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Meanings of Merit

Higher Education as a Lens on Public Culture

The College Board

What does discussion of higher education issues tell us about fundamental societal questions? Merit appears to underpin the major issues in higher education at the moment. Yet an inspection of these issues suggests that this is really about larger tensions that we may wish to avoid, such as the role of experts in a democracy, specifically their degree of professional autonomy in setting content and performance standards. A new unifying purpose for higher education—articulate judgement—may allow us to address these societal issues more clearly and the role of higher education more publicly and directly. Fundamentally, we must decide what role we want for the academic professions and how we place articulate judgement in their endeavor. Do we have the moral confidence in our enterprise to assert a capacity and a responsibility for independent, informed, deliberative, and humane judgment and for the capacity to elicit the same in our students?

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