Sublime

faculty line up their intellectual loves with their desire to instill their particular vision of orthodoxy or their desire to form students in a theological radicalism that they believe will free us from the problems of orthodoxy.

“All my friends who want to talk about education, you say, ‘Let’s talk about legacy programs. Do we really think legacy preferences, when we’re getting rid of affirmative action—shouldn’t we be getting rid of legacy?’ Oh, hell no. People will be like, ‘Oh, absolutely not.’ ”

The students who called for open admissions at CUNY understood that rejecting meritocracy did not mean rejecting rigor or discipline, but rather acknowledging that traditional conceptions of merit veil class and race inequities.