The Deflation of the Academic Brand

Here is Victor Davis Hanson rightfully deriding the academic “brand”:

When self-professed experts are wrong over and over, for decades, what’s the value of a university degree?

Trumpism is sometimes derided as an updated know-nothingism that rejects expertise and the input of credentialed expertise. Supposedly, professionals who could now save us tragically have their talent untapped as they sit idle at the Council of Foreign Relations, the economics Department at Harvard, or in the offices of the Brookings Institution — even as Trump’s wheelers and dealers crash and burn, too proud, too smelly, or too ignorant to call in their betters to come in and save Trump from himself.

But do the degreed classes, at least outside math, the sciences, engineering, and medicine, merit such esteem anymore?

Anthony Scaramucci’s Harvard Law degree seemed no guarantee of the Mooch’s circumspection, sobriety, or good judgement.

Bruce Ohr’s similar degree did not ensure either common sense or simple ethics. Or, on the contrary, perhaps at Harvard he learned that progressive ends justify any means necessary to obtain them. In any case, Ohr thought there was nothing wrong in keeping quiet about his spouse’s work on the discredited Steele dossier, or indeed in aiding and abetting the seeding of it, while he was the fourth-ranking official at Trump’s Department of Justice.

The Mueller team — along with a group of now disgraced, reassigned, and retired officers at the top echelons of the FBI, the descent of ex-CIA head John Brennan and ex-DIA chief James Clapper into caricature, the shenanigans of unmaskings and leaking at the Obama National Security Council, the warping of the FISA courts, the disingenuous operatives at Fusion GPS, and the implantation of informants into the Trump campaign — recalls the arrogant self-righteousness of the degreed geniuses who took us into Vietnam.

But this time around, the “best and brightest” (remember the media’s hagiographic praise of Mueller’s “all-stars” and “dream team”) would save us from Trump — much as John F. Kennedy’s and Lyndon Johnson’s whiz kids would deliver us from the North Vietnamese.

Read more: National Review