Here’s what’s going to get Cruz in trouble with his fan base. It’s not the fact that he went to Princeton, and then on to Harvard Law.
It’s that he’s looking down on people who went to lesser schools.
Whether or not it’s based on truth, much of America - primarily conservative America - feels that the pointy-headed academic elites look down their noses at everyone else. If you got your degree from, say, East Tennessee State University, or if you didn’t get a college degree at all, most conservatives feel that this makes you a second-class citizen in the eyes of the libruls of the Ivy League.
Most Teabaggers, most Fox News watchers, most of Rush Limbaugh’s audience, is OK with voting for conservative politicians who got degrees from elite institutions. But they’ve got to at least pretend that not much of the experience, and especially not the elitism part, rubbed off on them.
But here Cruz is caught looking down his nose at people who went to college not just at the ETSUs of the world, but at everyone except those who went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton.
That’s gonna rankle with the people in the GOP grass roots whose support he needs to go anywhere. And considering his penchant for picking up enemies among his Congressional colleagues, I think Cruz can kiss his 2016 hopes goodbye.
But it will be fun watching him go down in flames.
Given the number of Republicans who’d like to stick a metaphorical shiv in Cruz’ back, I’m thinking that the chances that this story will get some serious circulation in GOP-land are pretty good.
His roommate, evidently. The quote is getting a fair bit of play in the political media. I saw the quote in four or five different places already. I just don’t think it will get much penetration into cable news or radio, in part because it’s a text quote from a GQ article, and in part because there’s no handy narrative for the Limbaugh’s and Hannity’s of the world to fit it into.
Is anyone claiming that Ted Cruz is ineligible? He was born in Canada, but his mother was an American. Given the nonsense about Obama’s birth, I wonder if Cruz will face similar challenges.
Oh, certainly. There are now people claiming that for all possible presidents. One of the arguments for why Obama is ineligible even though he was born in Hawaii would apply equally to Cruz.
There are also people who believe Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are ineligible, as they each had a foreign (in the birthers’ eyes) parent. They were genuine fringe and didn’t get any airtime in 2012, but they existed.
[QUOTE=RTFirefly’s link]
As a law student at Harvard, he refused to study with anyone who hadn’t been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Says Damon Watson, one of Cruz’s law-school roommates: “He said he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown.”
[/QUOTE]
Demonstrating that there’s a Simpsons quote for every occasion:
Skinner: Lisa, the president of Harvard would like to see you.
Pres.: Nasty business, that zero. Naturally, Harvard’s doors are now closed to you, but I’ll pass your file along to … Brown.
Skinner: Mmmm, Brown. Heckuva school. Weren’t you at Brown, Otto?
Cruz’s snobbery is pretty ridiculous. Sure, the Ivies are very selective, but there’s a limit to the correlation between a student’s high school performance (which gets him into Harvard) and his usefulness as a study partner in law school. Good study partners are smart and hard-working, like good high school students, but they also have to complement your own strengths and weaknesses, which Harvard doesn’t select for, unless you’re an idiot and are trying to make up for everything.
OK, maybe Cruz had a point.
I also suspect, but cannot prove, that the actual quality of undergraduate education doesn’t correlate at all with the reputation of the school, which is based mostly on the quality of research by the faculty; most undergrads aren’t going to get within shouting distance of the Nobel Prize winners. That could be a factor too, though probably the quality of undergraduate education doesn’t correlate strongly with good study partners either.
For a guy who is suppose to be smart, that seems like a pretty dumb thing to do. Even if he thought he was applying the right criteria, being open about it just creates needless hostility.
Also, most CEOs aren’t from the Ivies: they are from state schools. Here’s a table from the report *Leading CEOs: A Statistical Snapshot of S&P 500 Leaders *:
Most Common Undergraduate Universities (by S&P 500 category)
S&P 500 Group Most Common University
1-100 Harvard, Stanford, Yale, U. of North Carolina - 3% each
101-200 Harvard, Stanford – 4% each
201-300 Rutgers – 4%
301-400 U. of Wisconsin – 4%
401-500 U. of Wisconsin – 4%
Not the best dataset, but I’ll note that Princeton is nowhere in the list.
Here’s an analysis that pools graduate and undergraduate degrees for Fortune 500 CEOs. Yes, Harvard leads the list. No, Princeton is not on the top 10:
Institution Total degrees Undergraduate degrees M.B.A.'s Other graduate degrees U.S. News undergraduate rank U.S. News business school rank
Harvard University 65 11 40 14 1 1
Stanford University 27 11 10 6 5 1
University of Pennsylvania 24 7 13 4 5 3
Columbia University 18 3 4 11 4 8
University of Michigan—Ann Arbor 14 6 5 3 28 13
University of Notre Dame 14 10 1 3 19 25
University of Virginia 14 4 4 6 25 13
Cornell University 13 8 3 2 15 16
Dartmouth College 12 9 3 0 11 9
Indiana University—Bloomington 11 5 6 0 75 23
Northwestern University 11 2 6 3 12 4
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey—New Brunswick 11 5 3 3 68 63
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 10 3 0 7 5 4
Don’t worry about the numbers: just note that neither Princeton nor Yale are in the top 13 and only 5 of 13 are Ivy League anyway.