Are You Meritorious?
A Conversation With Darel Paul
12.00-1.30pm | Friday, November 15
Elm Library, 31 Whitney Avenue
To advocates of meritocracy, merit is a kind of objective technical skill adhering to individuals that institutions should cultivate, recognize, and reward. But merit is inescapably cultural and political as well as technical, and thus collective as well as individual. What does it take for a society to agree upon a definition of merit and how to reward it? Can a social order ever be ‘fair’? How would we know ‘equality of opportunity’ if we saw it?
Darel Paul is Professor of Political Science at Williams College.
This event is open to all members of the Yale community. Lunch will be served.
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In a meritocracy, the real power resides in the authority to judge merit.
—Paul Freiberger, Fire in the Valley