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Lemann admires the rise of ETS, the way one admires a crocodile that had to eat a number of its siblings. But Lemann worries, too, because no one ever voted for the crocodile, and yet it seems to be in charge. The SAT was first administered in 1926, and today it is so deeply embedded in the self-image of the American elite that any change would be resisted with the ingenuity and tenacity of a legislator under threat of redistricting. Nonetheless, as Lemann observes, meritocracy is just a neologism for aristocracy, and America shouldn't have one. "How may an aristocracy of intellect justify itself to all men?" the University of California's Clark Kerr once wondered. "Good question," Lemann comments drily. Much has been given to the new meritocrats, Lemann notes. "And what [have] they done, really, to earn such privilege or authority, other than to get high test scores and good grades?"

The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy By Nicholas Lemann Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999 406 pages   Buy The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy by Nicholas Lemann

In Lemann's opinion, the meritocrats deserve a comeuppance. To some extent, he believes, they find it whenever they venture outside their narrow fields of specialization. At large in America, meritocrats discover they are not the only kind of elite. In fact, meritocrats are the least popular sort. The general public has much more respect for the elites that Lemann refers to as Lifers (who earned their eminence by long and loyal service, such as Colin Powell) and Talents (who won their places with unusual achievements, such as Steve Jobs). But a comeuppance is supposed to induce self-scrutiny, and skirmishes with the Lifers and Talents haven't forced the meritocrats to question their assumptions.

Here Lemann's narrative takes a sudden, hazardous turn. The single greatest comeuppance of the meritocrats, he believes, has been at the hands of the masses, in a slap delivered just when the meritocrats thought they were being most altruistic. The recent setbacks to affirmative action, Lemann suggests, have been salutary for a complacent would-be ruling class.

The big test of "The Big Test" turns out to be not the SAT, but the meritocracy's 1996 ordeal in California. The last third of the book charts the rise and fall of race-sensitive college admissions. Here, too, Lemann excels as a reporter, revealing unlikely alliances, unexpected motives, clandestine political bargains and yet more evidence of the Clintons' slipperiness. But there is a strange hollowness to the struggle, at least as Lemann describes it, because his heroines -- the two women leading the fight to save affirmative action in California -- lack any abiding faith in their cause. Even before its demise, attorney Connie Rice has "concluded that, as a solution to the problems of black America, affirmative action was a joke." And soon after the liberals lose, Molly Munger decides that affirmative action was "the wrong fight to be in." Lemann agrees. "The right fight," he writes, in an approving echo of her thoughts, "was the fight to make sure that everybody got a good education and a chance to live a life of decency and honor."

This is a logical error, of the form "Sex is better than cookies; therefore, cookies are bad." Cookies are not bad, even if sex is better. Of course a campaign to improve the country's elementary and secondary schools would in the long run be far superior to affirmative action. But that does not mean that affirmative action is not worthwhile in the interim.

"The project of picking the members of [the] elite properly does not confer an aura of justice on the whole society," Lemann writes. This is true, and worth saying, if only to prick the meritocrats' moral smugness. It's grandiose of the meritocrats to justify affirmative action as if it were charity, when the expense is only partially theirs. But affirmative action is more than the meritocracy putting on airs; all the numbers indicate that the power of an elite college education is real. The more familiar temptation in America is to downplay the hand you were dealt. If a group of people have admitted to a privilege so great they feel obliged to offset it with a responsibility, it probably isn't wise to refuse them just because we know they could do better.
salon.com | Oct. 1, 1999

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