By Khoa Sands ‘26
Much of my writing and observations on free speech and academic freedom at Princeton over the past several years in some way revolve around the relationship between the ivory tower and civil society. I have stressed why a liberal society depends on liberal education, the tensions between civic education and the pursuit of truth, and how campus protests mirror social revolutions. Of course, as has been repeated numerous times, free speech is the only way universities can adhere to their truth-seeking missions. However, academic freedom is important from the civil society angle as well, as it legitimizes elite institutions in the eyes of a wider democratic society. It is this latter defense of academic freedom that bears repeating now. In the aftermath of the Trump administration’s war on higher education and the pro-Palestine campus encampments, it is clear that elite higher education has lost its institutional legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Whatever social contract existed between the ivory tower and Main Street has certainly been broken. It’s no secret that elite universities depend upon millions of dollars of public money. In a famous passage from Plato’s Apology, Socrates proposes that instead of being put to death, he should be paid and honored by society. He demands to be fed at public expense in the Prytaneion – an honor usually reserved for heroes of war or the Olympics. In Ancient Athens, it was the height of insolence. But today, Socrates has achieved his demand with the modern research university.
In an unusually self-reflective op-ed published in the Daily Princetonian, Jia Cheng Shen ‘28 asks, “What do we owe society for a Princeton education?” He correctly notes that those with the immense privilege of studying at Princeton, a place that is subsidized by public money, have a responsibility to give back to society. But what does that responsibility look like?
This renewed discussion of the academia-civil society social contract has turned a critical eye to meritocracy. Last year, campus was abuzz discussing David Brooks’ cover piece in The Atlantic, which amounted to little more than a protracted takedown of meritocracy, without any viable proposal to replace the system. However, it was precisely the failures of Brooks’ piece that revealed the problem with how elites think about the social contract. Brooks, like the rest of the liberal American elite class, holds democratic egalitarian values. Meritocracy was once the means to realize those values, but we discovered, rather suddenly, that it's suspect, even dangerous. Considering Meritocracy’s origins in eugenics, perhaps it was never about equity after all. Far from leading us to a more democratic and more equitable society, we have created social segregation and an anxious, self-centered careerist class of elites who lack any sense of noblesse oblige.
We now have a class of elites deeply uncomfortable with the entire prospect of elites. Unable to acknowledge their status, they compete to tell the “right” stories about their own supposed oppression, now often a requirement for admission to elite universities! For many, identity politics and the oppression olympics have become useful means to justify selfish careerism. (A little bit of theory is a dangerous thing, like a young student using Marx to justify his pursuit of investment banking). Most critiques of meritocracy, therefore, argue that the system is not equitable enough, that there is still more to be done to eliminate biases in admissions, or to make the Ivy League more representative of broader social demographics. Most critiques of academic “elitism” from within elite academia fall into this latter category. But these suggestions remain aesthetic and perpetuate problematic oppression contests to gain entry into elite circles.
The simple truth that everyone knows but is ashamed to admit is this: Ivy League universities are elite institutions that exist to produce an elite class. Acknowledging this simple fact would lead us to the actually important question: what type of elite do we want to create? Scarcely anyone would argue that elite academia is producing a virtuous elite class beneficial to American society. As Brooks notes, the prep-school WASPs gave us the New Deal, World War II, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and Pax Americana, while the later meritocratic elite gave us wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the 2008 financial crisis. Rather than educating an elite class, with noblesse oblige and leadership in mind, we are educating a class of elites concerned first and foremost with their own financial or political success.
We should want an elite with a deep sense of gratitude towards the country and their community. We should want an elite with a strong dose of noblesse oblige. We should want an elite that will pursue a career in the nation's service, and the service of humanity. But in order to form a better elite, we must first acknowledge that we are one.
Khoa Sands ‘26 is the Editor-in-Chief of the Princeton Tory, President of the Princeton Human Values Forum, and Vice-President of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society.
