Chinese excellence drive ‘may make universities weaker’

Has it ever been different anywhere "competition" is involved. The long established elites have such a high opinion of themselves that they forget what their original purpose might have been, over furthering their own eliteness. I'm pretty sure that's true of most British top universities, creating distorted local economies that the original locals can't afford - isn't that part of the lesson of "The Glass Bead Game" by Hesse? We have our own Castalia's, about an hour journey from London that between them have had donations of a few billion in the last decade. That goes to found new colleges, create (or rename) chairs ... generally extend the inequality further, and distort on their local communities more. For the good of the country as a whole it would probably be better if those funds went elsewhere - they could still have a role in mentoring it's deployment, but to some that would be like treason? What happens at each scale happens more extensively as the scales gets bigger - local, regional, national, global. If we are going to survive we need to spread it around a bit.