The work of the elite universities has been to identify and attain talent from around the world, wherever it may originate, and bring it to a handful of specific locations where it can be educated and contained:

Elite universities engage in the educational equivalent of strip mining: identifying economically viable raw materials in every city, town, and hamlet, they strip off that valuable commodity, process it in a distant location, and render the products economically useful for productivity elsewhere (132).

The universities have in fact contributed to the creation of a new kind of aristocratic regime that liberal democracies—America in particular—have always attempted to reject.

The philosopher John Locke, for instance, saw that liberalism would naturally result in a rejection of the older form of aristocracy and simply create a new one. This new aristocracy would be based on rational powers and education, but it would be a ruling class of the elite nevertheless: “The criteria for the ruling class change, but their arbitrary distribution remains” (137). The difference is that the old aristocracy was based largely upon one’s hereditary position—a position that one could not simply advance into—whereas the new aristocracy would be one based (at least ostensibly) on merit, thereby giving the

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