On Thursday, Yale University announced it again would require some form of standardized testing for prospective students seeking admission. The university joins Dartmouth as the second Ivy League school to re-institute the requirement, which many schools scuttled during COVID-19.
Both Dartmouth and Yale admitted that making such testing optional harmed socially and economically underprivileged applicants, stacking the deck in favor of those whose families had more money and social capital. A lot could be said about this move in relation to American education. Here, the Left seems to have realized that their attempts at making their institutions more aligned with social justice actually ended up further entrenching the privilege they criticize in general society.
But there is an important political parallel to learn from this decision. Yale’s true failure resulted in removing needed objective standards from its admissions process. We suffer a similar failure in contemporary politics.
We have done so in several ways. First, we have redefined liberty to make it a vindication of an individual’s moral autonomy. From Hollywood to the Supreme Court, this view of human beings has been pushed in stories and legal mandates. The only objective ordering of liberty that remains resides in the requirement to affirm another person’s moral self-definition or face the brunt of social ostracism and even legal prosecution.
Second, we have reduced society’s view of persons to define them too much by particular characteristics such as sex, race, and sexuality, among other classifications. This point stands in tension with the first, as it reduces persons to either submit to subset groupthink or be called a traitor to one’s “own.” Look no further this Black History Month than toward the condemnation poured on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for not toeing perceived ideological lines in accord with the color of his skin. Yet the same elements of politics and society push both. And the groupthink mentality itself lacks true objectivity as it constantly seeks bigots, real and imagined, to sustain itself.
We need a return to truly objective standards, not just in college admissions but in our assessment of political persons, thoughts, and actions. There is no ACT, SAT, or other comparable test to take on this score (civil service exams certainly don’t count).
Instead, we should return to the standard articulated in our own Declaration of Independence. There, in defending our separation from Great Britain, our Founders did not primarily reference English laws, customs, and traditions. Instead, they first appealed to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” We do not find these laws in books detailing statutes passed by legislatures. Instead, their moral demands are “self-evident” to our minds exercising the basic human capacity to reason. These laws come from our Creator in forming us and directing us to live and to live well.
Thus, the laws of nature and of nature’s God precede human government and statutes. More than just prior in time, they are higher in authority. From those laws we understand how to make the human rules that make up our Constitution and our other regulations. And it thereby forms the standard by which we assess the justice of what we say and do.
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As Yale does well to return to standardized testing, we would do well in politics to return to this objective standard. As the Declaration relates, the laws of nature and of nature’s God tell us much about justice. It teaches that all men are created equal, that we all possess unalienable rights, that these include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Moreover, these rights and this equality demand a government that protects the former and acts through consent to respect the latter.
The return to standardized tests for college will take some renewed study. So will our return to the objective standard that helped form America in 1776. But it will make us better as individuals and as a people, instilling greater virtue in each person and making this a more just society as a whole. That is a test worth taking and, we hope, passing.
Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.
