Playing To Win
Addendum to Educating Extremists
Elite Educational Institutions in Action
An assertion in Educating Extremists is that elite educational institutions are more disposed to and capable of successfully educating extremists than are less elite educational institutions.
I tested that assertion using the pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel protests on US university campuses in the wake of the Israeli military response to the events of October 7, 2023, as an exemplar of extremism. I am not opining on whether the extremism was warranted or unwarranted, but rather just that the stances taken by the protesters were typically, if not universally, extreme. That is to say, the stance of the protesters was that military action by Israel was unwarranted and immoral, and the only solution was for Israel to cease immediately. Plus, the US President deserved to be called Genocide Joe for not stopping the Israeli military action.
To the protesters, the other side of the argument was strictly wrong and their side 100% right. There was no hint of anything less extreme such as: ‘Gee, we have to reach an accommodation that takes into account the legitimate interests of both the Palestinians and the Israelis.’ Again, I am not implying that the protesters were right or wrong, just that they were extreme — as exemplified by the banner above.
A website called Campus Guide that tracks campus danger created a list of US universities “grappling with pro-Palestine protests and encampments.” The list features 106 universities. However, there were two Canadian, one French and one Australian on the list, which I removed to get a list of 102 US universities.
I then correlated this with the list of the top US universities based on the QS ranking. (Two rankings, QS and Times Higher Education, dominate the global rankings of universities. I could have used either, but I generally like QS a bit better. I have little doubt the Times list would have produced the same results.) I looked at the top 100 US universities in the QS rating and deemed them to be elite US educational institutions, with the top 10 being super-elite. There are 3,896 accredited colleges in the US making that 100 the top 2.5% of them — so pretty elite — and the top 10, the super-elite 0.2%.
Of the 102 universities with pro-Palestinian protests, 65 were QS top 100 US universities (QS100). That means 65% of the QS100 had protests. Of the 3,796 non-QS100, only 37, or just under 1%, had protests. That is 65% if you are elite and 1% if you are non-elite.
And the extremes get more so as you get more elite. Fully 9 of the top 10 super-elite QS100 had protests — I guess the nerds at Caltech were too busy playing video games and/or inventing the future. (If you are curious, in order the 10 are: MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, Penn (yup, Mangione’s alma mater at #5), Berkeley, Cornell, Chicago, Princeton, and Yale) Of the next 70, 66% had protests, and of the final 20, 50% had protests — then it dropped precipitously 22% of the next 50, 14% of the next 50 after that, and the 0.5% of the remainder. Extremist protesting is an elite activity.
Interestingly, two of the 37 on the list of protests but not in QS100 are Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). They are not even ranked by QS in the overall university rankings because they are so narrowly specialized. But most consider RISD to be the #1 design school in America and FIT to be the #1 fashion school in America. So, in their respective fields, they are the most elite educational institutions in America. Of course they had protests.
The inference from this admittedly narrow sample of one extremist case is: if you want to inculcate extremism, send your kid to an elite educational institution — but maybe avoid Caltech!
