Now that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has burst into the top tier of 2016 Republican hopefuls, he is being subjected to a predictable, well-coordinated attack from media liberals and Democratic Party apparatchiks. The goal, apparently, is to "define" the enemy as early as possible.
One of the more curious lines of attack concerns Walker's educational attainment, or, more precisely, lack thereof. Turns out the guy dropped out of Marquette University in his senior year to accept a job (with the Red Cross) and never went back to get his degree.
In a manner reminiscent of the hit job the New York Times did on Mitt Romney's school days during the 2012 campaign, the Washington Post recently ran an in-depth piece under the headline "As Scott Walker Mulls White House Bid, Questions Linger over College Exit." Picking up the cue, former chair of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean says that Walker's dropout status indicates that he is "unknowledgeable" and that "a lot of people are going to be worried about this."
About which we can make several observations.
First, there appears to be little correlation between a president's formal educational achievement and his performance in office.
Some of the most highly regarded presidents have had relatively meager credentials. The most important Republican of the post-World War II era, Ronald Reagan, graduated from tiny Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois. The two most important Democratic presidents, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, had no degree (Truman) and a degree from Southwest Texas State Teachers College (LBJ), respectively.
And then we have Richard Nixon (Duke Law), Jimmy Carter (U.S. Naval Academy), George W. Bush (Yale and Harvard MBA), and Barack Obama (Columbia and Harvard Law); a highly educated crew but not one suggesting a need to clear more space on Mount Rushmore.
That Woodrow Wilson is the only president to have earned a doctorate (in political science, of all things) might even lend support to Bill Buckley's claim that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the entire faculty of Harvard. Robert Merry, one of our pre-eminent scholars of the presidency, ranks Wilson as the third worst president in U.S. history, ahead of only James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce (he has Bush the younger as fourth worst).
A second related point is that Walker's critics are (deliberately) confusing educational credentials with intelligence and competence. The conspicuousness of Walker's lack of a college degree stems largely from the greater pervasiveness of such degrees these days compared to Harry Truman's era. But this also means that the "content" of a college degree, what it actually signifies in terms of intellectual prowess and achievement, has been considerably diluted since then as well.
Put simply, when so many more people go to college and get college degrees, college isn't what it used to be, and college degrees don't mean what they used to either.
Whatever advantage in purely utilitarian terms it confers in labor markets, possessing a college degree by itself hardly proves that a person should be filling out a Mensa application. Given all the data that has accumulated regarding grade inflation, reduced classroom rigor, and declining study time and knowledge on the part of college graduates, it might be safe to conclude that many of the degrees awarded these days probably aren't worth the ink they're printed on or, at a minimum, justified the time and monetary expenditure to obtain.
In Walker's case, nobody has suggested that he lacks intelligence (except Howard Dean, probably not a good judge on such matters), or has proven anything less than highly competent at governance, or has failed to demonstrate a sufficient grasp of public policy issues. In all of these respects, he might even compare favorably to the current, much better credentialed occupant of the oval office.
At the least, historian Michael Beschloss's claim that Obama "is the smartest guy to ever become president" might make us more skeptical of the idea that what we need is more smarts in the chief executive.
Finally, there is the political angle to be considered--do Democrats really want to disparage a Republican for not having what roughly 70 percent of adult American adults don't have (a college degree)?
After all, the most important trend in American politics over the past decade or so hasn't been the rise of a new Democratic majority based on a "coalition of the ascendant" (minorities and single women), but the Democrats' loss of the white working class, most of whom don't hold college degrees and would likely be offended by suggestions that someone else who doesn't should be disqualified from running for president for that reason.
The hunch, though, is that the inherent snobbishness of liberal elites will make them take the bait and try to make an issue of "Walker the dropout."
Which will then give even more members of the white working class who never went to college, let alone had the opportunity to drop out of one, even more reason to run away from what once was, a long time ago, the "party of the working class."
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 03/09/2015