There's nothing inherently white, anglo-saxon or protestant about the oligarchy that these institutions preserve; they will very happily pass on to a new generation of westernised, college-educated liberals of all races and genders but no more variation in thought than the one they replaced. The cultural focus on such ephemera gives them a very useful fig leaf for excluding the demographic that it actually matters to exclude: the working class.
In this context, “WASP” refers to social status and cultural norms derived from northeastern British and Dutch colonists, but not limited to them. Working class southerners or Appalachians have never been “WASPs” in that sense despite fitting the definition literally.
