Sandel, M.J. (2020) The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Abstract

Michael Sandel, a professor of government theory at Harvard University Law School, considers how merit, an allegedly neutral standard, has become the guiding principle for deciding which candidate is best qualified for a position. Given their power to grant credentials, college faculty have become the primary arbiters in establishing who’s competent, who’s not, and what graduates must know to be deemed qualified. Who will be credentialed and who won’t. Having a college diploma proves you are smarter than someone who didn’t go beyond high school, if that far. Sandel asserts that this obsession with ‘credentialism,’ as he calls it, has caused too many college graduates to harbor feelings of conceit and condescension toward the uncredentialled, especially members of the working class (hereinafter also meant to include poverty-class individuals), whom Sandal defines as those employed in ‘manual labor, service industry, and clerical jobs.’ Credentialism is, in Sandel’s words, ‘the last acceptable prejudice.’