Relegating the Rule of Merit and Escaping the “Academic Fingertrap”

In the concluding chapter, we claim that there can be no rehabilitation of merit as a concept or device for fair academic knowledge production by eradicating its procedural flaws or tempering merit with the ideal concepts of luck, fortune, or grace. Despite attempts to do otherwise particularly in relation to access to higher education as represented by the recent arguments of Michael Sandel, merit remains fraught and normatively pretentious as it stands incapable of interrogating the values and concepts that are cloaked by their ideal standing. Sandel’s attempt to temper this ideal standing with an equally ideal concept of grace and luck proves unconvincing theoretically and institutionally. It is particularly problematic, as it allows merit to trap us and the very social institution whose role it is to create, teach, and expose ideas for error testing, into a merit system tempered by another equally intractable concepts. Justice is not achieved by pushing decisions of merit down under the veil of qualification, which is no less a mode of merit and credentialism. We find kinship in the thought of Hannah Arendt, who places particular value on a market place of ideas as a condition for thinking about human freedom. This lays the groundwork for our conclusion that merit cannot be used as a concept of power in a just way no matter what is done with it. As such, the way in which academic institutions and the knowledge they produce will have to change.