Why Not Nepotism?
“Everybody knows that the dice are loaded. Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.”
1.
There is something about the flow of news that feels, for lack of a better word, regulated. Not regulated in the sense of being directed or controlled by some regulatory body. No, there isn’t anyone behind the curtain. I mean regulated in the sense of fixed amounts delivered at regular intervals, regulated in the way that a medical IV regulates the intake of pharmaceuticals into the bloodstream.
That feeling of being medicated was one I had a couple of months ago, when this paper was making the rounds. This is from the abstract:
Despite the special role of tenure-track faculty in society, training future researchers and producing scholarship that drives scientific and technological innovation, the sociodemographic characteristics of the professoriate have never been representative of the general population. Here we systematically investigate the indicators of faculty childhood socioeconomic status and consider how they may limit efforts to diversify the professoriate. …
The paper found that faculty members at U.S. colleges and universities are twenty-five times more likely to have a parent who has a PhD than is a member of the general population, a number that rises to fifty times at elite institutions. This empirical finding is interesting and a useful contribution to the literature, so I don’t mean to pick on this paper. But I can’t help but get a little caught up in the opening sentences. If tenure-track faculty have a “special-role” in society, why would we expect them to be representative of the general population.
Along similar lines, the phrase nepotism baby or “nepo baby” entered the timeline earlier this year. At first, it was in reference to Euphoria star Maude Apatow, but the meme began implicating other children of famous or industry-connected parents. I’ll leave it to Vox to do what they do and explain further. Again, I have to wonder whether anyone believed that the entertainment industry was some kind of pure meritocracy. If so, what rock were they living under and why didn’t it have an internet connection.
I understand why papers like the one in Nature get passed around by the chattering classes and why the media is replete with stories about nepotism. The takes write themselves. We live in an oligarchy. The admonitions flow easily. You didn’t earn that! And it can all be wrapped up with a bit of sarcastic cope. Choose your parents wisely.
I get all that. What I don’t get is the element of faux shock that always comes with these takes. Don’t we get a steady trickle of stories and takes about the supposed failings of meritocracy and the evils of nepotism? It should be old hat by now. Has something changed since the timeline was questioning how Lena Dunham got an independent movie made at the age of 23 and her own HBO show greenlit at 25? This is what I mean by regulated news, the steady trickle of certain kinds of stories that strike the same notes and strum the same emotional chords.
We have a complicated relationship with the idea of meritocracy. It is human nature to dislike unfairness and so we tend to shun overt displays of privilege and favoritism. Tori Spelling was so concerned about the appearance of nepotism that she started telling people she auditioned for Beverly Hills 90210 under the name Tori Mitchell, which likely means that the best acting in that room was by the casting folks, who had to pretend that they didn’t know who she was. (Spelling does have the good sense to admit that her ruse was probably quite thin.)
As much as people do dislike the appearance of nepotism and other kinds of favoritism, they can also be really into lineage and legacy. Zoe Kravitz is likeable enough in her own right, but part of her appeal is that she has cool parents. I love the fact that C.J. Wallace and O’Shea Jackson Jr. played their respective rapper fathers in movies. Coming to terms with this contradiction can be difficult, especially when we refuse to acknowledge it in the first place.
2.
Part of the reason we have such a problem with the failures of meritocracy is that we like to tell ourselves we live in a uniquely enlightened era. But no commitment to enlightened equality or social justice, or whatever, is going to change the fact that we are still human beings. It has always been the case that people were likely to follow in the footsteps of their parents. For most of human history, if your parents tilled the soil and planted crops, then you grew up to plant your fields right next to theirs. Even as agricultural surplus created the space for people to developed specialized skills, those skills were passed down through familial channels and through tightly controlled guilds and licensing regimes. What has happened to make us think we’re so special now?
In many ways, we do live in a more meritocratic world, but we also have a false sense of our own progress. Look at this bit from an interview with Maude Apatow in which she talks about her role in The King of Staten Island, which was written, produced and directed by her father, Judd Apatow.
Were you concerned about the perception of you getting the role only because he was your dad?
I definitely thought about that before doing this movie. Obviously, I’ve acted in so many of my parents’ movies, and people are going to say it’s nepotism. I mean, it’s not even an insult — well, it is an insult, but it is what it is. But because I’d just done “Euphoria” and I was starting to do other projects showing I was capable of doing work without their help, I was apprehensive about it. But then I thought, “I haven’t worked with my dad since I was 12,” and I really look up to him as a mentor figure in my life. I want to be a director someday, and getting to watch my dad do what he does is very important to me. I don’t know when I’m ever going to do this again, and it just felt like, “Why would I not do it?” I’m gonna spend my whole life trying to prove myself as an individual, and that’s a chip on my shoulder. It’s really important to me to show that I work really hard, because I do. I want to be an individual.
I don’t know about you but when I read this, I just want her to come out and say what’s what. Yes, I am the beneficiary of nepotism. I probably wouldn’t be in this position if not for my dad, who worked really hard and built a career. No, it’s not fair. But so what? Who said life is fair? You want better chances for yourself? Work harder! And when the interviewer asks why she left Northwestern after two years, it would be plain old refreshing to hear her say: Because my dad is Judd Fucking Apatow and degrees are for peasants! I don’t need a piece of paper. My future is already stamped.
Of course, Maude Apatow can’t say any of that. The rules of the game say that she has to give the kind of mealy-mouthed, equivocating answer that she did and the interviewer has to nod politely and move on to the next question. This was a friendly interview after all and not a hit piece. Because the piece is crafted to leave us with a positive impression of Apatow, it deals with nepotism as something to be judged based on perception and not anything as crude as the simple application of a definition. If we like you, you are part of a legacy and working hard to step out of the shadow of your famous parents. If we don’t like you, you’re a nepo-baby. Such is the ethics of the internet hive mind.
Just to be clear, this is not a piece in favor of nepotism. This is a piece in favor of us remembering who we are. Nepotism, inherited privilege, other forms of favoritism; these are not so much as failures of the meritocracy as they are the result of how we’ve chosen to structure the meritocracy. We become so concerned with the appearance of fairness that we lose focus on what actual fairness might look like. This is where the medicated feeling comes from. We take in this steady stream of small outrages as a part of maintaining the illusion that we are fully committed to fairness, but that somehow we just keep falling short.
3.
We believe that we live in a superbly moral age, which is part of why these stories have impact. We’ve come so far! How could this still be the case? Moreover, our discourse is so often facile exactly because so many of those who take part in it believe themselves to be moral geniuses when mostly they're just parroting this or that bromide that they’ve pilfered from the timeline.
The inability to make real sense of meritocracy has given rise to a tired dialogue, one that vacillates between celebrating the elements of meritocracy that we like and then condemning the whole idea as some kind of scam. This is an area where too much has been written and not enough has been said. I will try not to add to this cacophony, but I will say that the debate centers around a false choice. Does meritocracy allow us to rise or fall to the limits of our hard work and natural-born abilities? Or does meritocracy serve as cover for not doing the hard work of crafting a fairer society? The answer to both of these questions is yes.
Again, this is not a piece in favor of nepotism. This is a post in favor of waking the fuck up. Isn’t it time we started to move beyond the phony moralizing? I get that this is not easy. Here I am having my own difficulty in avoiding the polemical. I guess the real question is how we move beyond.
I don’t have the exact answer, but I think it begins with learning to differentiate between understanding what the world is and having opinions about what we want the world to be. We are plagued by a reverse “is-ought problem.” Not only is it unhelpful to confuse what is from what ought to be, it puts the cart before the horse. How can we claim to know what ought to be if we cannot accurately speak about what is? In most cases, a doctor can’t cure her patient until she has a proper diagnosis of what’s gone wrong.
Let’s try this. Let's forget for a moment about whether these things are good or bad. Let us merely consider that they are, and from there, ask what can be done. Let’s go all the way back to the example of a tenured professor. What does it take to reach such a position? First it takes a college degree and then a graduate degree. Where you do your undergraduate and what you major in are not hard limits, but they are important. Getting into a good school takes high test scores and strong applications, which entail good grades, thoughtful recommendations, and a carefully curated list of the appropriate extracurricular activities. Making college admissions a fairer process would also entail making meaningful reforms to primary and secondary education (which would likely have to entail doing something about housing segregation, but let’s not get too far afield).
Once in school, you have to begin crafting a CV that will interest current tenure-track faculty. Academia is a collection of specialized fields. One needs to have a good idea of the current research, and where your research might fit in and make a contribution. And the earlier you know these things, the sooner you can start doing them and the stronger your CV will be.
How could having a parent who has successfully negotiated this series of hurdles not be an advantage to someone trying to go down that path themselves? What would such a world look like? What would it mean to effectively sever the ties between parental knowledge and experience and child outcomes? For one, we'd probably need to drastically simplify the route to reach a tenured track position. We’d have to replace opaque, subjective and bureaucratic criteria with easily understandable, universal measures of student performance. And we’d have to disseminate this information widely and as jargon-free and straightforward as possible.
How many of these things are we doing? How many are we willing to do? Yes, those are rhetorical questions. I don’t know what this other world looks like, but I know that it is not ours. And it is not likely to be anytime soon. There are countries where college admission is determined by a single test, which is one way to drastically simplify college admissions. The United States is not one of those countries. Quite the opposite, we are moving in the opposite direction, choosing to give more weight to the discretionary factors that admissions committees use to evaluate students behind closed doors.
I don’t bring any of this up as a way of advocating for one set of alternatives over another. And I admit that even drastically simplifying the path would be no guarantee that it is equally navigable by all. Intelligence is to some degree heritable. Work and study habits are fostered and handed down through families. Short of abolishing the family, the link between outcomes of parents and their children will remain. I am no revolutionary calling for the abolition of the family. Quite the opposite. And as much as I would like to see more paths to success that don’t require wresting credentials from the cold, inert hands of the bureaucracy, I do want to make sure that the people who design buildings and fly planes and perform surgery are the best and most qualified.
I bring these things up, because I believe that the only way for things to get better is for us to begin owning up to the very basic idea that we live in a world that is constantly being created by our choices and our actions. Merely, wanting things to be different has no efficacy. Refusing to call things what they plainly are does not transmogrify them into something more palatable. And numbing ourselves with a steady stream of faux outrage will not lead to a solution. It will only bring more numbness.
Leonard Cohen had a point, no matter how hard we pretend not to know.