Excluded Yale strivers found relief in Oxford’s inherited, effortless elitism

Evidence

“Bob had a very good time at Oxford,” Dougherty recalls. “He liked it very much. It was such a relief after Yale. Yale had that pseudo-democracy, but it was not democratic at all; it was snooty, with all that social tradition. When we got to Oxford, we found all this changed. It was understood by everyone there that by the very fact that you belonged to Oxford, you were the select and the elect. You didn’t have to compete for prestige or honors to become one of the elite. Because you were there, you were the elite.” — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 213

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off the ch5 claim that closed social systems drive excluded strivers to find or build parallel worlds of power. — connects to: Closed social systems drive excluded strivers to build parallel worlds of their own power — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 204; Yale’s Senior Societies never tapped a single Jew in seventy-three years — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 164; Oxford transformed hereditary arrogance into upper-class ideology of noblesse oblige — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 210 (+3 more)