Those with high relative “merit” see that as a reasonable criteria to evaluate students in a competitive world. Those without merit would prefer race and politics. Warikoo’s “study” showed that students are hypocrites who pursue their own interests, just like those with low “merit”. Who’da thunk it? Ps: the racism behind her pursuit of “equality” would embarrass David Duke.
My theory: in science, engineering, and medicine “merit” makes all the difference in the world, ultimately in life and death terms. Defining merit and grooming talent are important, but incompetence will lead to systemic or spectacular failures.
In soft/arbitrary fields such as Warikoo has experienced, “merit” is tangential because results often do not matter, except in some abstract, academic sense. What difference does it make if the “Marxist Critique of Merit” or “Dialectics of Form: Labor and Gender in the Unpublished Fragments of Ben Jonson Poems” are pursued by illiterate morons or the brightest, hardest working students? By all means, admit the duds to social programs, and steer the achiever to STEM.
I suspect that given the choice, this broad would choose a doctor to perform surgery that wasn’t let in because of Affirmative Action, over one that was.