Caroline Calloway, who helped to pioneer a certain style of long, confessional blogging on Instagram, is an influencer. She’s most well-known on Twitter and other corners of the internet for creating an absolute mess of a “workshop” earlier this year that promised to teach, among other things, creativity to followers willing to pay $165 per ticket. The events fell apart, which Calloway documented in real time, and eventually the Cut compared it to an Instagram influencer’s Fyre Festival.

By now, most of us expect our influencers to be doing some culturally sanctioned scamming. They’re not as happy or interesting or genetically gifted as their Facetuned posts would like us to believe. So it wasn’t a surprise necessarily when the Cut dipped back into the Calloway beat this week to publish a tell-all essay from Calloway’s former ghostwriter, editor, and friend Natalie Beach. (It also wasn’t surprising because Calloway herself posted her frenzied anticipation of the essay on Instagram for almost a week prior to its release, as Beach’s piece notes.) The story was an exhaustive and exhausting portrait of a toxic friendship, compelling for its recognizable dynamics laid out methodically.

An interrogation of the corrosive effects of commercial-grade narcissism, and one’s own role in its cultural rise, is all well and good—and you should go read Beach’s piece, if you haven’t already, if only to keep up with the conversation at the sober bar this weekend. But that’s not what we're here to discuss. Right now I’d like to talk about schools—the right kind of schools—and how America’s current crop of villains cannot resist the allure of the Ivy League.

Beach and Calloway’s friendship started, the former wrote, at New York University (pricey, yes; Ivy, non), where Beach wrote about being from New Haven, a place where one can find decent pizza and, also, Yale:

Yale was an obsession of hers; she’d been rejected and never got over it. The fact that I was a Yale townie won me an invitation to her West Village apartment, a studio painted Tiffany’s turquoise and filled with fresh orchids and hardcovers. “This is my Yale box,” she told me, sitting me on her white loveseat and showing me a shoe box of Handsome Dan and Beinecke-library memorabilia.

New Haven is their relationship’s origin story, sure, but it also lays the groundwork for Calloway’s heel turn to tragic figure of the moment. She can’t resist wanting the social validation that Ivy League acceptance imbues, and then she takes it to an obsessive place, by Beach’s telling.

As their friendship grew, Beach gave her a gag gift—three Yale-crest-stamped dinner plates. On the back of each one, she wrote, “Fuck It,” a repudiation of the school that didn’t want her friend. Calloway later claimed to Beach that the plates were were stolen.

Reading the piece, I couldn’t help but think of our cultural obsession with scam, and the way institutions like Yale have figured into them. Jeffrey Epstein never earned a college degree, but he donated significant money to Harvard, money the school used to build at least one building on campus. He wore Harvard sweatshirts. He had friends and defenders there. The Harvard link gave him—or at least he seemed to want it to give him—the aura of a Harvard man, a legitimizing thing. You can have all the money in the world, but nothing opens a door like a Harvard knock.