Ted Cruz earned his Bachelor of Arts Degree from Princeton University and his Juris Doctor from Harvard University. Josh Hawley earned his Bachelor of Arts Degree from Stanford University and his Juris Doctor from Yale University. Kayleigh McEnany earned her Bachelor of Science from Georgetown University and her Juris Doctor from Harvard University.
Former elected officials, political analysists and media Talking Heads, from Claire McCaskill to Steve Schmidt to Geraldo Rivera keep telling me that individuals with these credentials should know better and not support Donald Trump.
Why?
What it is about Ivy League credentials that somehow change ones moral compass? Why should Cruz, Hawley, and MeEnany “know better” than me with my simple Associate of Art degree from a community college and a Bachelor of Arts from small college no one ever heard of? For that matter, why should any of us know better, on moral grounds, than a high school graduate?
These same people in the media are quick to point to Trump’s ignorance and mock his academic achievements as some sort of justification of his immoral behavior. The man is too stupid to know better. His followers are too stupid to know better. We are shocked and amazed when individuals with credentials from prestigious institutes of learning do not know better and we think to ourselves, “Oh, they know better. They know what they are doing is immoral. They are just hiding the fact.” Are they? I don’t buy it. True, I do not have Ivy League credentials but neither did my mother who did not graduate from high school but was a better judge of character than anyone I have ever known.
And yes, this traces to the obsession with the Democratic Party to send everyone to college and concede the non-college educated vote. If college makes one more educated and aligns ones moral compass in the direction of justice (and the more prestigious the school, the better the graduate) , why bother with the ignorant and immoral hoi polloi? It’s not worth the effort, is it?
Your obsession is with falsely accusing the Democratic Party of demeaning those without college. In this case, you falsely accuse the Democratic Party of demeaning you.
Nobody suggests that anybody’s “moral compass” is changed. The moral compass is the same for everyone. The expectations of Mr. Cruz, Mr. Hawley, and Ms. McEnany are higher, because they have been awarded the very best upbringing (including education) that America can offer. That isn’t a statement about anybody’s moral compass.
It is instead an expression of Luke 12:48:
It sounds as though your argument is with Jesus, not the Democrats. Is that what you intend?
What do they mean then, when saying that certification from an Ivy League institution matters in this case?
You’re really being obtuse about the value of education again! I guess I have to spell it out. Harvard and Stanford Law Schools are both standouts in what they teach. Students there and other law schools learn the nuances of constitutional and statutory law. Their faculty are experts on what those things allow and require and do their best to pass along their expertise along to their students. Therefore, those who attended and graduated therefrom know better than the rest of us how the Constitution operates. I can forgive to some extent ignorance by the yahoos who did not learn the ins and outs and only know what Dear Leader tells them (though strengthening basic civics would fix some of that), but those with law degrees have no excuse.
Why? What.
What does that say about those of us who are not graced with their wisdom?
It’s no wonder the MAGA crowd is angry at the “libs”.
The law is the law. Right and wrong are right and wrong no matter where one went to school, no matter the “credentials” one has.
The “yahoos”?? Yeah, that says it all. If only we could sent the “yahoos” to Yale or Harvard…..
Come on, John — surely you, with your college degree and decades of life experience, understand the concept (whether you agree or not). If you prefer a secular approach, surely you have been exposed to the concept of “noblesse oblige” — is that also unclear to you?
This commentary leaves me with the impression that you are willfully refusing to admit what you know to be true.
What you are seeing, whether you like it or not, is condemnation of those who are expected to know better — not because they are brighter, but because of the widely-shared belief that those who have benefited most from society have the most obligations to that society.
Do you also oppose progressive taxation (a different application of the same principle)?
But the aforementioned are not too stupid. I believe at least Cruz has specifically a constitutional law background. I submit he DOES know better, but is ignoring his own intellect for the sake of power.
The point is that Cruz is who Cruz is and his college education, no matter where he received it, does not change that.
That is actually YOUR point. It is different from the complaint of those who are specifically criticizing Mr. Cruz. Your point is also incorrect in this case. His post-graduate work at Harvard is specifically relevant to the case being made against Mr. Cruz. It is the difference between first degree murder and negligent homicide — Mr. Cruz is knowingly and intentionally lying.
As Christopher has correctly observed, Mr. Cruz has deep understanding of constitutional law and theory. He cannot have obtained the degrees he’s obtained from the universities that he’s graduated from without showing that understanding in both written form and also in oral debate.
Mr. Cruz is, therefore, willfully taking positions he knows to be false. That’s called lying. It is also called sedition.
It has everything to do with what he has studied and where.
I do not know that Mr. Cruz knows his positions are false. How are you able to know what is in his mind? I think part of it is your faith in credentialism. It’s common in the USA.
It compels the wealthy class to take illegal measures to send their children to elite schools, not for the education, but for the credentials.
It compels our elected leaders to lie about their credentials, as President Elect Biden did when he said he graduated in the top half of his law school class and graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school.
Fact is he graduated 76th of 85 students in his law school class and had two undergraduate degrees, not three. His excuse for lying? “I exaggerate when I’m angry, …”
I like Joe, voted for him, and have no problem with the reality that he graduated 76th out of 85 students. But Joe exaggerated for the same reason that Lori Loughlin commited fraud as part of her role in a college admissions scandal: Credentials Matter to many, as you and others in this thread have illustrated.
I am able to use Google and then read his voluminous position papers, statements, and briefs. I am also able to read summaries of his oral statements.
Suppose your child needs risky heart or brain surgery to correct an immediate and life-threatening disorder. You have a choice between Dr. Able, with an MD from Random University School of Medicine in Podunk, KY and no published research or history or Dr, Baker, with an MD and PhD in cardiology or neurology from Harvard Medical known for their published and widely cited research into successfully treating the very condition of your child. Is it “credentialism” for you to choose Dr. Baker?
How are you “able to know” that Dr. Baker is likely to be a better surgeon than Dr. Able?
You know as well as I do that Ted Cruz is willfully lying when he alleges that the results of the November election should be overturned.
Yahoos….Podunks…..the contempt for those without an Ivy league pedigree is a sad commentary of any Democrat. It’s no wonder we are losing the votes of so many working class citizens.
More trolling.
…and for the record, I’ve had knee surgery, sinus surgery, and could not tell you where either doctor went to school. Somehow I survived. In fact, in my 65 years, I’ve never ever wondered or inquired as to the collegiate certification of anyone I have ever associated with, professionally or personally…..then again, I not a fan of credentialism.
More trolling
For over a decade I monitored the events happening at Harvard, MIT, and other local schools on energy, climate, and other things for my free weekly listing (http://hubevents.blogspot.com) and spent many, many hours going to lectures at Harvard, Harvard Law, and the Institute for Politics. My impression is that Harvard, most especially, is NOT about education and learning but about networking and getting ahead. It has nothing to do with real intelligence let alone “smarts” and is light years away from wisdom.
What a Harvard education gets you is connections and a pedigree. That’s it.
I have also observed that Harvard looooooves its Republicans. They get to be BMOCs because they are so rare in what is presumed to be a “liberal bastion” but is just another corporation feeding at the trough. Harvard bends over backwards for its Republicans and gives them, what is to me, a sickening deference. You should have seen the starbursts in the eyes of some when Alex Castellanos, creator of the Jesse Helms “hands” ad, was a Fellow at the Institute of Politics and I don’t believe those starbursts were for his immaculate ties and impeccable coiffure.
Peter Navarro is a graduate of the Kennedy School (and my bet for an upcoming Fellowship at the IOP). Jared Kushner is a graduate of Harvard College. Those two should not be forgotten.
PS: I stopped my weekly listings in September because I was never able to get the local environmental community (?) to understand that every week there were events at which they could meet movers and shakers and learn the latest energy and climate science and because I was bored with listening to many of the speakers I’d heard before say the same things I heard last time they appeared with absolutely no action items at the end.
I would be happy to work with others who want to resuscitate my listing service and even expand to a global climate events listing since everything is now online but every time I mention this I get dead silence.
PPS: If you don’t have a moral center by the time you hit puberty, an expensive education is not guaranteed to make up that deficiency.
Peter Navarro is a chameleon who has gone through a few dozen political identity changes. Check out his wiki bio. He’s an odd one … can’t really pin that on Harvard.
MA and PhD from Harvard’s Kennedy School. That’s what I pin on him. And Harvard.
This discussion has moved from simple trolling to downright silly.
We are in the midst of the most grave constitutional crisis in America’s history and the exchanges on BMG are about absurdities such as an assertion that “Democrats hurt working-class people by offering them college” or that Harvard is responsible for the reprehensible behavior of some of its graduates.
Is this really the best we can do here?
I think there is a mixture everywhere. Certainly, some people are only interested in plying their connections and extending their privileged status and don’t learn a damn thing from even the finest teachers (see Judas). And, to be fair, to be young is to be stupid. I will submit myself as evidence, and though I thought I had a moral compass, it was clearly malfunctioning as I look back in retrospect. It is easy to be better than some, and stop there, rather than to be better than the best, which is hard.
These problems exist at private elite universities and public affordable ones (although oftentimes the private ones are the more affordable, because everything is just so screwy right now).
The partisan divide is a glaring example of the lack of wisdom in society, but to find offense in the description ‘should know better,’ may be your own. It is simply too small a snippet, and may reveal your own insecurity. To be fair, some certainly think their pedigree makes them superior, and perhaps that bias is contained in ‘they should know better,’ but it is more likely because they haven’t met the internal standard of quality, and is in no way meant as the external slight you heard. Don’t forget, Harvard was attended by the Unabomber. Madness and genius lie side by side, and quantity and quality never intersect, like two rail of a train. A wise person can get a lot out of a little, but a fool cannot get a little from a lot.
One could just as easily say any native-born American should know better. We (well middle-class whites) have known freedom and liberty all our lives. How is it possible to think the election, even in defeat, represents “a steal” etc.?
Cruz, in particular, has a serious case of doublethink. In his book he brags about everything he did proactively to defend Bush vs Gore in the aftermath of the election. He swooped in and saved the day, the presidency and the republic. Mr. Superhero. He was on the ball, saw what was going to happen, and mocks the democrats for being out to lunch. Then, in a different spot, he accuses them of going to the Supreme Court first in spite of detailing how he went their first.
In any case, where you came from is meaningless. It’s where you are now that matters. Don’t carry baggage that does you no good.
John, I totally agree with the thrust of what you’re saying. A fancy academic pedigree does not confer a moral compass, QED ad nauseum. That’s not what they teach, and the culture doesn’t expect it or require it.
Young people who manage to land in those schools have probably shown ambition and a capacity for hard work; memory; analysis; presentation (writing); and so forth. But all of these useful things can be put towards post-hoc rationalization — the hardening of one’s prior beliefs and worst instincts. The ability (and moral necessity) of changing one’s mind in the face of newly-apprehended reality; compassion; a moral compass that stays true in the face of challenge and temptation … these don’t necessarily result from this training.
Look, if Ted Cruz were a decent guy, he might not be Senator, and we wouldn’t be talking about him. He’s the guy clever and ambitious enough to put himself in a position to respond to the “will of the people”. Politicians are generally not leaders; they’re followers.
All this being said, I’m pleased that students at Yale Law started a petition to disbar Cruz and Hawley, and that it’s been signed by 5,700 faculty and students nationwide.
We’ll see where that goes. These schools, and the legal profession itself, are facing scrutiny and judgment, and we’re looking to them to rise to the occasion.
It’s about time.
By the way, I recommend “The Tyranny of Merit”- What’s become of the common Good. by Michael J. Sandel
I’d like to think if we had MORE meritocracy at least my own life would be in better shape.
I think Sandel’s argument is that the meritocracy defined merit in a very narrow and exclusive way that hurts working class people of all races, but especially people of color. His AEI interview with Ross Douthat is quite good, as was his recent On Point interview.
In short, our meritocracy is broken precisely because it’s a self-perpetuating opportunity enclosure, and not the genuine article.
I tell my students to pick the job they want and get the education they afford them that job. There’s some intangibles though. My wife and I both concede we would have had more fun and gotten to do our jobs which we love sooner for less time and money had we gone to our respective state flagships.
We also would live poorer lives without one another and without our U Chicago friends, whom we’ve been zooming with weekly this entire pandemic, and one of whom are now neighbors of ours over the border in Melrose. So who am I to tell a student to put their dream school on hold if they get in? The ones who don’t get in though should be made aware they’ll do just fine, and even some of the ones who don’t go at all will do just fine too. Our job is to guide and this one size fits all approach is failing many kids.
I thought I did follow the advice you give your students. Then again, my attempts to play the whom-you-know card haven’t gotten me very far either. Never expected to be as educated and experienced as I am (if I do say so myself), yet still substitute teaching in my 40s!
Yeah it’s tough, I really felt that the first 7 years after college. Then I finally did what I thought I wanted to do in politics and walked away even more jaded and upset. Much the angst of that period probably spilled out into these pages. It’s only been through the last 3 years of teaching that I’ve finally found professional satisfaction. I’ll make a helpful nudge that it’s not too late to get your initial license and/or an EdM or do an induction program. I think you’d make a great history teacher and we certainly need more, and I’ll keep my ear to the ground for openings in our district.
Thanks, after years of saying that would not be my path I did get my initial licenses for middle and high school history. Still can’t get interviews most of the time – don’t know what I’m doing wrong:(
It’s wicked tough time and we’re the last to retire and the last to get hired in my (admittedly limited) experience. You could go for English which opens up “humanities” positions and English positions. They tend to be more in demand due to MCAS. I forwarded you an email with more leads and ideas and I’ll keep you in the loop. I’ll shoutout Mark Bail and Joel Patterson for their help in this process.
I saw that, thanks. I don’t recall having seen that one though I am on the School Spring email list for history positions.
It’s been a while since my kids went to college but I remember with less than fond memories the atmosphere during their junior years in high school where they were instructed to pick their safe school, reach school and several in between. What sickened me more was the conversations I had with parents who would ask “so what schools is Pat applying to” with comments of “Oh, that’s a good school” or as in the case with my sons, a puzzled look and the question “Is that all? I thought he would do better?”
Many parents were shocked that my kids chose UMass Amherst as their school. That decision, by the way, was one in which I offered very little guidance with the exception of telling them, “This is how much it is going to cost you. This is how much you will be making once you are out of school, and this is what you will owe in the end. Anything else is just a fancy sweatshirt to wear in public or a car window decal for parents to boastfully place in full view for all to see how special their children are.”
For the record, my youngest son started at UMASS-Boston, took a year to be on his own, and returned to finish his degree (in Sustainable Agriculture) from UMASS-Amherst.
My five children each went to the school of their choice in order to pursue the discipline of their choice. None of them made their choice based on vocational concerns (nobody who is thinking about money chooses to pursue a BFA, the choice of two of the five).
I’ve never seen a sweatshirt from any of their colleges. I think a few coffee mugs might have crossed our breakfast tables over the years.
On the subject: Harvard Kennedy School has removed US Rep. Elise Stefanik (NY) from the Institute of Politics Senior Advisory Committee. She’s a 2006 graduate of Harvard College, and was on the board as an undergrad. For a while she’s been one of Trump’s loudest defenders, and as such has taken up baseless claims of voter fraud. HKS said that’s out of bounds.
HKS Dean Doug Elmendorf’s wording is careful but revealing.
Stefanik responded predictably: Good riddance, cancel culture, etc.
I don’t buy the bravado. This has got to sting for her. She was an undergrad at Harvard, where one builds lifelong relationships and character. (You’re still a kid, really.) She was obviously very proud of that; and she had dedicated “long and committed service” to HKS. It was important to her. She had relationships and enjoyed the prestige.
Now, one can imagine what she was hearing in her rural district, from family and friends glued to 24/7 right-wing media. (I’m from near there; the district used to be pretty conservative — Reaganesque. But not like this, I didn’t think.)
She made her choice, and had to give up something personally valuable. For what? Trump? This guy? I detect the grinding of internal gears, the hard emotional labor of denial, and the zeal of the convert.
Thank you for bringing this up. The New York Times ran a piece on Josh Hawley that is simply terrifying. He thinks things went wrong with Pelagius — 1,700 years ago. (Long story short, St. Augustine won out, and the history of Christianity follows from there.) Hawley does not believe in freedom as Americans usually define it. I would argue that does not believe in the Constitution.
But that’s not the scary part. The scary part is that Hawley had sponsors. John Danforth, one of the most respectable GOP Senators of my lifetime (conservative, but honorable) has expressed regret for supporting Hawley. Hawley went to Yale Law School and clerked for John Roberts. You don’t get a gig like that by accident.
The GOP farm system is either deeply flawed to produce a guy like this and get him to the Senate, or it’s working perfectly, and I don’t know which one scares me more.
Mr. Hawley should be removed the Senate for sedition. He should be investigated to explore his connections to the insurrection. A similarly far-reaching investigation should explore which elected officials received funding from the hundreds of millions of dollars of Russian organized crime money illegally transferred into the country by agents of Vladimir Putin.
Donald Trump is continuing to spread lies and incite insurrection at a public appearance in Texas. He should be in jail. There is growing evidence of a conspiracy involving assets within the various agencies responsible for protecting Congress and the Capitol. The FBI is issuing warnings of threats in the capitols of all 50 states this weekend (WCVB reports that MA authorities say they have no evidence of planned armed violence). This is an organized insurrection, and there are strong indications that is an insurrection funded by Vladimir Putin.
The US should react accordingly.
I’ve never heard of Pelagius and I am not an expert on Augustine, but some of what Augustine has said doesn’t make sense to me. He essentially affirms killing in self-defense so the holy can survive and reseed The Word in the world. I think that is utter bullsh*t. Mormons have similarly rewritten the Bible to fit their politics. And, of course, there is Jefferson who chopped up his copy until it met his approval.
I think we would be well served by having religious debates, rather than political debates, in this country. Politics divide, faith unites. People running around self-righteously claiming to be holier than thou, in their interpretation of both the Constitution and the Bible, makes it impossible to come to a sound agreement when they avoid substantive discussion from the get-go. You would think what is good and what is evil would be simple to observe, but not in these times. From separating families and putting children in cages, to protesting and rioting during a pandemic, people can’t seem to find a strategy with a higher level of dignity and gentleness. The biggest problem with democracy is that it works so well: hypocrites elect hypocrites, and hypocrisy and denial are ubiquitous.
Really? Not in the world I’ve lived in for the last 68 years. Is “faith” uniting the Middle East? How about Asia? How about Ireland?
So far as I can tell “faith” has been responsible, directly or indirectly, for an enormous share of the blood that has been spilled during pretty much all of human history.
Is the “faith” of the Protestant Evangelicals who still worship Donald Trump uniting us? Has the “faith” of the ardent anti-abortionists brought us together? How about the “faith” of those who fervently believe that same-sex physical intimacy is a sin (and should be illegal)? Is Pat Robertson a unifying figure? How about Oral Roberts? The list goes on and on and on.
I suggest that agreeing that governance should be determined by facts, reason, and rationality is a necessary starting point. “Faith” explicitly undermines that agreement — by construction. The classic definition of “faith” is “belief in the absence of evidence”.
I’ve seen more than enough “faith”, thank you very much.
I think you hear what you expect to hear, not what I said. A discussion of faith is a discussion of the moral code. Politics, in contrast, is about power and people deciding for others. Democracy, in theory, is about a group deciding for themselves, but as a united body. Politics keep people divided over petty jealousies. This thread topic is proof of how petty jealousies exist, since it is based upon a wedge between public and private education. That is a fact, too. The purpose of faith and morality is to constrain our baser selves, whereas politics, as we know too well, encourages and invigorates that baseless.
To those evangicals, you mentioned, they never discuss theology or faith or morality. They only discuss the sins of others and politics and avoid setting moral standards of expectations which they fail to meet. Much like politicians they say “send me money and I will save you from your enemy.”
Faith has no enemies. Politics only has enemies, even making an enemy out of where they went to school.
I think here the difference is you are describing how things should work and Tom is describing how they do work.
Actually, I am pointing out how the micro is the macro. The hypocrisy of the biblethumpers in front of a clinic is on the same continuum of suggesting that people who go to a private school are automatically elitist (and perhaps presumably by extension wrong). Hypocrisy is hypocrisy. I’m not saying that these two events cause the same harm (and obviously the violence recounted is off the charts and fortunately exceptional) but every oak grows from an acorn.
We are here now, the statement was made now, so I responded now because that is where the reality lies now. We should always be able to make connections between the micro and the macro, or as you put, how things are versus how they should be. The practical and the theoretical, while very different, are also inseparable.
Where does the bias against public school or private school go? How does it get applied and to what consequence? When guilt by innuendo is acceptable, and more focus is on who said it rather than what was said, what tribalism will be the result? There are billions of reasons not to trust one another. Let’s not let this suggestion be one more. Let’s reverse course and remove the reasons to mistrust here and everywhere. The only way to move forward is to let go of our prejudices.
I’ve had to console heartbroken workers from a Planned Parenthood office on Beacon Street after a faith-driven anti-abortion extremist shot and killed his enemy — a 25 year old receptionist. The rector of my church at the time allowed them to use office space at the church so that they could stay open after the tragedy. That rector was dismissed by other men and women of “faith” on the vestry, who were unhappy that the rector failed to ask their permission. Have you had a similar experience?
I’ve had to pass through a mob of anti-abortion extremists in front of that same church in order to attend Palm Sunday services. I’ve had several dozen “faithful” yelling obscenities at myself, my wife, and my young children while we went to worship. It certainly seemed that they viewed us as enemies. Are you seriously trying to tell me that they were trying to unite us?
Do you call pushing, shoving, shouting obscenities, waving pictures of bloody babies, and so on a “discussion”?
I suggest that EVERY tribe has enemies. My read of the relevant anthropology is that the stark division between part-of and not-part-of is the very essence of tribal existence. It doesn’t matter whether the tribe is organized around faith, politics, or some sports team — it’s still a tribe.
I agree with you about politics. I think your commentary about faith is utterly divorced from actual human behavior. It certainly doesn’t appear that you’ve spent very many days near Planned Parenthood clinic in Coolidge Corner (when it was on Beacon Street) — those were not “discussion[s] of faith”.
In general, how people make connections between different things has more to do with their understanding of the world than their opinion on any one topic.
Case in point, this is a thread about private vs public education. (What I generally refer to as indoctrination or miseducation. It’s necessary, but a large part of one’s life is spent unlearning. Half of what we taught is a lie, and our education isn’t complete until we know which half).
So, how does faith fit into this? Well, the commandments say do not covet. And they say do not bear false witness.
Both fit this case. Ok, so you went to public school, but what you covet is private schooling. One is angry about what they could not have (whether they admit it to themselves or not). Second, they bear false witness through guilt by association that everyone who attends private schools are elitist snobs. There are elitist snobs, for sure, people can be overly proud about anything. They can be proud of their public education as well as their private education.
This is a failing of the individual, which they can easily outgrow, perhaps even unconsciously. Painting with a wide brush is stereotyping and is a form of bias and prejudice. That is the source of tribalism. How that tribalism and ‘holier than thou’ attitude gets expressed can be anything, from harassing others outside a climic (or defending them), to a simple blog post which serves to expose ones own failings rather than to illuminate problems or solutions.
In general, we are what we hate. That is the nature of hypocrisy. (See my Jan 1 post on We Must Never Surrender…To Hypocrisy). Republicans, in general, provide a plethora of examples, but by no means do they have a monopoly. Every enemy we create is self-defined. One can make people who attended private schools an enemy, one can make the rich or poor an enemy, or based on political party, race, country of origin or ethnicity, religion, etc. Is is pretty easy to make oneself superior to a self-defined enemy.
Faith says to love your enemy not because they are virtuous, but because in doing so one will see their own flaws. As we can see our own flaws, then we can see the flaws in others more easily and accurately. This is the meaning behind the passages about removing the log from your own eye first, before attempting removing splinters from others. (Matthew 7).
We are surrounded by seas of hypocrisy. The challenge is do our worlds increase hypocrisy or help to alleviate it? At the Congress last night many Republicans were calling for unity, and then repeated all the lies about the stolen election in their next breath. When tribes form based on lies, nothing good can come from it, which is why I suggested Democracy without Elections in my other blog post. One of the great flaws of democracy, not mentioned in that article, is that the greater the number of fears a candidate possesses, the more likely they will get elected. People trust those who fear the same things they fear. We don’t need to fear people who went to a private school. We want to eliminate the fears of one another, not increase them.
As far as the people lined up outside clinics goes, they are hypocrites armed with stones, acting as if they have never sinned. They are not practicing their faith, they have missed the lesson of the parable about the adulteress completely. Making it about political rights of the individual will never convince them that a medical procedure is not murder. Maybe abortion is a sin, but certainly no greater than their own self-righteousness. The woman who feels abandoned and afraid needs help with her isolation and fear, much like the adulteress who needs marriage counseling, not third party attacks. Likewise, those who attack others for their sins, most likely need help seeing their own. Faith spreads an understanding that we screwed up, must forgive ourselves, and helps others to see their errors. If it isn’t doing that, it’s not faith, it’s politics.
The fact that we have so many churches and faiths in this country, occupying opposite street corners in many cases, shows that we are a religious nation with little faith, the exact opposite of how it appears. Every structure a testament to hypocrisy, because they could have easily prayed together.
Let’s not forget that many private schools were started to spread the faith, and began before public education existed. As they have become more secularized the challenge of hypocrisy remains, and must be conquered by each successive generation.
Thanks for sharing that traumatizing experience Tom.
I’m sorry your family and church has to go through it, and very sorry for the loss of life. While my present parish is fairly progressive for an RC, I’ve heard plenty of anti abortion homilies in my day that could incite violence. It has to stop.
I think what he is trying to say is that the people you encountered are at least in his opinion not truly faithful, but rather posers.
I understand what he’s saying. I just think it’s mistaken.
TLDR — only those whose behavior and utterances fit within my envelope are “truly faithful”. That’s a very old canard.
My bottom line is that time and again those who commit outrageous and illegal acts cite their “faith” as why their acts are “protected”.
I’ve heard the argument all my life, and I continue to reject it.
I certainly hope that reasonable people agree that faith is not a justification for every possible act, especially violence. By that standard we’d have to forgive 9/11, perpetrated by “Muslims”.
Why wouldn’t we? A bunch of mostly children involved in suicide-murder led astray by the bias of their elders. Political murder is a very common thing. Should we hate them forever, or find a way across the seas of misunderstanding?
The perpetrators of 9/11 were not children, but they were not true Muslims either.
Well, that just opens up the whole purity thing at another level. Who is pure enough to judge what others are/should be/are not?
The way I look at is that truth exists and it is there for us to discover. It doesn’t change, we do. And, we take some many twisted paths to shed our mistakes, which makes us all unique. The more we communicate in earnest (rather than posturing and accusing or licking imaginary wounds), the more likely we are to improve together. Sometimes we are directly victimized by others, but we still have a choice in the nature of our response.
I don’t know enough about this particular religious dispute. Is Hawley a Dominionist?
The integralists are even scarier and at least one prominent HLS professor espouses it.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/new-integralists
In my view, religious extremism is the most clear and dangerous threat to civilization extant today. While I’m not disagreeing with the piece you quote (it is an interesting read), I fear it misses the point — it is the extremism itself that is the threat, whatever fifty cent word we attach to the specific ideology.
Whether Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, or anything else, people whose religious beliefs motivate them to kill and die are a threat to us.
That includes religious extremists who idolize the original text of the U.S. Constitution, by the way.
Sounds like they are heretics to both the Church and the State!
I could not possibly agree more, as a product of the Lynn Public Schools, who also later encountered such people at ivy institutions. You are spot on!
Separate from the players involved (Cruz, etc.), is this article just another form of anti-intellectualism? …being better by putting others down.
He will insist otherwise, but this diarist has a bit of a history of coming across as anti-formal education.
My charitable interpretation is anti-credentialism and anti-meritocracy, in so far as education level should not determine ones worth in the eyes of society or the economy. It’s a very Old Labour/Old Left way of looking at higher education and the economy, while Third Way/DLC/New Labour was all about expanding access to higher education to make more workers equipped for the information economy rather than questioning the moral foundations of an economy that values click accumulation over real world consumption and production.
My issue with John is that it’s unrealistic to go back to the Fordist model he pines for, my issue with his critics is we tried the Clinton/Blair/Obama approach and it left a lot of workers behind. Maybe Yang is right basic income (which Tom and John support) and a living wage is the best way to do this. Biden seems to be doing both, alleviating debt while also providing for job training and massive safety net expansions. I hope Biden gets to pass his transformative agenda.
Any chance we can persuade Paul Krugman to run for President?
I’ll cop to a bit of a credentialist bias myself. For me the two most eloquent defenses of education for all are the Massachusetts Constitution and Sam Seaborn’s monologue. One of my huge pet peeves is the obnoxious salaries professional athletes command, a key reason being that what they do hardly requires any formal education. I do believe both that everybody who works should be able to live off their wages and that in general the more schooling you have the more you should be able to make.
I think you are conflating education with credentialing. The elite colleges produce credentialed members of the managerial class. State schools produce some of that, but also everyone else. So to me I would not only agree with Sam and the state constitution, I would enforce it to guarantee higher ed at a public institution for any citizen of the Commonwealth. Now with online learning becoming normalized, we have a huge opportunity to expand rather than contract the seats at our public institutions and fully fund them. I do not see that mission conflicting with the mission to ensure those without higher education can still work, raise families, and retire with dignity. That is as much of the Democratic creed as the Jefferson/Whitman/Emerson/Seaborn call to educate all from the yeoman to the elite.
Andrew Yang proposed taxing donations to institutions with endowments over a billion dollars and using those funds and eliminating all the other rent seeking federal support given to private institutions to make free community or state college a reality for every American. I’m 100% in favor of that. What I am not in favor of is designing policies that assume everyone has or will have a degree or forgetting to design policies for those who don’t. Make it universal and opt in, and there will still be a need for the feds to fund vocational training to an extent they are not.
Tom often cited Germany and their workforce is simultaneously more skilled, better protected and unionized, and less educated compared to ours. And this is a nation that provides funding up to the PhD level, let along for BA’s as I propose. Their education system does a much better job training their workers while their social safety net does a much better job ensuring every worker has dignity.
It needs to be said that Germany also slots children into vocational versus academic futures at a very early age. While I was growing up in MD, there was a raging debate about similar “tracking”.
I like the idea that vocational education is offered as well as a more traditional academic route. I like the idea that publicly funded education is available up to and including a PhD (my wife got her PhD that way).
I am uncomfortable with setting that choice in concrete at age 15 or 16.
Isn’t vocational vs. academic more a matter of interest rather than ability? What I do favor based on personal experience is levelling as early as elementary school as long as you can change level from year to year based on performance.
From what I have read over the years, parents are a major factor in the rejection of trade schools for their children versus college. They see trade schools as where “kids who could not cut it or have behavioral issues wind up”. If their child wants to be a plumber, that means not being able to brag about where “Tracy was accepted!” and of course, no decal for the rear window of the BMW.
To me, it all traces to our obsession with college and our blatant credentialism, the last accepted “ism” that remains.
I mean, can anyone imagine a couple at a summer gathering in Wellesley bragging that “Tracy was accepted at Tecumseh Tech and starts her apprenticeship in September!”
But if Tracy was accepted at Brown and will be studying Egyptology and Assyriology, well that would be well received, as it should be, but no more than Tecumseh Tech.
My oldest child and her husband are professional chefs. They each attended culinary schools (CIA and Johnson & Wales in Providence).
In the restaurant world, people and families most definitely DO brag about apprenticeships with famous chefs, “staging” at famous restaurants, and attendance at top culinary schools. There are few workplaces as tough — especially on women — as a kitchen in a top-shelf restaurant. Hours are long, the work is tough, the pay sucks, working conditions are hideous, and there is zero job security.
Not all parents seek a “decal for the rear window of the BMW”. I did affix a decal for Boston University on the back of my Chrysler minivan when my chef began her freshman year (she got a BA in International Relations before beginning her career as a chef). It was still there when we replaced the vehicle a decade later. My other four were mortified at the prospect of such a tacky display on our part.
My youngest son is making his way as a farmer, after getting a bachelor’s degree from UMASS-Amherst. My oldest son persevered to get a BFA in photography from a “Tecumseh Tech” art school in New Hampshire. It was a difficult stretch for him, and he’s now doing very well. We are very proud of all our children.
The world I’ve experienced, especially through my children, is not nearly as bleak and shallow as the one you describe.
Your personal experiences are noted and welcomed. However, they do not match the majority of Americans, sadly, and that is the point.
I am not sure they are the majority of Americans, I think the majority of Americans want more trade schools. A majority of Americans still do not have a college degree after all. Certainly an ongoing issue in Revere and other Mystic Valley communities is the lack of slots at the Voke in Wakefield. There’s been real talk about reviving a Revere vocational option in the new high school to mitigate that.
Cambridge is a great example of another system that pioneered vocational education in this country (Rindge Tech, one of the first vocational schools in the country), abandoned it by the 1990’s, and successfully revived it in the early 2000’s. RSTA has a great auto tech, computer tech, culinary arts, and carpentry program. I think other schools are going in that direction and appreciate my principal highlighting the trades as a viable and valued destination in a recent state of the school address.
I agree that the majority of parents in the schools that are the feeders to the elite colleges that drive credentialism and the hereditary meritocracy Sandel warns against are in that bucket. They are also the Democratic donor class. Hence the tension between a more egalitarian approach to education and continuing to insist, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, that education alone is the great class leveler. It once was and can be again, but this requires genuine public investment in building more public colleges and vocational schools. To me, this is how we build back better.
You stumbled upon a bubble I live in by noting the majority of Americans don’t have a college degree. I’m pretty sure the overwhelming majority of adults I associate with do. That said, my own father attended some college but did not graduate, something I honestly sometimes forget because he has always held jobs (in the computer programming and data processing fields) which I would consider and assume to be “college jobs”.
My local school system has it’s own high school which is mostly “academic” and also feeds a regional vocational public high school. The ones I know who go to the latter may be influenced by parents as choices often are at that age, but they go more or less because they want to and not because they don’t think they can hack it at the high school, which of course as a public school also has to take everybody. Students from both schools do go on to post-secondary education. The vocational school teaches a lot of skills I can never hope to have. They may be hand skills as opposed to brain skills, but they are still skills.
Once tracked into the vocational slot, it is difficult or impossible to change. I think 9th grade is very young to be making such a decision, especially one based on the interest of the child.
in Finland’s highly successful educational system, 45% of the students choose a technical track, not an academic track, after completing their basic education.
Clearly, this is not the case in the USA and I see the cause as our bias against those without a “college degree”.
I think we live in a strange world. After centuries of an agrarian society, and very little physical, much less, class mobility, we now accept mobility as a given. But to your point on tracking, most decisions are made by the children, based on the best interpretation by the adults. I was always regarded as a daydreamer in school. Now in my sixties, I still dream. Were they right or wrong? I am just as comfortable with physical labor as management. I was self-employed most of my life, and did both, so I guess the shoe fit. But, when trying to transition to an employee, it was impossible. I was both overqualified and underqualified simultaneously. I have spent my life as a misfit, and had many a good laugh over it. My parents did their best, and we have done ours for our kids. We encouraged and supported their choices. We didn’t make them for them. There is no right answer in any of these challenges, just an attempt at order and to guide one another. Some people are too cynical, some too proud, some have lost faith, others naive, others blindly optimistic. Some get a lot of experience in an area that others are blind and ignorant of. Nothing is really equal because we come from such varied worlds. The challenge is to narrow the division of labor so it isn’t a division of understanding. And secondarily, if we are going to be mobile, we need to be easily mobile, and every job pay a satisfying wage. The real source of elitism is the wage disparity. We claim it is because of education, or the difficulty of the job, but that is utter BS. The gatekeepers embrace a status quo that should be challenged, but, of course, one is only allowed to be a gatekeeper if they embrace the status quo. Greed rules, whether by the rich who want to have more, or by the poor who want it for themselves. If education doesn’t enlighten, then it’s indoctrination. And the phrase, ‘they should have known better” could really be about that.
I’m trained as an electrical engineer (I have a BSEE), and I’ve been a programmer since 1982. My own training as an engineer has always led me to reject any claim that “software engineering” even exists — we do not have the rigorous scientific understanding of what software even is, never mind how it works, that is needed for actual engineering. When a civil engineer designs a bridge, she knows what forces are at play. She has a very good idea of the behavior of the materials she is using in the structure. She makes rigorous calculations of safety margins in order to minimize the chance of unexpected structural failure. When a modern bridge fails, it is almost always a result of engineering mistakes that can be (and nearly always are) identified by analysis after the failure. We have absolutely NO analogous theoretical framework for software.
I write all this because the commentary from this diarist on this topic often mirrors an analogous meme familiar to those of us from the world of technology. On one hand, there are organizations that place a very high premium on technical credentials from “prestigious” schools like MIT or CMU (my alma mater). There are other organizations that prefer to recruit from more proletarian sources. I performed my apprenticeship at Digital Equipment Corporation, an industry leader here in MA in 1974 when I started there. Digital was an “MIT company”.
Interestingly, by the time I joined Digital — envied throughout the industry for its superb engineering culture — our engineering community tended to value new graduates of schools like Worcester Polytechnic Institute above the others. We especially valued graduates who were returning military veterans (and therefore a few years older). We found that age, military discipline, and life experience tended to produce colleagues who were easier to work with, calmer under stress, and more able to rise to whatever challenges we faced. We found that teamwork was nearly always more important than individual accomplishment. In that culture, a prima donna that was unable to get along with his or her peers almost never lasted very long or accomplished very much.
After I left Digital, I frequently encountered colleagues and managers who took every opportunity to demean, attack, and criticize anybody who they viewed as “too high-falutin” (that usually meant anyone with a degree from MIT, and often anyone with a degree at all). I have known individuals and organizations where citing an authoritative source in support of a view during a technical exchange will hurt, rather than help, the exchange. I’ve heard phrases during meetings with recruiters for critical openings along the lines of “We’re looking for a Buick, not a Cadillac”. I most often encountered these latter situations as a consultant, brought in because the project was on the brink of abject failure.
I’ve heard the phrase “anti-meritocracy” before, and I think I understand it. For better or worse, I come from a culture where the market chooses some products over others. That choice almost never has anything to do with the credentials or “merit” of the organization that produced the product and everything to do with whether the product was perceived to be valuable or not. Like it or not, results matter. Facts are facts no matter how we feel about them.
I fear that we have become a culture that rejects the premise that objective reality exists and that some choices are better than others. Too many Americans refuse to admit that facts are facts — witness the majority of today’s Republicans who assert that Donald Trump won the election in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
I’m glad that there are places like MIT, CMU, Stanford and others where state-of-the-art research is expanding our knowledge of how the universe works and of what we can do with that knowledge. I’m also glad that there are places like WPI and UMASS-Amherst where men and women like my children who, for whatever reason, can feel more at home during their college years.
I think we need all of the above. I think America needs to open ALL of the above to ALL of our children. I think Democrats have always sought that inclusion, and that is an important aspect of why I’ve always called myself a Democrat.
I also think that there have always been demagogues like Scott Brown who insult the electorate by presuming that it will hear “Professor Warren” as an insult. I will always forcefully reject such demagoguery.
I enthusiastically agree with the diarist about most things. It appears that for all arguments here, we have ended up blazing similar trails for our children to follow (and that is arguably our most important contribution in this life). I profoundly disagree with the diarist about this specific issue.
I think the diarist and I agree that Ted Cruz is a despicable seditionist who is doing great harm to America. He should be removed from office. If an investigation shows that he has participated with insurrectionists, then he should be prosecuted.
His degrees and credentials have no bearing on the evil he has wrought.
I think you’re both much closer than you think. I think the thing we can all agree on is that the Ivy Leaguers pretending to be MAGA populists (including Donald Trump btw!) know they are full of it and goading people who don’t know better into doing their dirty work. Can’t shake the devils hand and say you’re only kidding.
The last Ivy Leaguer was a great president, the one before and after him sucked. The state school kid and his HBCU Vice President are going to do a great job. So what I’m hearing is that character matters more than credentials for a lot of jobs. Although we also should revalue expertise and objective data as a society to inform our policy and not feelings or gut checks. I think the best leaders do both, show the wisdom of the common man and listen to expert advice. Obama did this, Biden will do this.
Every Democratic president since (and including) FDR did this. It has been a characteristic trait of national Democratic leaders since the transformation of the Democratic Party in 1968.
Joe Biden is already doing this.
Speaking of Paul Krugman (above), don’t miss his column from today (“Four Rules That Should Guide Bidenomics” — https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/opinion/biden-economy.html):
This is incredibly sound advice, both economically and politically. I hope that the incoming administration follows it in spirit and letter.
Excellent stuff, and a lot of that mirrors the things John has also been animated about. I think the education debate is part of that. We need to make informed citizens and good employees, and I view my work through those prisms. I care less about whether you know when Waterloo happened and more that you know why it happened and can explain why in effective written and oral communication. Those are skills employers look for. Also figuring out what is a reliable or unremarkable source is how you get a BS detector as a voter. I imagine this is the case for other subjects as well.
“So what I’m hearing is that character matters more than credentials for a lot of jobs. “
Amen, brother. And in all areas of life.
Unfortunately, character is not much discussed. MLK said we should judge people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Maybe it is discussed, and I move in the wrong circles.
Besides the PTSD of the modern world, which seems to effect everyone, there are also an issues of self-esteem and pride which seem untethered. Hell is guarded by a three headed beast: the past, the present and the future. Seeing them in focus, and balanced, requires character.
I have much more faith that Biden will follow through and be the president for the working class. Obama, clearly, was not. Jet setting with Richard Branson after leaving office, buying a palatial vacation estate on Martha’s Vineyard and cashing in on his celebrity status with multimillion dollar book deal. Not exactly the life that Tom Joad could identify with. Tom might even wonder why President Obama bailed out the Wall Street Bankers but not the Main Street home owners. Of course, Obama and those bankers all went to Ivy League schools and we need them lead us, at least that was the explanation.
Time will tell. I don’t quibble with your assessment of Obama. Lipstick on Orwell is how I expected his tenure to unfold. And so it was. I read his book a year or two ago. Kind of a dullard, and Obamacare was clearly well formed, so he never listened to any objection, from any quarter. Similarly, I expected Trump to be a nightmare, but a great gift to the democrats. Biden is one lucky guy. And, I must admit, we are fortunate it’s not Warren or Bernie. As much as Trump was the wrong guy, Biden might be the right guy.
….but how different would the world be if Gore or Kerry won? Particularly Kerry. The numbers keep growing.