added by Brian Sholis · updated 2y ago
Elite Education | The Point Magazine
- - “What is our role in the world? To what extent is our institution a vehicle for political progress as opposed to academic excellence? Rational decision-making is impossible if these questions are left hanging, but at the same time it’s not hard to see why nobody tries to resolve them.”
from Elite Education | The Point Magazine by The Point
Brian Sholis added 2y ago
- - “But if a college like Swarthmore is necessarily and essentially complicit in injustice, its faculty are necessarily and essentially complicit as well, and campaigns to invest our billions more responsibly are mostly window-dressing.”
from Elite Education | The Point Magazine by The Point
Brian Sholis added 2y ago
- - “In a just world, a college like Swarthmore simply wouldn’t exist. The mere possibility would be regarded as obscene.”
from Elite Education | The Point Magazine by The Point
Brian Sholis added 2y ago
- - “In arguing that faculty radicalism is often illusory I do not mean to suggest that it doesn’t matter. On the contrary, it probably matters more than we generally think, just because elites probably matter more than we generally think.”
from Elite Education | The Point Magazine by The Point
Brian Sholis added 2y ago
- - “If you do stay, then you have to acknowledge that the sociological function of elite colleges in non-ideal America will always be to produce an unfairly privileged elite. The only question is what it means to do this well.”
from Elite Education | The Point Magazine by The Point
Brian Sholis added 2y ago
- - “There were different types of people at Oxford, no doubt, but what they had in common was that they were all part of a nascent elite. Elite colleges produce elites. Sociologically speaking, that is their function.”
from Elite Education | The Point Magazine by The Point
Brian Sholis added 2y ago
- - “One characteristic of a desirable elite, it seems to me, is that its members be self-aware.”
from Elite Education | The Point Magazine by The Point
Brian Sholis added 2y ago
- - “If one function of a college like Swarthmore should be to create a good elite, another should be to give young people a taste for the life of the mind understood as an end in itself.”
from Elite Education | The Point Magazine by The Point
Brian Sholis added 2y ago