The Party of the Well-Educated Offers the Least Well-Educated Candidates

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by American Thinker on November 15, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.


All presidential elections offer paradoxes, but the Harris-Trump contest provides a truly remarkable oddity. Specifically, the Democrats, now the party of the college-educatedespecially 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 education metric, 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 percent. 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 he received his BA in economics in 1968. 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.

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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 Journalone of ninean 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.

This sharp divide on educational attainment hardly predicts political acumen or intelligence more generally. Recall the two presidents who excelled politically but graduated from obscure colleges—Lyndon B. Johnson from Southwest State Teachers College and Ronald Reagan from Eureka College. Joe Biden graduated from the University of Delaware and then Syracuse University law school, neither one especially eminent.

Nevertheless, in the case of Harris and Walz, their educational shortcomings were conspicuous. This was particularly evident for Harris’ inability to offer thoughtful, detailed responses to tough questions while lapsing into incomprehensible “word salad.” Moreover, her solutions to pressing problems such as inflation were simplistic and lacked any awareness of past failures or problems of implementation, Harris also seemed dependent on her teleprompter and eschewed impromptu response. During the campaign, it became evident that she seemed unable to handle the daunting cognitive demands of the presidency, and predictably, Donald Trump labeled her “low-IQ Kamala.”

Tim Walz displayed similar limitations, and commentators would remark that Harris chose him as her running mate since, unlike much smarter alternatives such Josh Shapiro, he would not upstage her intellectually. He stumbled when asked about his controversial decisions about mobilizing the Minnesota National Guard during the 2020 “George Floyd” riots in Minneapolis and appeared over his head when debating JD Vance, openly admitting beforehand his fear of debating a Yale Law School graduate.

The Harris/Walz and Trump/Vance candidacies differed greatly in their willingness to engage in lengthy interviews with hostile critics or those notable for asking probing questions, such as 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 leaning, 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.

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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 problemscreating 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 believe that gender is socially constructed, that America 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 of Kamala Harris & Tim Walz by Gage Skidmore on Flickr

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2 thoughts on “The Party of the Well-Educated Offers the Least Well-Educated Candidates

  1. First, I would not dismiss Chadron College on the basis of the 32% 4-year graduation rate alone. It’s a rural teacher’s college located in a town of 5,206 — by contrast the University of Nebraska is located in a city of 294,757. A lot of rural kids will go to the small college for a year, do well, and then transfer to the University from whence they graduate. I knew a student from a small Maine island who was intimidated by the size of the Town of Machias, population 2060, and a university that had a FTE headcount of about 250.

    You also have a lot of girls who are seeking the “Mrs. Degree” — who will go to an open admissions teacher’s college for a year or two and then go marry their high school sweetheart. Many will then have a couple of kids and then return to college 20 years later to finish their degree and often get their elementary education certificate and become teachers in their 40s.

    I understand the value of the 4-year (and 6-year) graduation rate, but it doesn’t reflect either of the above groups. And as to Tim Walz, Chandron State has a football team — and why do I suspect that he played on the team and that’s how he managed to graduate?

    And the reason why the teaching of high school US History and Civics is in such a sad shape is that the most common name of a Social Studies teacher is “coach.” The rationale is that anyone can teach Social Studies so they give these jobs to the people whom they want to hire as coaches, and while anyone can teach these subjects, not everyone can teach them well.

    And as to Kamela, had she not been sleeping with Willie Brown, she probably would still be an Assistant DA in Alameda County, or more likely a washed-up defense counsel providing “reasonable doubt for a reasonable price.”

    NEITHER Harris nor Walz should be viewed as products of their respective educational institutions. Walz would likely never have had a career as a teacher were he not a football coach, and Brown would likely never have appointed Harris to both the the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, and later the Medical Assistance Commission had she not been sleeping with him.

    This election was more unusual than the 1976 one in that Gerry Ford had never been elected to anything more than Congressman. Both Harris and Walz had only been elected to statewide offices. Neither had *ever* won a state primary, in either 2020 or 2024, while Ford had won 27 primaries and went into the convention with 1,121 delegates.

    I think the larger issue here is just how undemocratic the Democratic party has become.

    1. I also make a distinction between “well educated” and “well credentialed.”

      Claudine Gay is an example of the latter — Phillips Exeter Academy ($67,315/year) for high school, and then graduating from Stanford and Harvard, with subsequent employment at Stanford and then Harvard — those are impressive credentials.

      But even if she hadn’t plagiarized it, would anyone outside the ideological echo chamber be willing to defend the academic merit of her work? And compare that to Albert Einstein who was a Swiss patent clerk when he started writing papers that were of academic merit, Without comparing the Swiss/German higher education system of over a century ago with the American academy of today, I think it is fair to describe Einstein as well educated, but not necessarily well credentialed. (Einstein was also largely self-educated.)

      Nearly 20 years ago, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) did research that not only found how little the graduates of elite institutions actually knew, but that they knew less than the incoming freshmen did.
      See: https://www.americancivicliteracy.org/summary_summary-2/

      Our elite institutions are elite because of (a) what they were a century ago, and (b) their ability to convince society that they still are elite. In a word: marketing…

      Are Harvard and Yale Law School considered the nation’s best because they objectively are, or because eight of the nine members of the US Supreme Court went there? Read some of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s opinions (e.g. Students for Fair Admissions) — would she be taken seriously if she wasn’t a cum laude Harvard Law graduate?

      Higher Education is currently in transition, employers no longer respect the merit of a college degree per se, and I wonder how much longer our purportedly “elite” institutions will be considered elite.

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