All presidential elections offer paradoxes, but the Harris-Trump contest offers a truly remarkable oddity. Specifically, the Democrats, now the party of the college educated, especially college professors, nominated Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates who were among the most poorly educated candidates in recent history. By contrast, the Republicans, now the party of the less well-educated, nominated Donald Trump and JD Vance, both of whom have Ivy League degrees. So, if candidate backgrounds should align with party bases according to the metric of education, the two parties should swap candidates.
Kamala Harris began college at Vanier College in Montreal, an academically undistinguished school for English speakers in French-speaking Quebec. She then transferred to Howard University, an historically black school in Washington D.C. rated 183rd of all U.S. colleges. She graduated in 1986 with a degree in economics and political science and participated in the debate team. She then enrolled in the University of California Hastings College of Law, whose rating between 1990 and 1999 averaged around 25 in national law school rankings. There she served as a President of the Black Law Student Association, and was admitted to the California bar after her second try at passing the bar examination.
Tim Walz graduated from Chadron College in Nebraska, a school rated 135th among regional Midwestern schools with a four-year graduation rate of 32%. He then worked as a high school social studies teacher and assistant football coach before entering politics.
Donald J. Trump enrolled in New York City’s Fordham University in 1964, a school with a modest academic reputation. He soon transferred to the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania where in 1968 he received his BA in economics. The Wharton School is world famous, currently ranking number one among all business schools. Though it’s occasionally alleged that Trump owed his admission to family influence, no supporting evidence exists for this claim, and he did graduate.
JD Vance graduated from Ohio State University in 2009 with a degree in political science and philosophy, completing a four-year program in two years. He then attended Yale Law School, generally considered America’s top law school, and while at Yale he served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal (one of nine), an honor similarly achieved by such notable as former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. He subsequently practiced corporate law in San Francisco before moving on being a tech industry venture capitalist.
podcaster Joe Rogan. Both Trump and Vance thrived on intellectual debate, including matching wits with “brainly” groups such as libertarians and champions of cryptocurrency.
No doubt, nearly all college professors, regardless of ideological learning, can distinguish between smart and intellectually struggling students. They recognize “word salad” when they hear it and can readily identify cliché-ridden research papers. At some level they will admit that both Kamala and Tim would rank at the bottom of the class at first rate universities and would probably flunk out of an elite school. Of course, this reality is inadmissible, at least in public.
Why, then, do professors overwhelmingly support a ticket with two intellectually mediocre candidates? Do they honestly believe that Kamala Harris, let alone Tim Walz, possess the cognitive capacity necessary to be President of the United States? Can they honestly defend Harris’ shallow answers to complex economic problems — creating an “opportunity economy”?
This is not to say that professors en masse should vote based exclusively on educational credentials. But, that acknowledged, why not just sit out the 2024 contest as one lacking any preferable option, perhaps categorizing the contest as stupidity vs. evil? Why the silence regarding cognitive insufficiency? They certainly had no obligation to be cheerleaders for the Harris/Walz ticket, yet they voted for it.
This enthusiasm had less to so with specific policies than the impact of campus racial identity politics. Thousands of academics have gradually been conditioned to support blacks and females, regardless of their records and abilities, whether as students, fellow faculty or administrators, and so endorsing Kamala Harris was just one more step in a decades-old process. Meanwhile, those faculty who refused to drink the woke Kool Aid have been culled from the herd. What began in the 1970s as just giving an extra boost to blacks to compensate for past discrimination, has evolved into embracing lower standards across the board. No wonder that as courts have severely limited such preferences in higher education, they often continue as if preferences are hard wired into the academy’s DNA.
This transformation is perfectly illustrated by the appointment of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard. Here was a woman of color with a modest academic record, a serial plagiarist who falsified her research and was openly anti-white. Yet the Harvard faculty and the administration anointed her as Harvard’s president. This embrace did not happen overnight. It required decades of slow-moving self-delusion promoted by incessant, often forceful proselytizing. Now, when these academics see a woman of color, their reflexive response is “qualified.” After all, once you have come to believer that gender is socially constructed, that American is fundamentally racist and victimhood is an exalted status, seeing Kamala Harris as “qualified to be president” is a snap. Many academics have obviously become well-trained in denying a plain-to-see reality.
Image: AT via Magic Studio
