The Supreme Court decision about the legality of race-based college admissions has been almost universally—and in more than one instance probably hypocritically—deplored by American college and university administrators; but of course it has been accepted, for now, as the inconvenient law of the land. But I doubt that much as been “settled.” Quite apart from the widespread hope for a different court and a different decision at some point in the future, a large and well remunerated section of our legal fraternity have as their principal task finding ways of skirting such inconvenient laws as have not already been obviated by the friendly commerce of our large and well remunerated lobbying fraternity with the elected members of our Congress. I don’t think we have any hard data on how the public rates lawyers on mass, only a frequently cited sanguinary suggestion in one of Shakespeare’s history plays. But on Congress we do have a statistic: nineteen percent of Americans approve of the job it is doing.
For the moment, the outrage of the aggrieved has shifted to another subject: legacy admissions. That is the practice of giving some degree of preference to candidates for admission who have a plausible connection to the institution already. This usually means that they are the children or grandchildren of alumni of the institution. Oversimplifying somewhat: if you cannot have “affirmative action” for the underprivileged, how do you justify it for the overprivileged? I am not entering the debate on the substance of the issues involved. Neither one seems to me open-and-shut one way or the other. The one dealt with by the Supreme Court was decided by a majority but not by a unanimous vote. But I do want to talk about a topic front and center in the discussions: that is elitism. Everybody seems to be against elitism, a very curious opinion to be held by citizens of the United States of America. It seems to me that a lot of people don’t know what the word elite means. For a long time I didn’t either. I thought it referred only to the small type face on an old Remington portable typewriter.
Elite is a French loan word, the past participle of the verb elire, which derives from the Latin eligo, the past participle of which is electus. If electus sounds to you that it might have something to do with English elect, you are absolutely right. What is elected or elite has been chosen from among plural options on some supposed belief in its comparative desirability. The system of the American Constitutional political system is explicitly elitist. We choose our legislators and our chief executives on the supposition of their superiority to alternative possibilities who are not elite or elected. If you have ever voted for anything, if you have ever chosen one garment over another, if you have ever asked for chips rather than rice on the blue-plate special, you are an elitist. If you put the Latin reflexive pronoun se at the front of eligo you get seligo, to select. If you can in today’s English find a dime’s worth of difference between elect and select, please let me know.
Think of a few instances in which election or selection is involved. Do you prefer any particular commercial good over another similar to it? Is the National Football League Draft “rigged” in favor of good football players? If you prefer your soft-boiled egg pointy-side up in the eggcup, are you exercising malign discrimination against Big-Endians? Is it unfair of your teacher to grade your course paper by a means other than the tossed-down-stairway method? Now very manifestly the process of college admissions has to be an elite process that renders elite results. Of course electing applicants for admission solely on the basis of their skin color would also be an exercise in elitism, as would specializing on the applicant’s eye color, whether their zipcodes begin with an even or an odd number, or possibly their shoe size. This is not sophistry or philological arcana. People who complain about “elitism” in American higher education, and in the practices of selective admission in general, are really complaining about something else, namely the social and sociological results they rightly or wrongly associate with a “good” college education. But if it seems reasonable to you that the owners and managers of the New York Yankees hire their team members on the basis of their anticipated capacities to play baseball well, or that the Met choose its opera performers on its evaluation of their abilities to sing well, what possible objection can there be to a college admissions committee that tries in good faith to assess candidates on their probable abilities to thrive in, contribute to, and make the most of the educational opportunities in the specific institutional context on offer? All of the “elite” colleges with which I am familiar are wealth-redistributing charities. As one small contribution to this mission they have for many years run summer academies and the like, backed by energy and resources, in an effort to give some number of promising high school students from “underrepresented” groups the opportunity and the invitation to glimpse and participate in something like actual college life. The motive is the sincere desire to inspire and encourage. These are good faith institutional efforts, and one step ahead of mere symbolism. But highly selective research institutions do not make the best use of their extraordinary resources by mounting remedial courses in basic literacy and numeracy, fundamental skills that since time immemorial have been regarded as the remit of elementary schools. It is their elementary nature that makes secondary education secondary and higher education higher. Though a topic for another essay, my opinion is that serious progress could be made in facing some of our problems of social inequality by yet further focusing national resources on the early years of public education. But we need to do it with our eyes open.
The schools and their teachers,--or, later, the colleges and their professors-- should not be expected to do all the work, though they too often are. “No Child Left Behind” is a great slogan for the right idea. The limitations in its visible “outcomes” have not been the results of bad faith or the unwillingness to spend public money. But at least half of our early education, surely, comes from the domestic setting, and from habits, practices, and expectations projected in a child’s home. The triumph of the republican principle , which allows the individual citizen to express and act upon individual preference in search of democratic decisions, has rightly been regarded as one of the lasting achievements of Enlightenment. Yet true elitism, the maximization of opportunity for wholesome independent choice, cannot thrive in a context of serious social pathology.
