Mythtaken

Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, has an OpEd in today’s New York Times that combines a familiar mix of complaints about “The Merit Myth” with some original, and wholly confused or at least confusing, observations.

Merit, he argues (against whom? I haven’t seen anyone of note denying his point) that merit “cannot be reduced to a single standard of measurement — certainly not an SAT score” or grades. Agreed, so let’s, as they say, move on.

“The problem,” Botstein maintains, “is that universities have for too long maintained a lie about how subjective and imprecise the assessment of merit actually is.”

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.

Critics of preferences will certainly agree with this as well. But what, then, is Botstein’s point about affirmative action? It’s not clear.

He begins by claiming that “one of the reasons there is so much anger against affirmative action programs is that they have been thoughtlessly applied.” Fine. How, then, should they be applied? Again, not clear, at least to me. Maybe you can make some sense of what seems to be his central point:

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.

It will certainly come as a surprise to Michigan’s lawyers that “diversity” cannot provide a defense of the racial preferences they are in court to defend.

Botstein, alas, does not say how merit should be redefined. He seems to believe that all applicants should be judged by the same standard — something all critics of preferences believe — but he doesn’t say what that standard is (other than complex) or how it should be determined. Nor does he say how admissions officers are so corrupted by “societal pressures” that they are incapable of defining merit and applicants must be protected from them. Does he believe race itself should be regarded as a component of merit? Again, he doesn’t say.

In fact, he doesn’t say much of anything at all.