On almost every campus in the nation, two projects are clearly in
view. One is the maintenance of meritocracy; the other is the pursuit
of an egalitarian ideal.
Meritocracy has to do with excellence of mind, with being
intelligent, and demonstrating that intelligence. No university should
ever default on its duty to make distinctions of quality. In making
these distinctions, it declares its adherence to the only form of
inequality that warrants its respect. That is the inequality of
individuality, success, talent, and even genius. Universities tacitly
recognize an uncomfortable fact about human progress: it has been
accelerated by such inequality. Individual distinction — not
standardization and not mediocrity — has been the key to that
development.
The egalitarian ideal, on the other hand, promotes the principle
that everyone should be treated fairly and openly within the university
community. It assumes that a campus is something more than a loose
assembly of competing individuals, that it can be a consort of people
with trust in each other who can make something honorable of themselves
together. It proposes that if a good community is established, it will
have a value to each member of it greater than the mere sum of what
solitary selves can generate on their own.
The facts all around us say that universities and colleges will
continue steadfastly to operate on these two principles into the
foreseeable future. And these two principles find their union in yet
another, and higher principle — that of opportunity.
Universities offer that precious asset to their students. It takes
the form of moving beyond one’s place in life, of securing, through
learning, a chance to improve one’s moral, intellectual, and social
situation.
Affirmative action, which has become one of the most powerful
institutional expressions of opportunity, enters this dual system as a
way of insuring that the egalitarian ethos is authentic. Students
cannot be left with the feeling that the claims of the meritocracy have
proved so witheringly intense that large parts of social reality have
been blocked at the campus gates. The university, as a beacon or force
for opportunity, needs both halves of its principled being to survive
as an organism.
This line of reasoning means that the meritocratic ethos of a
campus, no matter how determined and spirited, cannot afford to be
unreflective of the social realities defining the United States. That
way lies a form of university life that is abstract, rootless, and
“academic” in the worst sense. Intellectual rigor turns out to be no
rigor at all, if established in an atmosphere purged of social reality.
