A meditation on merit

One of the oddities of life in South Africa is that it is controversial to defend the idea of meritocracy. Neither the ANC or DA is willing to do so and there is no shortage of voices who want to condemn the notions of merit and meritocracy alike as "racist". Most recently Professor Jonathan Jansen proclaimed that "meritocracy is a myth".  "This thing about merit is not going to go away", he writes sadly. "It hangs like a cloud over every black appointment".

"The reason the question of merit will always remain in the air with black appointments", Jansen writes, "is because of a deep sense of racial superiority among some of our white brothers and sisters...The fallback on merit is a psychological defence...the merit argument is ignorant of history...many older white men..in all our universities would not meet the standards of appointment for professor at any respectable university today were it not for those two simple advantages - being white and male".

No doubt there are some older white male academics who deserve such a reproof - as also some of other races. South African academic standards in general are nothing like as high as in many other countries. But that fact alone makes such a diatribe against merit all the more dangerous: we need higher standards, more merit, not less. And while, of course, there must be some whites who still retain conscious or unconscious attitudes of superiority, it would be dishonest to pretend that the desire to appoint more academics of colour has not led to some disastrously inappropriate choices. Equally, it is in part those very choices which have helped create the cloud of doubt over merit which so exasperates Professor Jansen.

Two other facts have to be faced. First, many South African universities express deep concern because such a high proportion of their research publications are produced by older white males and some of them, like Wits, are taking special steps to retain such academics beyond retirement because they are so valuable - and because younger academics have yet to pick up the baton. There is, indeed, such concern over the failure of many more recent appointees to produce research results that the retirees are being saddled with all manner of mentorship duties in the (probably vain) hope that they can pass on their research skills.

Second, the reason why this exercise is probably in vain is simply that one cannot force-feed research or, indeed, rush through the creation of a new black intelligentsia. In the case of the Afrikaans universities it took several generations before an Afrikaans intelligentsia had been produced which was fully the equal of its English-speaking counterpart. It just takes that long. And there is no real way that the production of a black intelligentsia of equal heft can be accelerated faster than that.

It's a great pity, of course, and we'd all like it to go faster but we also have to face facts. If, instead, we remain in denial about such social and historical processes, we will only end up doing irreparable damage to our universities. Given that the era of liberation has seen a huge downward adjustment of the school system. The last thing we should do is further depress university standards.

Professor Jansen is a clever man and undoubtedly a well-meaning one. He wants the best for his university; of that there is no doubt. But universities are founded on merit and can only really work if they are true meritocracies. Of course one should object if that meritocracy is disturbed by lingering racial prejudices of any kind, black or white, but that is a reason to demand more and truer meritocracy, not less. It is therefore extremely odd - and somewhat disturbing - to find a university vice-chancellor delivering such a philippic against merit and meritocracy almost in principle. 

Such talk would, after all, be inconceivable in any of South Africa's BRICS partners: they all believe fiercely in merit and reward it. They do this in their economic lives and they do it even more in their sports. Can one imagine a Brazilian soccer team, an Indian cricket team, a Russian ice hockey team or a Chinese Olympic team using racial quotas or picking teams on anything but the strictest merit?

The notion would simply be laughable. The same is true more or less around the world. The British and Americans simply couldn't care less how many of their Olympic or football teams are black, white or brown and recently the Russians have been saying they'd like more black athletes since they've noticed how many black British and American champions there are. One can no more imagine sports managers than one could imagine business executive or university vice-chancellors from any of these countries making speeches saying meritocracy was a myth or speaking of "a fallback on merit" as if that meant some sort of reprehensible back-sliding.

So this is a parochial South African argument. The whole world is out of step but our Johnny.

That said, the argument divides into several parts, depending essentially on how parochially protected each sector is. And much of South African life is thus protected: when we are discussing which students should be admitted to university or which candidates should be short-listed for a job in the civil service, there is no real danger of international standards breaking in like sunshine.

Accordingly, people can be accepted on grounds which might never be accepted elsewhere. This is what leads to lower standards in many areas of our national life. We may console ourselves that we can live with that, but it always has a price and nowhere more than in education. We have had a whole generation now of appointing school-teachers at a far lower standard than the teachers who were so disastrously given packages to exit the system by Mandela in the mid-1990s. Professsor Jansen knows better than most of us what the results of that has been. A huge work of reclamation is now necessary to undo the damage done. As Professor Jansen says, "the thing about merit is not going to go away".

But as one advances up the scale there is less protection against international standards. The executives of our top companies have to compete, willy-nilly, not only with the best that their competitors here can put up but with international companies too.

The very top level is international sport where South African teams are always competing with world-class teams picked purely on merit. When Cricket South Africa announced its new racial quota rules its website was full of laughing comment from foreign cricket supporters who found such notions ludicrous and said they looked forward to welcoming more South Africa refugees from quotas into their sides. And nowadays, not just England but New Zealand, Ireland, Holland and Scotland all have just such players.

It is worth resting on this point of parochialism. Recently I read the first two volumes of Philip Dwyer's  large biography of Napoleon, Napoleon. The Path to Power and Citizen Emperor: Napoleon in Power. These are really cutting edge pieces of scholarship, based on years of research in the French archives. And Napoleon belongs to world history: if one wants to write about him one is competing with supremely good French and other international academics.

At the time he wrote these books Dwyer was a Senior Lecturer (not even a professor) in an Australian university. This made me pause to wonder whether one could conceive of such a person existing at a South African university - and the answer was obviously no. Almost all our academics in the humanities parochially study South Africa and this is even true of some in the hard sciences too. Very few would pursue their studies in a foreign language. This is one reason why one should not take South African university rankings very seriously. Far too much of what is studied or taught has little or no world significance.

Professor Jansen makes the valid point that a certain degree of handicapping is essential in order to recognise true merit, pointing out that "the child with four As from a struggling township school" may be better than "a child with seven As from an upper-middle class school". But he then rather spoils his point by going on to insist that "we need to transform the gatekeepers, not those queuing at the gate" - ie. change the judges who make subjective judgements about merit. Because if his first argument is right then we can judge it on the numbers. And it is important that we do because numbers are objective and what we want is to get away from subjective judgements altogether.

So, we can admit both the 4A and the 7A students to medical school and see how they get on, judging purely by results, that is by numbers. If the 4A student surpasses the 7A one, then it would be an argument to have a look at 3A students from township schools as well. If not, not. Of course, if we find that many of the 4A students get good second class degrees we might still decide that it was worthwhile admitting them on general social grounds. That is another sort of decision. It is tolerable only up to a point where it does not endanger the general meritocracy - and it need not do so, because one knows that quite a few of those 7A students will only end up in the second class too. But some will also be at the very top and these are crucial to any university.

The whole point about merit is that it will emerge, given the chance. The solution to selecting a winning rugby or cricket team is not to change the race of the selectors. The fact that South Africa has the No.1 or No.2 team in the world in both these sports suggests that our present selectors and coaches know their stuff and should be left alone.

If they were selecting mainly white teams which lost then they could be sacked. But in fact they are selecting racially mixed teams which win. Moreover, there are quite a few players of colour in both teams who (a) are all clearly there on merit and (b) make it clear that every single one of them opposes affirmative action in sport.

Oddly, perhaps, a very useful contribution to all these arguments was to be found this week in the Guardian interview with Billy Beane, whose role as the analyst/coach of the Oakland-As was celebrated in the Brad Pitt film, Moneyball. What Beane did was to show that the conventional ways of rating players were wrong and that by following his more analytical approach Oakland, always one of the poorer teams, began consistently to beat richer teams with notionally stronger players. He agreed that his statistical analysis had changed baseball.

"Baseball has become a lot smarter. And that's great. Sports should be a meritocracy just like everything else". Note that for Beane, living in Silicon Valley, "a meritocracy just like everything else" seems a self-evident notion.  It also seems to him axiomatic that you make your judgements based on numbers, not on subjective hunches of any kinds:

"Numbers are essentially just facts. And ultimately every sport is about numbers. It's like watching a card-counter in Vegas playing black-jack. Once you've learnt how to count cards, why would you ever go back to doing it on a hunch?"

So no transforming the judges for Beane. That would simply replace one sort of subjective judgement by another. And it cannot be stressed enough that the issue of merit comes up precisely when an affirmative action choice is made which doesn't really work out. A good example was the appointment of Peter de Villiers as the Springbok rugby coach in 2008. De Villiers was a surprise choice because he hadn't been a successful coach in provincial rugby and nor had his teams won anything, the normal background for a Springbok coach.

In appointing him Oregan Hoskins made it clear that the fact that De Villiers was a man of colour had been a factor. "We have made the appointment and taken into account the issue of transformation when we made it. I don't think that tarnishes Peter. I'm just being honest with our country." Corne Krige, a previous Springbok captain was immediately pessimistic: "We have seven lean years ahead." In the end the Springboks under De Villiers were knocked out of the World Cup in the quarter finals. That is, they made the last eight but not the last four. South African rugby fans saw this as a major failure because they assume their team ought to be in the last two or, at worst, the last three.

So where does that leave us ? The Springboks won the world championship in 1995, coached by Kitch Christie. Christie was appointed because he had led Transvaal to be Currie Cup champions in 1993 and 1994 and also to win the Super Ten cup in 1993 as well as the Lion Cup and M-Net Night Series cup. There was no doubt that, on this record, Christie was appointed on merit.  And again in 2007 the Springboks, coached by Jake White, won the World Cup.

White had previously been an assistant coach with the Sharks, had a major coaching reputation and had coached the Under-21 Springboks to win their World Cup. So, again, an appointment on merit that worked.  Then came the disastrous De Villiers reign. He took over a team of work champs and after four years had reduced them to a team only making the last eight. The man everyone expected to get the job on merit was Heyneke Meyer who had won four Currie Cups and a Super 14 cup with the Blue Bulls. When De Villiers was appointed over him Meyer quit his job and went to work overseas, which is what happens when merit is ignored. Finally, in 2012 Meyer was made coach and has since steered the Springboks back into the top two in the world.

So what exactly was achieved by picking a coach on "the issue of transformation" ? It humiliated Peter De Villiers who has been able to get any major coaching job since then. It hugely upset the fans who began to desert the team. It hurt the team. It hardly pleased the sponsors. It invalidated that way of picking a coach. And it was hardly a happy precedent to be set by the first man of colour as coach. Note that it doesn't make the slightest difference that Oregan Hoskins is also Coloured. He and his board had picked White, then De Villiers, then Meyer.

All this is known by the rugby fans and, indeed, by the entire world. There can be no hiding at that level. This experience doesn't mean that it is wrong to appoint a coach of colour. It means that colour doesn't matter at all because all that counts is merit and the track record. When South Africa stick to that, they win; when they don't, they don't. It's very simple. Billy Beane, by the way, is very strict on the notion that merit must, above all, be observed in picking management. "The better the business is run, the healthier the team on the field is going to be."

The same lessons apply to society at large. If either the ANC or the DA are to save this society, they have to re-discover that only merit counts.

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