“The smart people will never be on our side,” announced Rick Santorum in his last run for the presidency; he attacked Obama’s hope to see all Americans attend university as “snobbery.” Obama, Santorum’s side said again and again, was an “intellectual snob.”
Sarah Palin led the charge, but several candidates followed in relentlessly calling Obama “professor.” Another high-profile Republican, Scott Brown, “consistently addressed [Elizabeth] Warren as ‘professor’” in their debates and in his speeches. Palin, in her first speech after being named a candidate for vice-president, said “we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.”
Apparently a lot of voters (not enough – all of the people I’ve just cited lost) despise universities because that’s where the liberals and the atheists roam. The very words “professor” and “university” are red meat to them.
That’s why Donald Trump has some splainin to do. He not only taught at a university; he founded a university. He put his name on a university: Trump University. Here’s his Chairman’s Welcome – complete with a British voice-over (Trump’s uber-snobby Anglo thing reappears in the symbol of Trump University – a lion rampant, drawn from British heraldry) which praises him as an “educator,” a graduate of “prestigious schools,” and the “author of many books.” Trump says, “I like academic life.”
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On the positive side of the ledger, Trump has been sued for having opened Trump U. This allows him to tell his constituency that it was all a big mistake.
June 26th, 2015 at 10:02AM
maybe an issue, the crackers have a kind of love hate relationship with the prestige of education, especially with business schools.
speaking of the business of higher-ed:
http://www.omaha.com/news/crime/nearly-alcohol-traffic-arrests-during-cws/article_4f4d400c-1bba-11e5-a905-cb122577e382.html