> many institutions have a history of seizing land from Indigenous groups

The institutions themselves did? How many Ivy League founders forcefully dispossessed indigenous groups specifically so they could build a university on their land?

I'm not talking, like, how the land Yale University is on was once owned by the Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples and then some white dudes forcibly relocated them and then years later some other white dudes got together and founded a school which became Yale.

If dispossession makes something prestigious then why isn't every college in America prestigious? They were all built on land seized from indigenous groups. Many in the South were built or benefited from the labor of enslaved black people in addition to that. By this logic the most prestigious universities in America really ought to be clustered in the deep South cotton belt. This strangely doesn't seem to be the case.

It seems to me prestige and some form of exclusion have to go hand in hand. This might be in terms of cost to attend, or coming from the "right" ethnicity, or coming from the "right" family from within the "right" ethnicity, or having the highest SAT score, or some mix of these.

If the Ivy League was open to any and all comers it would no more prestigious than any community college because anyone who wanted to could attend. I don't see why Yale couldn't build bigger buildings and open a bunch of satellite campuses in all 50 states if they wanted to. But if they did that it would be like Gucci selling $15 shirts at Walmart. It would utterly destroy the brand even if the quality remained the same.

> This picture of elitism is bolstered by a study published last month in Nature Human Behaviour2, showing that almost 25% of faculty members in the United States have at least one parent with a PhD (in the general population, less than 1% of people have a parent with a PhD).

What would the numbers look like if you did the math for plumbers, programmers, farmers, or any other trade? Suppose your dad was a welder and he taught you about it from a young age, gave you skills, put in a good word for you with his boss, which gave you a leg up on the people trying to get into the trade from nothing. It doesn't seem much different from me to the PhD thing. This is not even getting into whether (or to what extent) intelligence/personality is heritable. PhDs will spend a lot of time with each other, and mate with each other, and their kids will be PhDs because they were raised in a PhD environment by PhD parents and the cycle will repeat again. I could have told you that without a study.

> Depending on the field, only 5–23% of faculty members worked at an institution more prestigious than the one at which they earned their PhD, according to the analysis.

Well yeah. If they had enough prestige to go to a prestigious university they would have done so before earning their PhD. Either the most elite universities in the US are leaving a ton of $100 bills on the sidewalk by ignoring non-prestigious PhDs, or it's not a meritocracy and never was.