Silly thought of the day

27 May 2011

Rivalry among elite universities serves an important social function, because if alumni of these schools did not regard one another with some suspicion, they would be more likely to team up and fleece the rest of the country even more than they do today. It’s sort of the flip side of Jay Gould’s quip “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.”

P.S.: Jay Gould, the nineteenth-century financier, should not be confused with Stephen Jay Gould, the twentieth-century Harvard professor.

• Later: Time for a settling of accounts
• Earlier: Short, hopefully sweet, fiction