The Deflation of the Academic Brand

Trumpism is sometimes derided as an updated know-nothingism that rejects expertise and the input of credentialed expertise. Supposedly, professionals who could now save us tragically have their talent untapped as they sit idle at the Council of Foreign Relations, the economics Department at Harvard, or in the offices of the Brookings Institution — even as Trump’s wheelers and dealers crash and burn, too proud, too smelly, or too ignorant to call in their betters to come in and save Trump from himself.

But do the degreed classes, at least outside math, the sciences, engineering, and medicine, merit such esteem anymore?

Anthony Scaramucci’s Harvard Law degree seemed no guarantee of the Mooch’s circumspection, sobriety, or good judgement.

Bruce Ohr’s similar degree did not ensure either common sense or simple ethics. Or, on the contrary, perhaps at Harvard he learned that progressive ends justify any means necessary to obtain them. In any case, Ohr thought there was nothing wrong in keeping quiet about his spouse’s work on the discredited Steele dossier, or indeed in aiding and abetting the seeding of it, while he was the fourth-ranking official at Trump’s Department of Justice.

The Mueller team — along with a group of now disgraced, reassigned, and retired officers at the top echelons of the FBI, the descent of ex-CIA head John Brennan and ex-DIA chief James Clapper into caricature, the shenanigans of unmaskings and leaking at the Obama National Security Council, the warping of the FISA courts, the disingenuous operatives at Fusion GPS, and the implantation of informants into the Trump campaign — recalls the arrogant self-righteousness of the degreed geniuses who took us into Vietnam.

But this time around, the “best and brightest” (remember the media’s hagiographic praise of Mueller’s “all-stars” and “dream team”) would save us from Trump — much as John F. Kennedy’s and Lyndon Johnson’s whiz kids would deliver us from the North Vietnamese.

The liberal Washington Post recently fact-checked some of the claims of the new socialist candidate for Congress in New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has often boasted of her college erudition. (“How many other House Democrats have a degree in economics like I do?”) Indeed, Ocasio-Cortez has repeatedly noted that she graduated fourth in her class at Boston University, with a joint degree in economics and international relations. Yet most of her major statements that she has made since coming onto the national scene have proven either wrong or unhinged.

In an interview on the rebirthed Firing Line, the international-relations major was forced to admit that she knew relatively little about the facts on the ground in the Israeli–Palestinian dispute, other than boilerplate left-wing anti-Israeli talking points. She claimed that the unemployment rate is low because “everyone has two jobs” In truth, only one in 20 do, about 5 percent of the American workforce.

Crazier was her statement that the “upper middle class does not exist anymore.” In fact, its numbers are at a near all-time high, nearly encompassing one-third of adults.

A series of Ocasio-Cortez’s assertions about Medicare and Obamacare turn out to be equally fallacious. She claimed that ICE had a “bed quota” that had to be filled by unsuspecting immigrants. That too is a false statement. ICE keeps a minimum of 34,000 beds for surges of detainees, but it is absurd to suggest that the agency must keep them filled.

No doubt Ocasio-Cortez, at 28, is still young and inexperienced. But when she refers to her own supposedly stellar academic record, and then in a series of statements illustrates how poorly educated she is, one wonders, What exactly is the value of $300,000 Boston University degree?

We could ask the same about Sarah Jeong’s UC Berkeley B.A. and Harvard Law degrees. Years of Jeong’s racist tweets surfaced, creating a firestorm, shortly after the New York Times hired her as a writer and member of the editorial board. Responding to critics, the Times noted that it had reviewed Jeong’s social-media history before hiring her.

Given her lack of prior publications (other than The Internet of Garbage) and accomplishments, it is hard to ascertain what on her résumé earned her the New York Times billet other than her clearly anti-white, anti-male, and anti-nuclear-family prejudices. And like Ocasio-Cortez, Jeong combined her smugness with puerile ignorance.

Jeong thought her banal and shop-worn comparisons of Trump to Hitler were somehow proof of her own genius: “I was equating Trump to Hitler before it was cool.” She lauded herself: “How f***ing prescient was I on Trump = Hitler.” (She did not use asterisks.) Actually, not very at all — given, most recently, the near daily dreary brown shirt/Hitler/Mussolini slurs leveled at George W. Bush during the Iraq War.

Narcissism, superciliousness, and tragic buffoonery combined to produce another Jeong declaration: “White people have stopped breeding. You’ll all go extinct soon. This was my plan all along.” As a self-described Hitler expert, she might have known that others had predated her on matters of a “plan” for racial extinction. (In her doomsday predictions of a self-induced white holocaust, Jeong, a South Korean immigrant, seems unaware that the fertility rate for South Korean immigrants is among the lowest of all immigrant groups — and lower than that of native-born households.)

Jeong, the Harvard Law graduate and veteran of gender-studies advocacies, seems obsessed with comic-book-style theories of race: “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.”

Jeong seems to be channeling either the crackpot melanin theories of former professor Leonard Jeffries (Ph.D., Columbia, 1971) who postulated an inferior “ice people” of cruel and brutal whites, set against a superior “sun people” of compassionate and calm blacks. Or perhaps she is echoing H. G. Wells’s dystopian notion of light-sensitive, white, flaxen-haired — and cannibalistic — Morlocks in TheTime Machine, who dwell deep and goblin-like in the earth.

The subtexts of the statements of Ocasio-Cortez and Jeong are that our top schools are obsessed with race, class, and gender but apparently not rigorous in cross-examining the fables and pop fads of their students. Had either Ocasio-Cortez or Jeong been required to take an exit test to receive a B.A., they might not have been stamped with any certification of education.

Read more