Politics & International Relations

Superpowers: The American Elite

Is academic prestige more important that individual merit? Robert Oprisko argues that 'excellent or not, students from less prestigious institutions are less likely to get an opportunity to showcase their talent', but that this shouldn't necessarily be the case. Is it fair that highly intelligent students are overlooked, simply because of their academic class?

As Oprisko comments, 'the bottom of the barrel at Princeton is still the bottom of the barrel.'

This matter has been widely debated in the media recently, and Oprisko's argument is made clear in an article in The Georgetown Public Policy Review, Inside Higher Ed and The Chronice for Higher Education, whilst there has been further coverage of the matter in Foreign Policy and Washington Monthly. The issue has also been discussed on political science blogs such as The Duck of Minerva, The Monkey Cage and Outside the Beltway.

This extremely important and current issue cannot be ignored, and is covered in Robert L. Oprisko's book Honor: A Phenomenology, which is available to preview online here. Read more below, or recommend the book to your librarian.

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Honor: A Phenomenology

By Robert L. Oprisko

Series: Routledge Innovations in Political Theory

Honor is misunderstood in the social sciences. The literature lacks both accuracy and precision in its conceptual development such that we no longer say what we mean because we have no idea what we’re saying. We use many terms to mean honor and mean many different ideas when we refer to honor....

Published July 16th 2012 by Routledge