Piled Higher and Deeper

My family never had much truck with education.

My father, a successful man, graduated from high school and managed a year of seminary before family circumstances forced him to return home and help in his father's gas station. Shortly after that, he married the woman who would become my mother eight months and twenty-eight days later. She was an RN from back before college was required for that credential, and she never attended one.

Among their seven children, all unusually bright and articulate, there was exactly one four-year degree, a bachelor's in accounting awarded to my immediate junior, Stephanie, who is no longer with us. My own formal education ended with high school. My personal commitment to that education really ended after 8th grade: I attended an excellent small Catholic grade school in New York State and a public high school in rural New Mexico that was so mediocre that, years later, the Economist magazine actually mentioned it as an example of a dysfunctional American high school.

I married a woman who returned to college as a non-traditional student and earned a BS in Educational Psychology, which may have been (but probably wasn't) useful in the homeschooling of our six kids. Among those six children are seven or eight degrees, but they're unequally distributed: three of them have no degrees at all. There is not a Ph.D. in the bunch.

My father had a low opinion of the value of a Doctorate, an opinion that I, for better or worse and to a lesser degree, share. I'm wary of that anti-academia bias in myself: a lot of very well-educated people are actually pretty smart. I know that. I also know that some of the worst ideas come from some of the most educated people; indeed, some ideas are so preposterously bad that one almost has to have experienced a lot of formal education in order to embrace them. Buckley thought the same way, of course, as evidenced by his famous quip about the faculty of Harvard.

That brings me to the point of this post, which is that the only two US presidents to have received Doctorate degrees happen to be among our very worst.

The first was President Woodrow Wilson, who received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins after doing his undergraduate studies at Princeton. It is to this very educated man and his championing of executive overreach that we owe a debt of gratitude for the modern deep state.

The other is, of course, President Jill Biden, who received her Ed. D. from the University of Delaware, after having received undergraduate instruction there and elsewhere.

Is it any mystery that the Biden administration was an unmitigated disaster of progressive overreach, given that an over-educated school teacher with a Doctorate in something called "educational leadership" effectively sat at the helm?

No. No, it is not.