Inheriting Power: The Old Boys Network and the Reproduction of Privilege at Upper Canada College
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates the ideology of meritocracy through the lens of Upper Canada College (UCC), a prestigious all-boys private school in Toronto, Ontario. UCC promotes a 100 percent university acceptance rate for its students with an International Baccalaureate (IB) curricula and membership to elite private school organizations (Upper Canada College, n.d.). The research uncovers how the institution serves to symbolize and reproduce the social and economic domination of elites in Canada, particularly through the social mobility and power wielded by its alumni, known as the Old Boys. Through examination of neoliberalism’s impact on education, the differences between public and private schools, and themes of meritocracy in the context of education, this paper demonstrates how UCC is representative of the ways elites obfuscate the inequities of power, wealth, and fortune, which in turn aids in its perpetuation. Drawing from Herman’s (1999) traditional ideologies used by power elites to hold dominance, the ways in which themes of public service, masculinity, privilege, elitism, fortuna, and isolation present a formula for the institution and its graduates to perpetuate power is illuminated. By employing narrative analysis, testimonials from Old Boys over four cohorts, ranging from 1919 to 1993, and UCC’s contemporary website were coded thematically, identifying key strategies that serve to reinforce the school’s and its alumni’s elite status. Oftentimes constructed with honourable characteristics of moral virtue, leadership, and hard work, these narratives work to mask underlying inequities that favour those from privileged backgrounds. Findings challenge the validity of meritocracy, arguing that location, socio-economic status, genetics, opportunities, and resources significantly influence one’s upward mobility, instead of merit alone. This work contributes to understanding how elites and institutions use self-representation to establish generous, moral, and admirable personas to society, while sustaining and perpetuating their self-serving power beneath the surface.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".