Joe Biden should run against the Ivy League
One evening many years ago, when his sons were in grade school, Joe Biden was sitting around with old friends in a backyard in his home town of Wilmington, Delaware. He startled the group by asking one of them where he planned to send his own child to college. The boy was just eight, protested one of the friends. Another observed there were plenty of good universities.
“Lemme tell you guys something,” Mr Biden replied with sudden intensity, according to “What It Takes”, by Richard Ben Cramer. “There’s a river of power that flows through this country.” Most people did not even know about this river, while others could only stand by its banks and gawk. But a few Americans, Mr Biden continued, got to swim in the river of power their whole lives, and go wherever they wanted to. “And that river”, he concluded, “flows from the Ivy League.”
Mr Biden, a mediocre student at the University of Delaware and Syracuse University College of Law, has always exhibited a mix of reverence and disdain for America’s educated elite and the system that credentials them. He has surrounded himself with graduates of the Ivy League—and did indeed send his sons to such schools, one for college and the other for law school—but he has boasted about going to a state university himself. Since his first campaign for Senate, in 1972, he has prided himself on resisting the pull of progressive orthodoxy he associated with elites from Harvard.
2023-07-12 15:33:58
Post from www.economist.com
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