Science Quote by James Bryant Conant

Meritocracy is Conant's polite word for hierarchy, and he knows exactly how combustible that sounds in an American century that loved to flatter itself with equality while quietly running on gatekeepers. "Each honest calling" is the tell: he's not abolishing rank, he's laundering it. The old aristocracy of birth gets replaced by an "aristocracy based on excellence of performance" - a class system that can be defended as fair because it claims to measure output, not pedigree.

Conant, a scientist and long-serving president of Harvard, is speaking from the cockpit of midcentury institutional power, when standardized testing, credentialing, and professionalization were remaking the United States. His intent is reformist, not radical: broaden the pipeline, identify "talent", reward competence. The subtext is that society needs stratification to function; the moral upgrade is that the stratification should be earned. Calling it "elite" softens the edge, and the repetition ("each... each... its own... its own") democratically distributes prestige across trades and professions, a rhetorical move that dignifies plumbers and professors in the same breath.

But the line also smuggles in a danger Conant's era often minimized: performance is never measured in a vacuum. Who gets training, time, and second chances? Who defines "excellence"? His phrasing tries to fuse dignity with competition, selling inequality as aspiration. It's a comforting blueprint for a modern technocratic society: keep the ladder, promise the rungs are just.