March 12, 2019 (264 words)
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A collection of responses to the elite college admissions scandals.
Tags: meritocracy
This post is day 71 of a personal challenge to write every day in 2019. See the other fragments, or sign up for my weekly newsletter.
I wasn’t in the mood to write anything new today, so here’s a compendium of some of the best tweets on my timeline about the elite college admissions scandal. (Click the image to be taken to the tweet itself, if it’s still up. Apologies for the BuzzFeed-esque post today. I need to spend less time on Twitter.)
and the finale:
Things are still terrible overall, and it’s too early to tell if this will actually change anything (for the better), but it was still nice to see the facade crumble in such an explosive way. Meritocracy was always a BS concept but at least now the mask is off.
Other recommended resources on the topic of meritocracy and elite college admissions:
- A Speech on Socialism at Andover - Nathan J. Robinson for Current Affairs
- Adam Wheeler Went to Harvard - Jim Newell for The Baffler
- Not Every Kid-Bond Matures - Gabriel Winant for n+1
- Tech culture, unions and the blind spot of meritocracy - me chatting with my friend Xavier for Notes From Below
- this quote from Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed
- this quote from Frédéric Lordon’s Willing Slaves of Capital summarising Bourdieu’s analysis of the true function of university of degrees
- bonus: my saved quotes from various books/articles I’ve read that include the word meritorcarcy