The failed fantasy of pure meritocracy

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

From a post on a New York Times blog specifically about college admissions: My daughter is a senior from a public school with a class size of 589. She has a 4.0 GPA with mostly advanced and AP classes, except required classes. She has an SAT of 2,250, ACT 36. So she is a National [...]

Posted in absurdity, america, gender | 14 Comments »

American universities and class anxiety

Friday, November 9th, 2007

Sometimes you hear claims that Americans don’t discuss social class. That it’s not a topic of public discourse. That it’s absent from our collective consciousness. (The late Molly Ivins, or else it was Barbara Ehrenreich, once claimed that ‘class’ was the one taboo topic in the op-ed pages.) To me it seems more accurate to [...]

Posted in america, politics | No Comments »