The only thing that sounds at all wrong here is the conflation of leadership with authority. Way back in the 1970s, I observed that a lot of universities were

The only thing that sounds at all wrong here is the conflation of leadership with authority. Way back in the 1970s, I observed that a lot of universities were focused on training leaders. I was at Harvard at the time, and they didn't much care whether you wound up as a leader in scholarship, politics, business or whatever; but they assumed they were training some kind of leader. The case was even more extreme in other countries. Tokyo University was obviously in the business of training its country's leaders. Poorer countries had their one-best-university with a similar charter. France had its Ecoles Normale. And by the way -- notwithstanding what the article writer says, a lot of the UK's leadership does come from Oxbridge.