Wealth Matters writer Paul Sullivan writes about the first meeting of the Elites Research Network in his column today. Featured in the article are prominent scholars Sudhir Venkatesh, Dorian Warren, Jeffrey Winters, Olivier Godechot, D. Michael Lindsay, Michèle Lamont and Shamus Rahman Khan. Khan is one of the conference organizers and, more importantly for our purposes, author of the forthcoming Princeton University Press title Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School.

“It was a serendipitous time for Columbia University to convene the first Elites Research Network conference last week. The conference drew in scholars focused on inequality across academic disciplines, like economics, political science, sociology and history,” writes Sullivan.

“In the academic world, this was remarkable. As several of the scholars acknowledged, there has traditionally been some unease in talking about the elite, let alone researching them.”

Later in the article he writes about Shamus’s experiences with St. Paul’s:

Shamus Rahman Kahn, a conference organizer and assistant professor of sociology at Columbia, seemed to be most at ease with the conflict. The son of a Pakistani father and Irish mother who both emigrated to the United States, he said he came from a wealthy but not elite family. His father, a successful surgeon, paid his son’s way to the St. Paul’s School, a top boarding school.

Yet when Mr. Kahn arrived there in the mid-1990s, he said he lived in the “minority students dorm.” He used that experience and a later teaching stint at St. Paul’s to write a book on the nature of advantage, called “Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School,” which will be published by Princeton University Press in January.

“Is it morally responsible for you to get your kids into very expensive schools if it will advantage them?” Mr. Kahn said. “It’s hard not to do it. But by doing it, you’re not explicitly squirting some other kid in the eye with pepper spray. It’s more subtle.”