I do recommend the Third Reich in the Ivy League as a generally good read, which highlights the significantly more nazi-sympathetic student body at harvard with the more activist population at Columbia, largely in part due to the fact that Columbia failed to attract the white elites of NYC and had a larger Jewish population as a result.

>The student athlete I knew, my roommate Tony Tomaska, was the son of a Chicago policeman. He played for the football team. He was working class, not upper class.

Yeah I don't deny that a lot of athletes are from disadvantageous backgrounds, I was only to highlight that the sports we associate w/ that fact do not make up a lot of other sports in the ivy league, and that if your goal diversity, you should just increase admissions of disadvantaged students, not use athletics as a proxy.

FYI it’s “The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower”

there may be something good in the book(?) but talk about a title that makes the author sound unhinged

how about "vestiges of old fashioned bias remain in the ivory tower" or something

It wasn't "vestiges" for there to be support for the third reich while it was gaining power.

I could see your point if the book wasn't talking about the 30s, but it was talking about the 30s.

Ah, that's right, apologies, I should have double checked the title before replying.

I’m familiar with some very creepy attitudes the local land grant college had toward Nazi Germany.

Was this an Ivy League thing or a higher ed thing?

Much of the early 20th century was spent building US higher education around the German model.

The post WWII period was a golden age for social progress. Along with the final collapse of colonial empires ruled over by royal families came a corresponding breaking down of class and overt ethnic/racial barriers in the West and America, with universities using test scores to open their doors to students of merit regardless of background or gender.

but that golden age, having achieved remarkable success, is over. It was predicted by somebody-nobody-listened-to that strip-mining [my word] IQ and EQ talent from various communities and elevating them to elite status would leave behind communities more deeply impoverished and dysfunctional than they were before. And what is our politics today but that exact battle?

Did life improve in the post-colonial world? There don’t seem to be too many 1950s era success stories in this regard.

life has generally improved for everybody, everywhere in the world, as it was also the time of the green revolution, antibiotics, etc., and many former colonies revel in their self governance even while their politics seem even more dysfunctional than western politics. But you might be making the point that some former colonies would have been better off remaining as colonies, a hill I am not willing to defend, let alone die on.

America, Canada and Australia benefited from being English colonies, but that's sort of tautological because they were originally colonies settled with English people, apart from indigenous peoples and later arrivals.

Hard to say if indigenous people are better off, certainly particular indigenous people have been worse off, and there's certainly the enduring popular romantic notion that being a hunter gatherer is peak evolution for us/them and the tiny sustainable populations of the nomadic invaders and such of several continents were entitled to be left alone to battle each other for supremacy while collectively hogging those resources for themselves, free from having to battle anybody else for them.

But personally, while descended from hunter gatherers, I'm glad I'm not a hunter gatherer myself (he said, typing on his silicon dream machine) though considering it, I would have made a great one tempermentally.

We have more trinkets yes, but in exchange we've been reduced to a deracinated blob with no hope or future, now in a state of terminal decline

More chattel does not necessarily mean a better life. Dictators that look more like you are not necessarily more beneficent.

> Did life improve in the post-colonial world? There don’t seem to be too many 1950s era success stories in this regard

"Prior to deindustrialisation, India was one of the largest economies in the world, accounting for approximately one quarter of the global economy.... The Indian economy specialised in industrialisation and manufacturing, accounting for at least one quarter of the world's manufacturing output before the 18th century."

in 1900 it was 2%. There were huge famines under Colonial rule, the kind that would male Mao proud.

India is doing so much better now, its not even comparable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_Indi...