Posted on 11/16/2024 9:02:33 AM PST by ProtectOurFreedom
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 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.
Donald 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.
[I cut two paragraphs about Walz and Vance which make the same point - Walz is a lightweight and Vance is tough, educated and experienced]
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
The closing paragraph says it all except I would apply its conclusions to the entire Democrat electorate, not just professors in the academy.
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 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.
Abraham Lincoln didn’t have a college degree, Nixon went to Whittier because he couldn’t afford Harvard, and Reagan went to Eureka College.
Condoleezza Rice doesn’t have an ivy degree, but she is a professor at Stanford.
Education can often mean = indoctrination. But not always. So it shouldn’t be the end all be all either way.
Read the article. The author discusses those people and the schools they attended (and others).
Thank you, it doesn’t talk about Nixon or Condoleezza. But mentions Reagan and LBJ.
Maybe academia itself IS itself mediocre...Have you ever read the landmark essay: “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” by Yale professor William Deresiewicz
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/
Another great thinker who was earlier and foreshadowed the downfall of elite, Western education was Carroll Quigley, who hailed from Harvard and briefly taught Bill Clinton at Georgetown.
“Is Georgetown University Committing a Suicide” (to try and be a second rate Harvard instead of advancing the scholarly traditions of Christendom)
http://www.carrollquigley.net/Articles/Is-Georgetown-University-Comitting-Suicide.htm
An examination of those degrees will reveal a scarcity of physics and math and a surplus of sociology, urban studies and political science.
So the leap on their part to declare themselves well educated is suspect.
She then transferred to Howard University, an historically black school in Washington D.C. rated 183rd of all U.S. colleges.
—
So she was trading on her possible 1/64th black gene back then. There is an excellent video by Candace Own that attempts to trace her father’s side decent without much success using Kamala’s own book recalling who was who in her family.
Turns out that one of her named black aunts was just a random family friends or neighbor and another was white and Irish. Owens was hard pressed to find any black relatives on her father’s side, using Kamala’s own book and the people she names as her relatives.
Harvard University’s mission statement in the opening of its rulebook from 1646:
“Let every student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning”
Harvard’s original motto was “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae,” which translates to “Truth for Christ and the Church”
Much of the Ivy League except Cornell hailed similar virtues.
As pragmatic a businessman an executive like the president should be...the real downfall of modern Western education is the lack of in-depth HUMANITIES and rabid secularization of the Liberal Arts. The search for truth, for God’s hand in creation, for the meaning of existence and the human condition as revealed in literature —> all that is supposed to be universal and transcend vocational trades.
TWO BLACK SCHOLARS LAMENT THE REMOVAL OF THE CLASSICS DEPARTMENT AT HOWARD UNIVERSITY as a “Spiritual Catastrophe”
https://cornellfreespeech.com/commentary-howard-universitys-removal-classics-spiritual-catastrophe
Thanks for the pointers to those articles. I will read them.
Over the past couple decades, Prof. Victor Hanson has become extremely critical of the pompous self-proclaimed “elite” at the Ivy schools in the USA. He says all you get from those schools is a “brand” on your hide and connections to other upper crust snobs, but no solid classical education. And you get thoroughly steeped in “minorities are good no matter their skills or competence.”
BTTT
Interesting. I was aware of Owens’ research but was unaware of those findings. It just shows the power a good sun tan has to elevate you if you shamelessly capitalize on that tan.
CR is a total derpstate neocon, but I give her a pass solely on her Bach performances.
Close but not quite. It's the obverse actually. Positive reinforcement in their education trains them to see only what generates reward (hence virtue signaling). They are trained to see, and as a consequence of the process ignore everything else. Hence, what they see of conservatism is whatever gives them an opportunity to flout their superiority, generating whatever disparaging meme they've learned, applicable or not.
You may refer to them as “educated”, I refuse.
My term is “overschooled” and undereducated. The prevalent must go to college mindset has produced the dumbest couple generations in history.
These kids all went to college, were fed a bunch of woke crap, came out with degrees, and went into journalism, politics, Hollywood, all jobs which don’t require any talent to hold.
AOC, Tlaib, Klobuchar, and a thousand others, are living proof.
Worth noting that Martin Luther King Jr. was one of our last major classically educated public figures (he was just as into the classics privately as well as academic) — he had a degree in philosophy from BU and taught it at Morehouse as well.
But if you read his sermons and writings, speeches that are lesser known to the public, you catch how steeped he was in them. And how it shaped even the way he confronted more modern ideologies like Marxism.
Even “I have a dream” includes Shakespeare quote…He loved the Greeks, etc…
Yes I understand your misgivings about Secretary Rice’s policies.
When I learned that the massively ignorant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez graduated cum laude from Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences in 2011, my opinion of Boston University fell through the floor.
When Sotomayor was appointed to the Supreme Court I said to my leftist brother-in-law that she simply not qualified as a jurist to sit on the court. His response was, but she is a wise Latina.
I have another friend, quite conservative, and we had a discussion the other day about intelligence and level of what we now consider education. I pointed out that educational level does not equate to intelligence. He said he thought it did. He does not have a great deal of formal education but he has done well enough for himself. Another example of where basic common sense and innate intelligence trumps formal education.
My closing remarks were that I know people with masters degrees who are dumb as a box of rocks. Fortunately they are in-laws and not blood relatives LOL
But one facet of the question the author is addressing might be rephrased as "why do so many university professors consider flailing idiots such as Harris and Waltz to be One Of Us?" The answer is that they are. And that's pretty damning.
I think far too much has been made of a college education.
Especially nowadays, when graduates appear to be “educated fools,” spouting doctrinaire B.S. and little else.
I have a document which certifies that I’m college educated but that doesn’t make me superior to any other human being!
And I’m afraid that too many educated fools believe that by virtue of their college indoctrination, their worldview is superior to everyone else’s.
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