"Striving For Upward Mobility Without Background"

Hidden hierarchies and the Harvard Extension School commotion

I’ve noticed this weird tic among some elite college professors where they start a sentence with a lower-case letter and abbreviate words seemingly at random.

The clucking about whether Harvard Extension is the real Harvard reminds me of George Orwell in The Road To Wigan Pier explaining how upper middle class snobs "while theoretically pining for a classless society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige."

The commotion also reminds me of another quote:

“There is a recognisable psychological type: bright enough to get into Harvard/Oxbridge, not super-bright, and able to play the games of diplomacy and chimp politics.”