The Middlebury Campus

Issue date: 5/8/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Angela Evancie Lani Guinier stresses the value of diversity and the need to reverse the mentality of higher education while delivering this year's John Hamilton Fulton Lecture on April 30 in Mead Chapel. [Click to enlarge]

"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.

Continued...

Page 1 of 3 next >

Article Tools