Fallows's point was that ideas about what constitutes "merit" has become distorted by the dominant (Yankee) culture and is becoming a mandarinical dead end. After all, mandarinism damn near killed Chinese civilization.
This may not be the best thread on which to have this discussion, but I am not one of those conservatives who thinks that credentialism or its supporting structures is the last bastion of academic rigor or a properly conceived liberal education.
Well, actually, it is, because philosophies of education are tied to philosophies of government and society, and one of the subjects Yankee assailants of the Old South like to work over is Southern education, damning it for its shortcomings as measured by Northern ideas and norms. They do this constantly, through the medium of university-level "history" and "sociology" courses that treat regional differences in American history, the Civil War, Reconstruction, et cetera. A current "distance education" (TV lecture) series being aired by the University of Houston on the topic of "the history of the South [as lied about by an ideologically committed enemy]". The lecturer informs us that the South is his "adoptive home", and then proceeds to lecture Texas students about its history in a manner that convinces any fairminded listener that the South is his "adoptive home" in the same way that a cow is the "adoptive home" of a botfly or a cutworm. It provides him his living, his meat and drink, and in return he does his best to kill it and return it to the dust of the earth.
That's your immigrant Yankee history professor for you.
So they remove God from our classrooms, and insist that our children could have abortions and practice homsexuality. They whitewash history, and smear the finest men this country ever had to cover their culpability in the war. I guess Yankee assistance explains why children today graduate being unable to read English, when previous generations knew Latin and Greek as well.