John Rawls’s veil of ignorance meets the unequal realities of elite college life in this fictional narrative about meritocracy. At five in the morning, a student cleans the bathrooms. At ten, he sits in a philosophy seminar with the students whose bathrooms he cleaned. He inhabits both floors of the institution, but only one of them sees it.
Ability, work, family, and luck refuse to fit into the clean argument he is supposed to write. A fair chance matters, but what if even the will to keep running arrived as an unearned gift? Drawing on research about elite college admissions and low-income students, the story follows one young man’s escape and the harder question of who must take his place.
Read the essay and sources: https://joelkdouglas.com/2026/06/09/latrines/
