Only when I entered Princeton did I start to have doubts about the system that got me there. Some took the form of doubts about myself. My impressive performance on the SATs (whose supposed biases I was blind to, perhaps because I was a middle-class Caucasian and they operated in my favor) didn’t seem to count for much now that I found myself having to absorb volumes upon volumes of information rather than get the right answers on multiple-choice tests. Yes, I had a large vocabulary, and yes, I knew how to deploy it to good effect in classroom discussions and during professors’ office hours, but suddenly my prowess felt slightly fraudulent. Called upon to read whole books, many of them old, obscure and difficult, I discovered that I lacked stamina and insight. The little word puzzles I cut my teeth on were irrelevant to the daunting task of digesting Chaucer and Milton. My solution? I didn’t have one. Like countless college students before and since, I relied for my scholastic survival on a combination of verbal bluster, teacher-pleasing good manners and handy study aids.

While I dished out the high-level baloney that my aptocratic mind excelled at, I looked around at the students who didn’t resemble me in terms of skin color and background and wondered how they were staying afloat at all. As a child of the rural Midwest, I felt decidedly out of place at Princeton among the debonair Eastern prep-school graduates who still, in the early 1980s (just a decade or so after the campus went co-ed) seemed to embody its privileged heritage, so I could scarcely imagine the alienation of these other yet more marginalized students. And while I happened to know that some of them gained admission on special terms meant to make up for their social disadvantages, I didn’t resent them for this. Not at all. Because I came from a geographic region that Princeton hadn’t favored in the past, but which it was now intent on drawing from, I was also a sort of affirmative-action student. What’s more, the poorer and browner of my classmates — particularly the women — seemed to study twice as hard as I did, clocking endless hours in the library and forgoing weekend parties for late-night cram sessions. Maybe their SAT scores were lower than mine, but they ranked higher than I did on the effort scale. And on the bravery scale too.

Image Credit... Illustration by Mr. Bingo

A system of advancement by aptitude, by statistical measurements of mental acuity, doesn’t concern itself with determination and courage, but if the world were truly fair, it would. This was one of the things I learned at Princeton, along with the lesson that multiple-choice tests don’t predict a student’s grasp of Shakespeare. To judge by her statements about her college days and by her ruling on the use of a vocational examination used to promote firefighters, Sotomayor is also skeptical about one-size-fits-all testing. That’s probably natural, given her experience as an aptocrat who needed help, made the most of it when it was offered and may soon succeed to a position that could allow her to see that others receive it. But what does the American public think?

According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, 67 percent of Democrats support affirmative action, while 60 percent of Republicans oppose it. These numbers reflect an old philosophical split over the nature of social justice. Does it consist of devising enlightened rules and applying them equally to everyone or does it entail sometimes modifying those rules when it appears that they treat some of us a bit more equally than others? This argument could go on forever (and has), but there’s a way out of it, I think, which even my most exacting Princeton professors might not find entirely idiotic. The premise of this solution is that all systems that seek to rank human beings according to “merit” — an inherently complex idea — will inevitably fall short of fully accounting for what merit consists of in the real world. As such, these systems, like our Constitution, should be subject to amendment from time to time, since no definition of merit lasts forever.