The university, democracy, and the challenge to meritocracy

Universities can undergird democracy in two ways. First, they can promote and defend truth, which is antithetical to despotism and a natural progenitor of democracy, but they do so only as the university itself is meritocratic and courageous in its adherence to canons of intellectual rigour and academic integrity. Second, universities are, or can be, engines of opportunity and of the ascendence of achievement over ascription-and thus of democratization. However, absent efforts to the contrary, the natural tendency of universities is to perpetuate or even to widen the effects of ascription: for example, social class, race, or gender. A truly democratic university, then, must find ways to select among students and to distribute its benefits in ways that are still meritocratic, but that weaken rather than accelerate the transmission of the status and wealth into which one is born.