The yard
Six bands, from the gate that decides who may be considered to the seats from which the next cohort is chosen. The tracks do not move. Set a road and one career lights up through them.
Reading the wires
Filed — in a statutory filing or an official appointment notice. Published — the institution's own words about itself. Stated — said on the record by the person it concerns. Structural — true of the roster as a whole and of no single person.
Turn a lamp off and those links leave the diagram. Turn everything off but Filed and what is left is the part that a regulator or a government has written down.
Can you apply?
Four rungs, in order of what they lead to. The question at each one is the plainest available test of access: is there a way in for someone who is not already inside?
Who holds the seats on rung four
The gradient
The first rung has no gatekeeper. The second has two committees. The third refuses your application outright and screens the shortlist through an executive search firm. The fourth publishes no process at all — and it is the rung that chooses who fills the second.
The loop
Seven steps. Each adds something the one before could not, and the seventh hands control of the first to people the first produced. Step through it.
Two ladders
Both end in power over other people's lives. One is four rungs long and open to everyone. The other is nine and, on this record, reachable by vote at exactly one of them.
Where the two touch
One citizen, one vote. One citizen, not one unit of access. The ladders meet only where an appointment is made by someone who had to be elected — and an appointment is not an election.
Routes in
Selection is one entrance, not the entrance. Two others reach the same rooms, and one of them leaves no record at all.
What the third route implies
If comparable access can be had without passing the selection gate, then part of what the gate does is not education. It is certification of who belongs — and a certificate can be substituted for.
What it does not show
The record above establishes a structure. A structure is not an effect. Four questions, and what each would take to answer.
The record
Every figure, date and appointment on this page comes from one of these. Nine of the eleven are the institutions' own publications or a government filing.
Circulate
Ten cards. Each one is a single finding that stands on its own, and each links back here.