I was there during some of those dinner-table conversations. Topics that were raised: Number of for-profit and non-profit founders who didn't get all the way through college; how successful founders and interesting people seem to be missing the "imitation gene" (Thiel's term); how the standard system filters out different kinds of innovative people at each step of the process; how making it possible to bypass a single stage of the system might have a multiplicative effect on the total number of innovators who survive to adulthood with their creativity intact.

Topics which were not raised, at all, not even in the slightest: Universities having a left-wing influence.

I'm genuinely shocked at the amount of vitriol and conspiracy-theorizing which Peter Thiel is getting over this.