One-Track Mind. - Brief Article - Review - book review

Reason, April, 2000 by Brian Doherty

The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, by Nicholas Lemann, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 406 pages, $27.00

Molly Munger graduated from Harvard Law School in 1974, a member of the school's first class that was more than 10 percent female. She was atypical at Harvard for another reason, too: She had grown up in Southern California. In The Big Test, Nicholas Lemann uses Munger as an example of what he calls the new "American meritocracy." According to Lemann, an excellent reporter and former staff writer at The Atlantic, this group consists of those who succeed based on their "aptitude," as measured by standardized tests, without being held back by such 19th-century standards as breeding, inherited money, or religion.

Munger certainly fits Lemann's bill. Though her father ended up quite wealthy as a top lieutenant to super-investor Warren Buffett, she was raised comfortably middle-class by her mother and stepfather. She was smart, succeeding well enough in high school and at Radcliffe to get into Harvard Law despite being a woman and a non-New Englander. She was motivated after graduation, too, and eventually became a partner in the L.A. office of the prestigious law firm Fried, Frank, Harris & Shriver.

But even as she was living out an upper-class American dream, she wasn't satisfied. Her experiences mentoring disadvantaged young black girls made her wonder how she could stand to benefit so much from a system that still let race and poverty stand in the way of merit. Success in a culture as rotted as ours, she concluded, was a meaningless distinction, one better rejected than embraced. So after nearly 20 years as a standard legal eagle, she quit her lucrative job and entered the affirmative action battlefield, as a lawyer for the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund.

Lemann makes much of Munger's midlife crisis. For him, she personifies one of the ironies of the meritocracy envisioned by Harvard President James Bryant Conant in the 1930s. Conant, one of the central characters of Lemann's book, reformed Harvard's scholarship policy, changing the place from essentially a finishing school for fancy lads to the academic powerhouse it is today (it was only in the 1960s that Conant's revolution fully triumphed throughout the Ivy League).

Conant thought that everyone atop the new meritocracy would do immediately what it took Munger 20 years to get around to. That is, he expected them to emulate the "Episcopacy," Lemann's term for the quasi-aristocratic gaggle of Episcopalian "good families" who comprised proper society and dominated America's elite institutions before World War II. Conant assumed that his meritocrats, not content to enjoy the benefits of their positions, would act like a moral elite as well, reforming a truculent society that wasn't as good as it ought to be. He especially expected them to go into government and the law, where their talents would have the greatest uplifting effects.

But most of the meritocrats, like Munger in the beginning, took the perks and ran, seeking the time-honored American prerogatives of success for themselves and their families. They've proven comfortable with letting the commonweal take care of itself. Pace Conant, America is the better for it. More overall wealth and progress comes from smart young men and women entering the world of business and seeking their fortune there than from further clogging the corridors of government and law, whose denizens mostly place barriers in the path of achievement.

Lemann's book is subtitled "The Secret History of the American Meritocracy." The "secret history" in question lays out in detail just how Conant and his right-hand man, Henry Chauncey, transformed the Ivy League from relatively mediocre schools more concerned with social connections than with smarts into academic powerhouses with diverse student bodies. Their primary weapon was the SAT, the "big test" of the title. With smooth segues all the way, Lemann tells the story of the SAT and the personal stories of Molly Munger and others from the first generation to benefit from the Ivys' more open admission policies. The book concludes with some inspired political reporting on the fight over California's Proposition 209, which ended affirmative action in admissions to state colleges there. Lemann's topic is probably too big--he raises more questions than he has space to answer--but his book is interesting throughout.

In the 1930s, Conant and Chauncey began to shake up the Ivy League's ossified order by admitting more of the "wrong people"--initially just Midwesterners, but later Jews, Catholics, and Southerners. Both men believed in a natural aristocracy of educational talent, and neither could swallow the notion that it could all be found among rich Episcopalian boys from New England. In 1934, the pair found their revolutionary weapon: the exam then known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The SAT had been developed in 1926 by Carl Brigham, a psychometrician with an interest in eugenics; it was an immediate descendant of the infamous Army IQ tests of World War I, which Brigham had worked on and which, to his mind, gave scientific support for prejudices against Jews, blacks, and Southern and Eastern Europeans.