Democrats, at Convention, Bash the Ivy League

Plus, what the WSJ news articles are missing about Israel and Gaza

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, speaking at the Democratic National Convention, complained about Cornell University’s “corporate greed.”

Even the Democrats are starting to sour on “elite” higher education, if the first day of the Democratic National Convention is any indication.

Rep. Joyce Beatty, a Democrat of Ohio, said, “JD Vance likes to talk about how he's from Ohio but as soon as he could, he ran away to Yale and Silicon Valley, cozying up with billionaires.”

The president of the United Automobile Workers, Shawn Fain, talked about the UAW workers at Cornell University “fighting corporate greed.” By “corporate greed,” he meant Cornell.

And in the biographical video introducing the story of Kamala Harris’s youth and origins, the video described her as coming from “East Bay.” The word “Berkeley” was not uttered. It’s as if Harris is embarrassed to admit she is from there. People in the San Francisco area do talk about the “East Bay” as the region that includes Oakland, Berkeley, Piedmont, Orinda, Emeryville, and the like, but it was hard to avoid seeing it as in intentional effort to obscure Harris’s connection to the home of the flagship campus of the University of California, a place known for high-powered academics and also for its radical or “progressive” political leanings.

The Democrats may figure they already have the college professor and college-town vote locked up already with demographic trends (college-educated voters have been trending Democrat in recent years), student-loan forgiveness, abortion rights, and other policies. So their convention messaging is aimed at the same “working class” voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, and Wisconsin that Trump and Vance are trying to win over.

It is an interesting situation though. With Kennedy and Nixon the Democrats were the Ivy League intellectual types and the Republicans were not. Now the Republicans are running two Ivy League guys (Trump of Wharton and Vance of Yale Law, which Trump mentions first thing whenever Vance comes up for discussion) and the Democrats are running Harris (Howard and U.C. Hastings law) and Walz (Chadron State College, Minnesota State University, University of Houston).

Not many people on the Ivy League campuses will be confused—they’ll be voting for the Democrats. But it says something about the declining prestige and public image of these universities that the Democrats are joining in the public bashing of them rather than rising to their defense.