Oxbridge

"'Perhaps two feet by two and a half?' she said.

Castalia made notes while Helen spoke, and when she had done, and we were trying not to meet each other's eyes, rose and said, "'At your wish, I spent last week at Oxbridge, disguised as a charwoman.

I thus had access to the rooms of several professors, and will now attempt to give you some idea.

Only,' she broke off, "'I can't think how to do it.

I was thinking rather of my aunt's cactuses.

What could they know about chastity? Again we told her not to wander from the point.

Did the Oxbridge professors help to produce good people and good books, the objects of life.

There, she exclaimed, it never struck me to ask.

Which pre-kindergarten funnels you into which of the right kindergartens, funnels you into which of the right schools, the right after-school curriculars, extracurriculars, tutoring classes? which of the prominent high schools that will enable you to have the best shot of achieving a high grade on basically one exam, right? Every funnel goes into like for the entire human existence for the first 18 years goes into one one gate, right, which then determines which of a number of universities you get to take your pick from, which then determines, okay, do you have a shot at like a high paying corporate job or a government job and these kinds of things.

So if you think of the Ivy League in Western universities and Oxbridge in the UK as, if you think of those as gatekeeping institutions, then the gate and the way that the gates are being kept is even more brutal in the East.

And it's not a laughing matter, right? It's kind of, it's actually very sad when you think of the billions of sort of like, of different pathways that children could have gone on that were snuffed out in favor of this one central gatekeeping mechanism.

So it's very, very sad, okay? And it's very, very sad, but it's also becoming more and more absurd in how little it can continue into the future.

Exactly.

And Owen O'Malley's equivalence in the likes of Britain and the U.S., in the Ivy Leagues, in Oxbridge, they get their backs up to these calls to decolonize things because colonialism has been very good for these people and these institutions.

It makes no sense for an Irishman in an Irish university to take the side of colonialism, like, and to feel almost that, oh, we can't be decolonizing things in Ireland the way that Owen O'Malley is suggesting.

You know, and of course, like, Again, people got tribal about this one as well.

These systems of capital, they reinforce themselves through these institutions.

That is the point of Oxbridge.

That is the point of places like Eaton, for instance.

The U.S. has this too.

Here's another.

Oxbridge failing to address diversity.

The article says as many as 16 Oxbridge colleges failed to offer any places to black British applicants in 2015.

Okay, so look, I'm all for raising attainment.

It's what I've been doing for nearly 30 years with brown and black kids in the inner city.