Education Does Not Make a Leader
By Katmandu2 on October 5, 2008 at 9:00 AM in Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Education, George Bush, Jimmy Carter, John McCain, Legislative Achievements, Patriotism, Qualifications
A recent e-mail making the rounds suggests that Barack Obama’s superior education and intelligence mandates his choice as president over John McCain.
There are many things wrongs with using a single category as a decisional tool for a job so complicated as the presidency. Surely one’s experience, character, judgment displayed in the past, leadership qualities, legislative accomplishment, patriotism, etc., should be considered.
Paper accomplishment has its limits. After all, Ted Kaczynski attended Harvard and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Michigan – but he was a destructive individual. Bill Gates, famous as an innovator and now a humanitarian, was in college only briefly. And many of us have had college professors who we would not entrust with picking up our newspaper from the driveway while we were away on vacation.
But let’s look anyway at the single variable of educational pedigree as a predictor of presidential performance. (Aside: McCain’s defenders may point out that McCain’s father and grandfather made four star admiral, though they were very poor Naval Academy students.)
Who were the great presidents and who were the failures? Numerous polls of historians show a fair consensus, with some large deviations for recent presidents, as might be expected. I chose the most recent polls listed at Wikipedia’s Historical Rankings of U.S. Presidents, which have the advantage of the most coverage, but I looked at other listed polls when recent polls showed wide variation. I am not making a statistical comparison; changing standards of education over time make that a questionable task (as education has become more formalized over time). And to keep this at readable length, I have omitted many qualifications on my analysis. So here goes –
Among the top ten presidents, Lincoln’s formal education consisted of about 18 months of schooling; he was largely self-educated. Washington may have attended a school near his home for the first few years. He was not taught Latin or Greek, as was common among the “educated” of the time, and never learned a foreign language. Nor did he attend college (Harvard, WM. & Mary, Yale and Princeton were available). His formal education ended around the age of 15.
Getting to the modern era, where paper degrees supposedly are a surrogate for intelligence, Truman (whose standing has risen to #7 in the polls) did not earn a college degree. Reagan (whose ranking, controversially, varies from 6 to 16) graduated from an institution of little note — Eureka College.
Eisenhower, now consistently ranked in the top ten, finished in the upper half of his class at the Military Academy, but was routinely criticized during the 1950’s as being not intellectual or well read.
On the other hand, the two Roosevelts, members of the highest echelons of America’s upper class, were very well educated. Wilson was perhaps the best educated president, and often ranks in the top ten, but his star is diminishing as historians place his imperialist foreign policy, his racism (he reinstituted segregation into the federal government) and sexism (he tried to have a leading suffragette committed to an insane asylum, and countenanced the brutal beating and prison torture of suffragette demonstrators), and his odious personal beliefs (e.g., he was a eugenicist) into modern perspective. Grover Cleveland, whose rankings vary from 8th to 20th, did not attend college.
Middling presidents (those ranking in the 20’s) include Hayes, who was first in his class at Kenyon College and who completed Harvard Law in two years. He is right now our only Harvard Law School graduate.
Bill Clinton (underrated in the polls, IMHO) went to Georgetown’s elite Foreign Service School, where he was Phi Beta Kappa. He studied at Oxford under a Rhodes Scholarship, and graduated from Yale Law School.
Taft (20th) graduated second from his Yale class, then got a law degree from Cincinnati. John Q. Adams (25th) went to Harvard. So, the middle of the pack has a number of well educated persons. (The famously well-read and educated John Kennedy with time has seen his rankings drop, to between 14 and 18.)
Now the fun part — the bottom of the rankings, and bowing to current popular opinion, let us start off by noting that though a mediocre student, George W. Bush attended Phillips Academy, Yale University, and has an MBA from Harvard. A perennial in the loser category, James Buchanan (ranked 40th), graduated from Dickinson College with honors, then studied law. Franklin Pierce (38th) finished third in his class at Bowdoin, then attended an unnamed law school.
Andrew Johnson (37th) was self-taught, a point for the degree=excellence school, but John Tyler (35th) graduated from the prestigious Wm. & Mary, then read for the law.
Jimmy Carter (34th) attended Georgia Tech before receiving an appointment to the United States Naval Academy where he received a physics degree in 1946. Carter finished a high 59th out of his Academy class of 820. Richard Nixon (32nd) was a Duke Law School graduate.
Hoover (31st) had a geology degree from Stanford, later becoming a mining engineer. Gerald Ford (28th) had a University of Michigan degree in political science and economics; at Yale Law he graduated in the top 25 percent of his class.
Again, this is a simplified analysis, but the proposition that academic achievement equates with expected presidential performance is so demonstrably false that a more rigorous analysis is unnecessary.
As Mark Twain said – “Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.”
by Ronald Scott
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