Maybe that's what he meant by "Make America Great Again". The easiest way to do that is to make it shit, then if he or the next person can return it to how it was before he took office, it will be relatively great again

I'm not claiming it's all elitism, I wouldn't even claim it to be mostly elitism, but if you think there's no elitism in academia (this is by no means exclusive to MIT), then you're either unobservant, unintelligent, or willfully ignorant.

Intellectual diversity is having different viewpoints and ways of thinking about a problem represented. The most concrete example of this to me in the hard sciences is the Schrodinger vs. Heisenberg interpretation of the wave-function in quantum mechanics. While they may arrive at the same result (since that is irrelevant of how you view it), the two different views make different problems more or less obvious. Similarly, there are different ways of thinking about mathematical problems and how to best approach them taken by different people. It has been shown that the way people think is shaped by the teachers they have. Since different alma maters have different teachers, it stands to reason their students will have different approaches. Thus, if an MIT student has six professor's throughout their career, 5 of who all were trained at MIT where they also had majority MIT professors, they are being exposed to less ways of thinking than that same student if they had six professor's all trained at different universities and therefore in turn were trained by professor's from different universities.

You claimed where you got your PhD is irrelevant, the data clearly shows it is not. I'm not saying they throw every application from other universities in the trash, but clearly the university you come, directly or indirectly, from has an effect on your chance of being hired. Whether you attribute this to elitism or merit is your decision I suppose.

There are rankings done regularly (The most common is US News https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-schools/mathematics-rankings although admittedly it has Berkley tied with Harvard) Although, most studies show rankings are hogwash that rely more on reputation than actual research or teaching abilities. But if you are willing to accept that there are "top schools", then clearly schools are in some way tiered, and so theoretically a more precise tiering method should exist to create such a ranking.

It also shows a complete lack of intellectual diversity. Most people teaching people were taught by the same people. This is a bigger problem in social studies, but still a bit of an issue in math and sciences as it leads to less innovation.

To be fair, my friend really likes tanks and so has "panzer" in his online handle, and he's a somewhat left of center Democrat. Dude just likes tanks, man. In this case, your analysis is probably correct though.