Tony Judt died last week, at age 62. Readers of the New York Review of Books, especially, will miss his recurrent and beautiful essays, which had appeared in every issue of that publication since January. His final NYRB piece, ?Meritocrats,? is, like the others, autobiographical and therefore specific, but also general in that it decocts ideas from personal experience?in this case, his time at King's College, Cambridge, into which he was matriculated in 1966.
Judt, born in London's East End, was the first person in his family to finish secondary school, ?much less attend university,? and most of the boys he met at King's ?were?like me?the upwardly mobile products of selective state schools without fees.? Yet it is precisely such enabling schools that for forty years the British government, through ?a catastrophic sequence of ?reforms' aimed at curbing its elitist inheritance and institutionalizing ?equality,'? has been undermining.
Judt was a self-described ?universalist social democrat,? an established man of the Left,?and he found the eschewal of educational elitism to be wrongheaded. He prized the ?incoherence of the meritocracy? that was at once tolerant and discriminating, a system built upon ?giving everyone a chance and then privileging the talented.? American education has grown too uncomfortable with this system, with educational elitism, and is now fixated on various ?gaps? and on the quantity of high school and college graduates rather than their quality. Just yesterday the president reaffirmed his hope that by 2020 the United States will, among nations, have the highest percentage of people with college degrees. What meaning will such degrees confer?
Certain forms of elitism?those based on familial connection, say?are undesirable because they are unrelated to an individual's worth or potential. Thus do they narrow opportunity for the deserving?rather than expand it. But elitism?founded on talent or achievement is something else entirely. It is real, not invented, and it can and does expand opportunity for those whose promise might otherwise be limited. As Tony Judt knew, to grow squeamish about natural, unavoidable, positive elitism, to hide from it, to weaken it?this is not wise.
?Liam Julian