Tag: Ivy League

The Decline in Standards

By Stephen Macaulay

Marco Rubio did not attend an Ivy League school. After graduating from South Miami Senior High School, he went northwest, to Missouri, where he spent a year at Tarkio College, as he received a football scholarship. Then it was back to Florida, Gainesville, where he attended what was then Santa Fe Community College. That was followed by attendance at the University of Florida, where he received a BA in political science in 1993. Then he attended the University of Miami School of Law in 1996.

Using what seems to be the communication tool of choice for Trump wannabes, Twitter, Rubio tweeted out that Joe Biden’s cabinet nominees “went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumes, attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline.”

There’s a lot to break down there. And we’ll give Rubio the benefit of the doubt that he’s not simply annoyed that he didn’t make that league.

But let’s start with the conclusion. That America is in decline. And who has been the president for the past four years? Who has failed to rally the American public to do the right things to stop the coronavirus in the way that a leader who has lost more than a quarter million of his people would? Whose lack of response has led to not only high rates of unemployment right now, but what is likely to get worse as the fall turns to winter. . .and the funding and restrictions against evictions run out?

Oh, and who had control of the Senate?

If America is declining, we can see where it started. And would it have been better to reinforce that decline by re-electing the person who has gotten the proverbial ball rolling?

Are manners now a thing of the past, politeness something that is to be demeaned?

If you are a parent and have a high school student, odds are it would be your fondest dream for them to attend an Ivy League school. You would be so very proud if they can achieve a strong resume. It would be something to brag about if they were able to attend the right conferences. And regardless of all of that, you want them to be polite and orderly.

When people start calling out other people for being smart and good mannered, there is evidently decline.

A decline in standards.

And we can clearly identify when that started: June 16, 2015.

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Culture Wars Go to College

By Todd Lassa

A bit like an NCAA football rivalry, the Culture Wars have stumbled onto the battlefield of the college and university alumni of presidential candidates’ staff and cabinet. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., fired an early shot as the former vice president began announcing his choices to staff the White House. Rubio expressed concern about people who received degrees from Ivy League schools, presumably in an effort to appeal to the Trump wing, as one of Trump’s biggest demographic constituencies consisted of non-college educated white males.*

Then the Biden transition team launched a trial balloon, or canary in the Senate coalmine if you will with Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, nominated to become director of the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden was a longtime confidant of Hillary Clinton tipped to potentially be her chief of staff, background that has drawn some opposition from supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who believe she helped torpedo his 2016 Democratic nomination bid. When Trump won instead, she took to Twitter with the “#Resistance” hashtag. Since Biden announced his intention to nominate her, she has deleted more than 1,000 tweets from over the last four years, according to the New York Post.

Her tweets’ alleged nastiness has drawn the ire of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, both Republicans, though one might presume that as far as Rubio is concerned, she won’t be among the “polite & orderly caretakers” of the nation’s decline. 

What’s more, Tanden has a law degree from Yale.

The other intended cabinet are mostly ivy leaguers. They include Ron Klain (chief of staff; Georgetown University and Harvard Law), Janet Yellen (Treasury; Pembroke College of Brown University and Yale), Antony Blinken (State; Harvard and Columbia), John Kerry (special envoy for climate; Yale, though he had “low grades”), Alejandro Mayorkas (Homeland Security; University of California-Berkeley and Loyola Law), Linda Thomas-Greenfield (United Nations ambassador; Louisiana State and University of Wisconsin-Madison, a “public ivy”) and Jake Sullivan (national security advisor; Yale). [Hat tip to Wikipedia and New York magazine’s Intelligencer.]

Biden will be the first non-Ivy grad to take the White House since Ronald Reagan in 1980 and ’84. He attended the University of Delaware and Syracuse University for law. Trump is an Ivy League grad with an economics degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Reagan? Eureka College. According to Lou Cannon writing in a piece for the UVA Miller Center (https://millercenter.org/president/reagan/life-before-the-presidency) “He majored in economics but was an indifferent student, graduating with a "C" average in 1932.”

Sounds like Rubio’s kind of guy.

*It should be noted that Rubio (along with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson) is considered a lead Republican candidate for president in 2024, assuming the party remains centered on its Trump populist wing and that no members of the outgoing president’s family—Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner—announce they’re running (which could explain the rumored pre-emptive pardons). To say nothing of Trump himself announcing another run in ’24 (which could also explain the rumored self-pardon).

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