Word: merit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Friday night, television personality Stephen Colbert concluded an appearance at the Kennedy School of Government by telling a sold-out crowd that he’d given them enough information to merit a graduate degree from Harvard...
...What are you gonna do. Yes, it's easy give McEwan a pass because he's a writer of high literary merit - Atonement was TIME's book of the year in 2001. Yes, I feel a personal karmic debit to McEwan, because I once misspelled his name as McKewan very publicly in print and feel guilty about it (I was thinking of Ian McKellen, OK?) One could haul out the usual verities about how all great writers steal, Shakespeare included, and how in the Middle Ages plagiarism wasn't even considered a bad thing, but it's really not necessary...
...students of this university, are not some hand-selected intellectual elite that unquestionably earned our place here. We were chosen to reflect diverse forms of merit in an arguably arbitrary way. Asian Americans are underrepresented relative to their academic performance simply because, in light of other considerations that are prioritized above merit, there are more qualified Asian applicants than will be accepted. Rationalizations based on speculation about the personal qualities of these students compared to those of other ethnic groups are based on ill-informed and racist stereotypes...
...well qualified Asian applicants but also admitting a more diverse candidate pool. Karabel reports in “The Chosen” that 40 percent of legacies were admitted in 2002 compared to 11 percent of other applicants. There is a bias here that is not simply based on merit: While one might argue that legacy admits are simply correlated with better qualifications, high-performing Asian Americans are suffering the opposite of this kind of preferential admission...
There is a fine line between subjectivity and systematic exclusivity, and the comments documented by Golden attest to how easily the former can lead to the latter when the process loses transparency and accountability. We sacrifice meritocracy because of our belief in the merit of diversity, but it is our responsibility to ensure that this diversity is not used to justify a convenient elitism...