick the “best and brightest,” but in her view this amounts to “nothing more than students who can perform well on the test.” The boys do better in math and that appears to disturb the author.
In The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, Guinier does not call for college admissions based solely on test scores and grade point average. Readers will get the feeling that the author dislikes other test scores as much as the SAT, and she clearly is uncomfortable with the whole idea of individual merit. Even so, Guinier does not explain how this supposedly tyrannical status quo allowed someone like herself to became a tenured professor of law at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. It may have helped that her father, Ewart Guinier, born in Panama of Jamaican parents, was chairman of Harvard’s Department of Afro-American Studies.
In quest of democratic merit, Guinier wants a change “from test oriented lectures to a collaborative atmosphere that teaches our students how to problem solve.” In that cause she deploys Carnegie Mellon University professor Anita Woolley, an advocate of “collective intelligence,” that is, intelligence for groups, not individuals. In this politically correct vision, individuals have only the distinction of drops of water in a clear pond, something Kenneth Minogue outlined in Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology.
Guinier also invokes economist Scott Page, author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. In Page’s model, “diversity trumped ability.” What “diversity” means is not outlined in precise detail. The default meaning is that higher education must reflect the racial and ethnic proportions of society, and if it doesn’t that can be only because of discrimination, to be remedied by government action.
Likewise, how the Woolley and Page models would work in practice may not be clear to many readers, but for Guinier they show “democratic merit in action.” And this democratic merit, the author says, will “positively affect our societal institutions and governance.” So the author’s vision encompasses all of society, not just higher education.
“Just as obsession with competition and individualistic merit begins in the classroom, so can a more effective democracy,” contends Guinier, who touts a “culture of collaboration rather than competition.” Such a sweeping vision will leave readers wanting some examples. As Paul Hollander showed in Political Pilgrims, the favored models of this vision have been Cuba or the Soviet Union, not democracies in any sense. Alas, the only example of a working culture of collaboration cited in The Tyranny of the Meritocracy is the city of Chicago’s community police and school boards, as noted by Archon Fung, also of Harvard. Readers may find this Chicago model unconvincing, along with Guinier’s defense of affirmative action.
During the 1970s, the University of California at Davis reserved a quota of medical school slots for accredited minorities and denied admission to Allan Bakke, highly qualified but not a person of color. Bakke’s successful lawsuit against UC-Davis was to remedy discrimination against himself on the basis of race, not about opposing “diversity,” as Guinier has it.
The Tyranny of the Meritocracy fails to mention California’s 1996 Proposition 209. The first time voters anywhere in the United States had any say in a matter of affirmative action, they duly eliminated race, ethnic, and gender preferences in education. That historic vote was certainly an example of democratic action, but it’s not the sort of thing Guinier has in mind.
In 1993, President Clinton nominated Lani Guinier for assistant attorney general for civil rights but withdrew her name after protests over Guinier’s schemes for “race-conscious districting” and support for racial preferences that got her tagged a “quota queen.” For many readers, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy will confirm that her critics had it right. As used by Guinier, diversity is a proxy for government racial and ethnic gerrymandering. Meanwhile, readers should be aware of another back story.
Back in the 1990s, Guinier questioned the blackness of African-American scholar Thomas Sowell, who was born in Gastonia, grew up in Harlem, and earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, a master’s from Columbia, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. He accomplished all this apart from any government affirmative action scheme. Sowell, author of many books and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, said he didn’t need Guinier to tell him about being black.
In similar style, academics, parents, and students don’t need Lani Guinier to pursue the reforms higher education definitely needs. On the other hand, readers of The Tyranny of the Meritocracy will gain insight into the politically correct mindset with its dead-bolted dogmas, deceptive vocabulary, and rigidly collectivist vision.
Lloyd Billingsley is author of the forthcoming Bill of Writes.