Elite Oxford education bred contempt for ordinary and colonized people

Evidence

Under the influence of Oxford’s conservative insistence on the rightness of the British system’s provisions for keeping the reins of government in the hands of a highly educated upper class, Moses came more and more to admire that system. Such admiration, of course, postulated as a concomitant an amiable contempt for the capability for government found in members of the “lower” classes—which in this context included everyone not a member of the British nobility. And from this attitude, it was a logical step to reserve supreme contempt for those whom the British aristocracy considered most incapable of self-rule—the people of the nations British troops had conquered, which meant, in general, people of color, brown, yellow or black. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 224

Categorization

• XREF: This is the intellectual seed of what Caro frames as Moses’ later racial condescension and faith in an enlightened administrative elite — connects to the bureaucrat-above-democracy theme running through the book. — connects to: Oxford’s public-service ethos fused privilege into patronizing noblesse oblige. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 212; Elite foreign schooling can intensify arrogance and self-contempt toward one’s own country — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 223; Oxford transformed hereditary arrogance into upper-class ideology of noblesse oblige — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 210 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Oxford transformed hereditary arrogance into upper-class ideology of noblesse oblige #expands (0.82) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 210
• Excluded Yale strivers found relief in Oxford’s inherited, effortless elitism #corroborates (0.75) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 213
• Colonial schooling directed elite pilgrims outward while administrative careers confined them to demarcated homelands #expands (0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 473
• Victorian English scholarship’s grammar fixation dulled the university compared to the Continent #corroborates (0.72) — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 321
• Seventeenth-century Oxford was a byword for scholarly stagnation until Laud reformed it. #corroborates (0.72) — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 158