What Can Men In Black Teach Us About Meritocracy?

My thinking abouit trhe Penn women's swim team has inevitably brought me back to the selection scene at the beginning of the whole Men in Black franchise. For those who aren't familiar with it, the premise of the series is that the space aliens have already arrived, but the government has worked out a super-secret agreement with the aliens to let them stay on the planet if they're careful to stay out of sight. The job of the Men in Black, an ultra-secret, ultra-elite cadre, is on one hand to enforce the agreement with the space aliens, while on the other to act as a cleanup crew in cases where the aliens have inadvertently revealed themselves to ordinary people.

It goes without saying that anyone tasked with making sure the space aliens stay quiet and out of sight, as well as cleaning up situations where they don't, must have extraordinary tact, intellect, skill, and initiative. At the start of the first Men in Black film, Agent J, played by Will Smith, has unknowingly applied to be a member of this team. How he's selected gives an indication of how merit ought to be selected, even if the real world falls far short of this ideal.

Agent J arrives late to the selection session, in which it's explained that the government is looking for "the best of the best of the best". His fellow applicants are clearly the cream of the government's best, Navy SEALs, honors graduates of the academies, Marines, and the like. Agent J, in contrast, performs a series of gaucheries. His first test is to find a way to fill out his application when no desk or table is available to any of the elite applicants. Agent J is the only one to see the coffee table in the middle of the group and noisily pull it to himself, the only possible way to accomplish the task.

At the conclusion of the test, Agent Zed, who's conducting it, announces to the military meritocrats who feel they've made all the right moves, "Gentlemen, congratulations. You're everything we've come to expect from years of government training." Expecting one of their group to be selected, they're instead led off to an "eye test", which Men in Black savants will recognize is a device that wipes their memories of all recent events. Agent J is selected.

Over the past several days, I've thought and thought about this episode vis-a-vis the Penn women's swim team. I would go so far as to say that for them, this is a test very much equivalent to Agent J's selection process, but in their case, there's no Agent J. Or if there is one, the winner is Lia Thomas. The Penn women's swim team is, after all, everything we've come to expect from the Ivy selection process, the best of the best of the best. And their potential employers, or perhaps the Olympic teams they might hope to join, are fully entitled to expect the same. The top-tier law firms will happily recruit them as associates down the road given their flawless records. They will never commit the remotest gaucherie.

Except that, confronted with what must be in at least some cases, the ony serious challenge they may have had in the successful progress of their lives in the form of a wild-card competitor, a male impersonating a female, none has come up with an effective counter strategy -- not even, as our Roman Catholic parish clergy might advise if asked, to pray, seek out a Plan B, and leave the team if that's the path that presents itself. I hear a number like 36 as the total women's team membership presumably including Thomas, the guy.

Of the 36, or maybe 35 women, 16 have gone so far as to enlist a spokesperson to write a letter on their behalf, allowing them to keep quiet and out of sight, a little like the space aliens have been told to behave. This has been met with silence from Penn; they needn't have bothered. Several others, just as anonymous, have written the administration to say that they're tickled pink that Lia has had such a wonderful opportunity, and they're copacetic with the whole program.

Of the 35 women, I have the impression that none is going to find a solution that will be remotely satisfactory for herself, sacrificing a sense of justice or even plain common sense to an illusory idea of a future career that's likely to be just as unsatisfactory. None seems willing to come out of the shadows and identify herself by asking for simple justice, either reporting the indecent exposure to law enforcement or reporting the sexual harassment to the designated campus authority. That way, I have a feeling, leads to issues like ulcers, cancer, or alcoholism down the road. Just sayin'.

The real elites here are the people who are running the show, the ones who must certainly have put Lia Thomas up to the stunt and paved the way for it over a period of years. Remember that Thomas began transitioning nearly three years ago and must certainly have done it with the assurance they'd have a place on the women's team. But even to start nearly three years ago means the assurance had to have been in place well before that. The game was well and truly rigged before most of the women swimmers arrived on campus their first year.

The people who set that plan in motion are the real elites, the ones who control the hazing. The Penn women swimmers are just the best of the best of the best, the hazees. They don't have the remotest idea who the real elites are, nor the remotest idea of how to counter them. They'll spend their lives doing as they're told, which is the point.