This is true I suspect, but as siblings have noted, it doesn't require reifying the "upper class" as some decision making entity that is doing this on purpose.

This is true I suspect, but as siblings have noted, it doesn't require reifying the "upper class" as some decision making entity that is doing this on purpose. It's just that discrete sectors of the "left" push both social-identity based and class-based critiques of inequality. Both of these get broad pushback from the political right, but identity-based inequality remediation is generally acceptable to business interests, who are far less likely to care and may even largely be socially liberal, cosmopolitan, and urbane. Start trying to remove class distinctions and alleviate economic inequality, on the other hand, and now you're a threat both to the political right and to business interests that otherwise don't give a crap about politics. Maybe somewhat ironically, though economic leftism or at least Marxism certainly started in academia (Marx himself being a scholar), as far as I know, the recent push for wokeness and the term "woke" itself arose originally from AAVE in the 1930s and became popular more recently thanks to Black Twitter. It did not come from academia, and it doesn't seem like the form it has taken in academia is anywhere near what the original proponents had in mind. Lead Belly was singing "stay woke" back in 1938 and he was not talking about intersectionality and transgenderism.