Nicholas Lemann
142 foreign affairs
tions about the system he was helping
create—especially about how it would
be perceived by the public. Today, many
people assume that admission to Ivy
League schools is a process that is highly
susceptible to corruption by prosperous
parents, and degrees from those institu-
tions are widely perceived as tickets to
gaudy status and material success, not to
careers in public service. This is partly, but
not entirely, accurate. Ivy League admis-
sions now rely on a pastiche: remnants of
the pre-Conant system—preferences for
athletes and the children of alumni, for
example—persist alongside a genuine
commitment to racial and class diversity,
as well as the strong emphasis on aca-
demic criteria that Conant wanted. And
Ivy League students are inculcated into an
elite culture defined less by crass ambi-
tion than by a peculiar mixture of soaring
liberal idealism and an overwhelming
preoccupation with success.
Markovits’s home institution, Yale Law
School, is an exemplar. It was founded
in 1824 but essentially refounded in the
late 1920s, when a coterie of fiery
young reformers led by the legal scholar
and future Supreme Court justice
William Douglas arrived after defecting
from Columbia University and gave
the school a decidedly more liberal cast
than its competitors. Yale still overpro-
duces law professors, judges, and govern-
ment officials. It is also intensely con-
scious of being considered the country’s
number one law school. Its students
have run a brutally competitive academic
gauntlet for two decades before they
arrive, and when they leave, they are
highly attractive to prominent commer-
cial law firms. The Meritocracy Trap grew
out of a speech Markovits gave at the
Yale Law School graduation ceremonythe dominant college admission device.
While he was doing this, in stages
during his reign at Harvard, he was also
occasionally writing essays calling for the
establishment of a new, classless Amer-
ica. But it’s worth noting that during his
peak period of influence, he was also a
leading opponent of the gi Bill, the
greatest expansion of educational oppor-
tunity the country had ever seen. His-
torical figures act according to the assump-
tions and exigencies of the moment;
Conant was focused on promoting the
research university model at Harvard and
other elite academic institutions and on
winning the Cold War. The prospect of
wasted scientific and administrative talent
haunted him, and he feared that class
divisions would weaken American society.
His solution to these problems was to
create large but strictly tracked public
high schools whose male graduates would
also have to go through a period of
compulsory national service. If everybody
went to high school and did their national
service together, he believed, that would
prevent class tensions from developing, so
the project of strict elite selection could
proceed unimpeded. Expanding access to
college was not part of his plan; doing so
would have diluted the focus on super-
achievers that Conant thought universi-
ties should maintain. He also expected
that the new American elites would be
overwhelming oriented toward public
service, as were graduates of top univer-
sities in Europe, and that they would not
try to rig the system that had produced
them in order to advantage their chil-
dren. Those qualities, too, would fore-
stall any resentment the new elites
might engender.
Like most social visionaries, Conant
was substantially wrong in his expecta-