The year 2025 will be remembered as the year that universities cut minority recruitment programs, closed student racial affinity groups, and censored their websites of the word diversity. These are not just responses to The Trump administration freezing funding to extort universities. As a faculty equity advisor at a minority serving institute, I see firsthand how academics are turning on efforts to make higher education more accessible. The truth is, even those of us who identify as liberal have a weakness for meritocracy arguments. It’s baked into our academic training. And lately this weakness—call it merit Stockholm syndrome—is fueling an internal backlash against diversity.
Academics spend their careers validating their own belonging: defending their dissertation, responding to editorial critique of their papers, and justifying their worthiness for dwindling funding. These rituals hone scholarship, but also feed impostorism, as the job turns into a repeated grind of proving one’s own value. With hard work, some of these academics land a coveted tenured position.
Some develop an unhealthy attachment to the institution that validated them with academic prestige. As their peers go on to lucrative careers outside the ivory tower, the sacrifices that they made for their career hold them emotionally hostage to their institution. If that institution engages in efforts to broadly recruit talent, they might see that as threatening to dilute its—and their—academic bona fides.
To be sure, the rigor of peer review is a cornerstone of academic standards—but it assumes the equality of all participating. Even if we were as race-, gender-, and class- blind as our university brochures claim we are, our measures of merit can be racialized, gendered, and classed. This can be a hard pill to swallow. My physics colleagues often object, “What does one’s ability to solve Maxwell’s equations have to do with the color of their skin?” The answer is nothing.
However, the ability to overcome the grind of the academic inquisition affects minoritized groups harder than those who aren’t reminded of their otherness when theirs is the only dark-colored hand raised in a classroom. Consider that one of the dirtiest slurs you can call an academic is a ‘diversity hire’—a term that implies that one is not actually meritorious of their position. This is a dogwhistle analogous to Regan’s “welfare queen.” It creates distrust—why collaborate with someone who might not be as qualified as you—even if the phrase is never uttered out loud. And so while one’s capacity to do physics has nothing to do with social dynamics, they may absolutely impede one’s ability to succeed within our meritocratic ivory tower.
While academic outsiders get left out, insiders reap additional benefit. As we establish the metrics by which future academics are judged, we train our progeny (academic and biological) to be the best prepared for those metrics. This insider knowledge is called the “hidden curriculum.” It is no surprise that university faculty are 25 times more likely to have a parent with a PhD. There are high schoolers who leverage family connections into research internships at national labs and undergraduates who take advanced graduate courses in topics that aren’t offered outside of the most elite universities. In turn, the prestige of these experiences shines on a CV and opens further doors in a cycle of success. These students rise to the top of admission piles, even though other intelligent, hard working applicants never got the opportunity to shine in the same way.
To be clear, the privileged students worked hard to make the most of what they were given. They earned those accolades en route to faculty careers. It is precisely because of how hard they worked that they reject efforts to make higher education more inclusive. What they miss is that recognizing relative privileges between individuals does not invalidate one’s own merits. By focusing on a narrow view of meritocracy, we implicitly tell the less privileged to “pull themselves up from your bootstraps,” even though no poor child in rural America—no matter how gifted—will have access to advanced laboratories the way the child of a nuclear physicist might.
As gatekeepers of opportunities, it is on faculty to moderate how they use prestige or pedigree as a proxy for assessing actual achievement. The former may be inaccessible to those with less privileged backgrounds, while the latter requires reading a CV beyond its “awards” section. Some of us use the phrase “distance traveled” to assess the grit, talent, and ingenuity required for the applicant to earn their achievements relative to opportunity. This has nothing to do with quotas, tokenism, or tipping to scales to protected classes; but it does have everything to do with recognizing actual merit rather than prestigious heuristics.
To be sure, qualifications matter—no amount of distance traveled will make up for the ability to do the job. Any reasonable program will start from candidates who are qualified. But it is on us to ensure that the opportunities of higher education and research are fairly accessible by all. The biggest challenge toward this may not be the current administration or the much-lampooned notion of “implicit bias,” it may be our own entrenched codependency with merit.
