Universities and the contested creation of the elite

Noam Yuchtman

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: For centuries universities have been a locus of elite creation. In the Middle Ages, university trained elites were leaders of the Church, served in secular lords’ administrations, and staffed the judiciary. Over time, their scope has expanded to include leadership in governments, corporations, and civil society more broadly. Universities play two roles in the creation of the elite: selection and education. Both of these have historically been the subject of intense contestation, with the outcomes shaping a range of political and economic outcomes. In this piece, I synthesize work on educational institutions’ creation of the elite, discussing both historical and contemporary cases of contestation of this process and their outcomes. I close with a discussion of the implications for our understanding of university-based protest movements.

Keywords: universities; elites; educational content; ideology; protests (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 I20 N00 P00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 7 pages
Date: 2025-03-14
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in The Manchester School, 14, March, 2025. ISSN: 1463-6786

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/127495/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:127495

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().