The Oh, Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. Two guests this week, both inspired by recent events.

In moments we'll hear from the sociologist Seamus Khan who studies among other things

elites in their schools and at the bottom of the hour we'll hear from the political

scientist theory of francos on the fraying of our ruling institutions and what that

means for left politics.

First, elite schools.

I have some personal experience with one.

I grew up in a mediocre suburb in Northern New Jersey and went to mediocre public schools there. But since I did all the things

you're supposed to do, I got admitted to Yale in 1971 and spent four years there. It was quite a shock to me

to confront all those generations of institutional power.

Yale was then 270 years old, and a stratum of people I barely knew existed,

preppies.

People like me had only begun going to Yale in quantity a few years earlier. Starting the late

1960s under the admissions director R Innsley Clark, known in classic waspshylus

Inci, the university began admitting middle-class kids from public schools and women as well.

A few years ago, Clark was revealed to be part of a ring of sexual predators at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx in the 1970s and 80s.

The legacies, those whose fathers and maybe grandfathers and great-grandfathers went to Yale

and whose name sometimes appeared in the building

were still there in some number,

but the days when Yale and other Ivies were mere finishing school for rich

young men were over. They became much more meritocratic, a problematic word

worth a show in itself, institutions for ruling class recruitment.

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