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-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 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 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.
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 problems—creating an “opportunity economy”?
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
