The Rise and Fall of the Elite University

“Their air of moral superiority is really an assumption that someone else will always cook their dinner,” wrote the historian A. J. P. Taylor in 1957 of the British establishment, a group he often referred to as “The Thing.” To no one was this term more aptly applied than the dons of Oxford and Cambridge. Those two universities, after two world wars and decades of social upheaval, still pave a path to membership in the country’s elite. Disgust at Oxbridge for being a wellspring of snobbery, the…