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Monday, October 24, 2005
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR THE OVERPRIVILEGED From a Slate review of The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton: Karabel's ultimate goal in deconstructing merit is not, however, to vindicate affirmative action but to expose the hollowness of the central American myth of equal opportunity. The selection process at elite universities is widely understood as the outward symbol, and in many ways the foundation, of our society's distribution of opportunities and rewards. It thus "legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability and hard work over the prerogatives of birth." But the truth, Karabel argues, is very nearly the opposite: Social mobility is diminishing, privilege is increasingly reproducing itself, and the system of higher education has become the chief means whereby well-situated parents pass on the "cultural capital" indispensable to success. "Merit" is always a political tool, always "bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger society." When merit was defined according to character attributes associated with the upper class, that imprint was plain for all to see, and to attack, but now that elite universities reward academic skills theoretically attainable by all, but in practice concentrated among the children of the well-to-do and the well-educated, the mark of power is, like the admissions process itself, "veiled." And it is precisely this appearance of equal opportunity that makes current-day admissions systems so effective a legitimating device. |