Upon reading an article on meritocracy

The quirky nature of my life is due to always feeling like an outsider. My parents and my sister emigrated from the United Kingdom in the 60's, and my mother and father never quite assimilated. They watch a hefty amount of British content, and don't really have any grasp on American popular culture created after 2000 or so. 

I spend a lot of time now assisting with transition to being elderly. I spent the past five days with them and I'm on board a train back to Charlottesville. I got today's newsletter out, and I've spent the last hour waiting for arrival of delayed Northeast Regional 171.

I did not want to work on the computer, so I did something I've not done in a long while. I read an article in a magazine. Last last year I purchased a subscription to The Atlantic mostly because there was an article I really wanted to read online.

I might have posted something about it on Facebook, but I'm staying away from that platform having identified time there as something that was likely taking more from me than rewarding me. I have yet to delete my account, but I feel like I am getting some of my self back. I feel like there's more time to write and research my newsletter. 

And there was time to read a lengthy article from David Brooks called How Ivy League Admissions Broke America. I resisted reading it because of the headline which seemed sensational. But I've come away thinking that I have a role to play in trying to figure out how to repair what any rational observer would see as a broken country. 

Brooks writes about the efforts of Harvard President James Conant to change the way college admissions worked to stop a trajectory of America becoming an aristocracy. 

"Conant and others set out to get rid of admissions criteria based on bloodlines and breeding and replace them with criteria centered on brainpower. His system was predicated on the idea that the highest human trait is intelligence, and that intelligence is revealed through academic achievement."

The article goes on to describe the tenets of meritocracy and Brooks suggests that the result hasn't really worked out for the best. From my own perspective living in a city dominated by the University of Virginia, I am constantly aware of how what happens there is not for the rest of the community. I moved to the area to work a job related to UVA, and was gone within 18 months for failing to toe the hierarchical line that had been drawn. Somehow I've remained in the community, but I and many others feel like a second-class citizen. 

I'm drawn to the work I do because I am curious. My curiosity comes from my experience as the son of immigrants who moved to a place they didn't really try to understand. For much of my childhood, I was told that I was lucky to have been saved from England and that being born in America was the best thing that happened to me. 

When it came time for me to go to college, I had no idea what it was for. I was not a good student because I always asked too many questions. I did not have parents who had been through the system, and they offered no guidance. I went to Virginia Tech, and enjoyed many of the classes, but I was relatively aimless until I discovered I had a love and sincere interest in journalism.

Nearly everyone told me that I would never find a job and I should concentrate on something different. I stubbornly threw myself into the work until my drive fizzled out in 1996 after being demoralized working for a public radio station. At one point, my supervisors suggested I would only get a recommendation if I performed a sexual favor on him. This was way before the days you could report someone for something like that.

I am not a favorite son of Virginia Tech and have not returned much in the thirty years since I graduated. I've not stayed in touch with anyone who was at the college newspaper, and mostly everyone I lived with went on to become engineers. I was the odd person out and put so much of time and effort into the restaurant job and the newspaper. 

But thirty years later, I realize I have accomplished a few things and that my pathway has been one that has involved communication. My intelligence never looked good on paper, but for nine years my stories were in the daily newspaper. Now I'm trying to directly compete with a publication that now only goes out three times a week.

Brooks' article has captured my imagination as I think about what role journalism can play in trying to replenish this country and perhaps avoid the conflict and violence that seems inevitable. For me, the kind of journalism I strive to produce has been largely eliminated from the landscape. I helped build a successful nonprofit news organization only to have a new director come in and inform staff we'd be doing something different. The new director said the organization would not be successful until fundraising hit a million a year. I wanted no part of that and left dejectedly. 

That person when hired had great credentials but honestly I don't remember where they went to college.  This passage from Brooks' article jumped out at me. 

It’s gotten harder to secure a good job if you lack a college degree, especially an elite college degree. When I started in journalism, in the 1980s, older working-class reporters still roamed the newsroom. Today, journalism is a profession reserved almost exclusively for college grads, especially elite ones. A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal had attended one of the 34 most elite universities or colleges in the nation.

I believe that changed journalism at a time when the profession was being eviscerated by deregulation, a shift to the internet, and an overall sense that the public didn't need to know what was happening in municipal government. The kind of explanatory work I wanted to do was dismissed as "broccoli" that no one wanted. 

That attitude has not served the country well. Communities lack the framework to communicate about civic matters. At the moment, I am limited in what I can do, but I'm determined to devote the rest of my life to this work. There's much more I want to do, and I'm at a point where perhaps I'll be able to continue growing. 

And I'm going to revisit the article because my hope for America is one that can manage to build space for the competition of ideas instead of one run by memes and simplistic arguments. And maybe this is a fool's dream, but I'm happy to wear that hat.