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December 06, 2003

Laughing at Academic Leadership

There's apparently some hash being made of the comments of a cat named Michael Berube about norming SAT scores. It's a good joke, but apparently defenders of the regime didn't find it so funny. What regime you ask? Why the regime of strict meritocracy as exemplified by the excruciatingly painstaking and foolproof process of undergraduate admissions.

If, like me, you take much of what goes on with undergraduate admissions with a grain of salt, a sense of humor and an appreciation for rough justice, you are not likely to get particularly bent out of shape about Affirmative Actions and other monkey business with the social determinism of the College Testing Service and their lackeys in the blovio-drome. Seriously, what most of us are learning as undergraduates are the ethics of the white collar class, which are not especially awe-inspiring these days despite the brilliance of many. It is our strange misfortune to have this education presided over by that bizarre cadre of leaders, academics. You can't have everything.

I can think of few people I'd rather have lead our society than those who lead our colleges. This is not an anti-intellectual sentiment; it is a re-affirmation of the fact that a nation as large as ours cannot be run on the same principles as an academy. I'm as fond of the disciplined search for knowledge as the next guy, probably more. But one needn't be so intellectually precise in America. And it is an insistence on such precision over the general affairs of our lives which wreaks havoc. That is what this affair is about.

Within the bowels of this obscurity, I take John's point against:

the Invidious Ubiquitous Non-Sequitur according to which racial discrimination is no different from discrimination on the basis of athletic or musical talent or where your parents went to school. If you can discriminate for any reason, according to this view, you can discriminate for every reason.

With one important exception. It's true that racial discriminations by racists are categorically different than any other garden variety discrimination. But in the context of college admissions for the purposes of inclusion, which is clearly what we are talking about (bringing duffers into a fearsome foursome as it were), there are not evil racists lurking under every bush plotting to do damage.

I would believe that the longer one is part of the academic conspiracy to brain up the American population, sooner or later one comes to some reasonable terms with the absurdiity of the proposition. We can't all be above average, not even if we seek to discriminate against and exclude the stupid, which is essentially what testing is all about. The aegis of higher education, especially given the temperament of its leadership, just doesn't scale to the whole of society. Good! So it is natural that monkeying with this overburdened KPI is going to ruffle the feathers of those who kneel at the church of collegiate meritocracy.

Those who expect the manners of academia to presage matters of social justice are mistaken and a little bit screwy. Stick it too 'em Berube.

Posted by mbowen at December 6, 2003 12:12 PM

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Posted by: IB Bill at December 9, 2003 08:58 AM