I went to visit Harvard Law Professor Lani Guinier late on a recent Friday afternoon and dawdled in her outer office for an hour as she met with students. Through her door, I could hear voices bubbling away with the excitement of ideas. At last Guinier ushered the students, three women, out of her office. “Did you see them laughing?” Guinier says. “We had fun.”

The tall, striking woman with long ringletted hair and a big smile is memorable from the days that she became famous—notorious, really—after conservatives forced Bill Clinton to withdraw her 1993 nomination to a Justice Department post, saying that her ideas, involving affirmative action and minority voting rights, were outside the mainstream. Today she is advocating another transgressive notion: that the college admissions SAT is a litmus test of dubious merit. “Admissions rituals are political acts,” she declares. “We have not given enough thought to why we value the capacity to fill in bubbles on a timed paper-and-pencil test.”

But doesn’t the SAT measure something meaningful? I ask.

Her eyes flash. “Quick strategic guessing, with less-than-perfect information; that’s what it measures. It measures your ability to follow instructions and your willingness to assume that there’s a right answer to every question.”

The first woman of color to be tenured at Harvard Law School, Guinier is at the forefront of a movement of educators who claim that the SAT reinforces social imbalances. A growing number of colleges, including Bates, Bowdoin, and Bard, have dropped the test as a requirement for admissions. And the University of California, which helped inaugurate the era of the meritocracy by adopting the test 50 years ago, has recently threatened to do the same.

Guinier calls the test- based admissions system a “testocracy.” She is finishing a book arguing that a culture of fill-in- the-dot tests has damaged higher education and American society. The book, which she hopes will come out in late 2008, has a working title of Meritocracy Incorporated. Guinier smiles as she recites her subtitle: “How wealth became merit, class became race, and higher education became a gift from the poor to the rich.”

It is fitting that Cambridge should be the scene of the assault. In the 1940s, it was Harvard president James Bryant Conant who, more than anyone else, pushed and kicked to change the college selection process so young people would be chosen on the basis of mental gifts, not social station. Conant, who died in 1978, was motivated by concerns in many ways similar to those of the 57- year-old Guinier. As Harvard president in the 1930s, he grew disturbed that the vast majority of Ivy League places was going to students from East Coast boarding schools. In a celebrated 1943 Atlantic Monthly essay, Conant spoke of himself as an “American radical ... wielding the axe against the root of inherited privilege.” He argued that science, notably psychological testing employed by the military, would act as a social equalizer. At his urging, the Educational Testing Service was formed in 1947, and within 10 years, half a million students were taking the college boards to qualify for admission. The coup came in 1968, when the University of California system adopted the college boards as an entrance requirement—a story told by Nicholas Lemann in his book, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy.

Published in 2000, Lemann’s book, with its conclusion that the meritocracy has gone unrealized, has become a central text for Guinier and other critics. The meritocrats set out to undermine the social privileges of what Lemann termed the Episcopacy (referring to its Protestant roots) but, in the end, established a method of ranking that looked “more and more like what it was intended to replace.”

Guinier begins her critique as Conant did: with the idea that Ivy League schools are a scarce public resource supported by huge public subsidies. Pointing to studies showing that rich kids do better on SATs than do less-fortunate children, Guinier argues that places in universities are awarded through a class-based system. For some time, it has been argued that the SAT is racist, stocked with questions more answerable by students from white backgrounds than by minority test-takers. Lanier emphasizes class in her critique, pointing out that students who excel on the SATs come from a and well-educated families, usually ones that can a costs of prep courses or tutoring. “Even if the tests did measure something, how significant would that be after a $900 prep course or a $1,500 tutor or a $25,000 live-in tutor?” says Robert Schaeffer, an educational activist who has worked with Guinier and whose organization, FairTest, has lobbied schools to drop the SAT.

The critique has spread to state schools. The University of California and the University of Texas have, in recent years, downgraded the SAT’s weight. The Texas legislature became alarmed that rural students weren’t getting into the best state schools, because they were not exposed to the test culture in their high schools. In 1997 the legislature, seeking a legal basis for its affirmative action policy, mandated that the top 10 percent of every Texas high school be granted places in any state school those students wanted to attend. Guinier says the system is fairer than its predecessor and that students chosen on the basis of grades outperform those who excel on the SATs. Guinier began this exploration about 10 years ago, after seeing studies suggesting that law school frequently weeded out the desire to perform public service, and she has observed the same tendency in undergraduate life at Harvard. She tells of a former student now working in the U.S. Congress who lately met up with nine other members of her “blocking group.” Three or four are now in finance, another three are lawyers. Only her former student is involved in public service.

In thinking uncritically of test scores, Guinier says, we promote this culture of self-aggrandizement. “Many people have internalized their scores as a badge of deservedness—they have earned their place and need do nothing further to give back to society.

“We have come to think that the way in which you exercise leadership is simply by scoring and winning on scores, on SATs, in terms of the money you make, without regard to whether you’re solving problems, whether you’re saving the planet, whether you are acting morally,” Lani Guinier says. “At that point, it’s hard to say that you have a vibrant democracy.”