Any school will have a culture. Those that pride themselves on diversity tend to have one narrow kind of variety, and extreme monoculture on other axes - or else have a bunch of subcultural groups that don't really talk to each other. There's a kind of fundamental conservation: for people to be able to communicate and work together requires a certain level of cultural commonality.
So whichever school you went to, you end up finding it easy to talk with some number of people and hard to talk with some number of people. It all averages out. The questions that matter are a) how good or bad that culture is and b) how good or bad the non-cultural aspects of your education are.
One criticism the article makes is that people with elite educations are expected to be leaders of the entire country (or community or other group), yet they often do not understand the common man at all. I think this is both valid and note worthy. It goes a long way towards explaining the discontent of "the 99 percent."
Rules made by elite are often rules made for the benefit of the elite as well. They often completely overlook the needs of the rest of the people and these rules may benefit the elite at the expense of the masses.
It is one of the reasons I walked away from my scholarship. I am unwilling to exercise power in that manner.
I think the idea that there's this homogenous "common man" is bogus. If you pick your leaders from 1% of the population then they won't represent everyone - but that's true whichever 1% of the population you pick, and leaders by definition are a minority of the populace. If you picked, say, the employees of a particular steelworks to be leaders, rather than Yale graduates, you wouldn't end up with a group that was any more representative.
My concern is for how power gets exercised in a harmful manner such that it actively victimizes the most vulnerable members of society. As a mother, this is the opposite of what I understood my role to be.
I don't care about diversity in leadership. I care about leadership that doesn't flush the whole system down the toilet so thoroughly as to cut even their own throats in the process.
So whichever school you went to, you end up finding it easy to talk with some number of people and hard to talk with some number of people. It all averages out. The questions that matter are a) how good or bad that culture is and b) how good or bad the non-cultural aspects of your education are.
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