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We could ask the same about Sarah Jeong’s UC Berkeley B.A. and Harvard Law degrees. Years of Jeong’s racist tweets surfaced, creating a firestorm, shortly after the New York Times hired her as a writer and member of the editorial board. Responding to critics, the Times noted that it had reviewed Jeong’s social-media history before hiring her.
It is growing harder and harder to equate elite university branding with proof of knowledge. Barack Obama, another Harvard Law graduate, proved this depressing fact a number of times when he asserted that the Maldives were the Falklands, "corpsmen" was pronounced with a hard p, Austrians spoke a language called Austrian, there were 57 states, and Hawaii was in Asia.
Joe Biden, another law-school graduate, once stated that George W. Bush should have addressed the nation on television the way FDR did after the stock crash: "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television . . ." Biden apparently forgot that FDR was not president in 1929 and that TVs weren’t introduced to the public until 1939.
The Trump revolution is often attributed to the angry pushback of the deplorables and irredeemables and all those who lacked the knack for getting with the global agenda. Perhaps. But it was also a popular consensus that our experts in government, the university, and the media were not very expert, and the résumé and letters behind their names increasingly denoted nothing much at all.