Silpa Kovvali’s view (“Harvard’s toxic final clubs culture,’’ Opinion, May 13) is that Harvard fails to foster cross-class socialization. That could probably be said of the entire US educational system, starting with selective pre-K programs and continuing through prep schools and Ivy League colleges, so it runs much deeper than Harvard.

But Kovvali fails to acknowledge that the status-seeking that keeps this system humming is part of what makes America work. American philanthropy, which is unique on this planet, is driven in large part by a unique social mobility that enables the US self-made billionaire to rise from poverty to society in one generation.

For this impulse to drive the US economy, there needs to be a societal element. That’s where elitist institutions such as final clubs make a positive contribution. Much of Western literature, from Stendhal through Austen and onward, is preoccupied with describing how the bourgeois becomes a gentilhomme.

The president of Harvard, Drew Faust, realizes, I’m sure, that there is little she can do to change human nature.

Peter Foukal

Nahant