The one obvious clue that President Joe Biden did notattend an Ivy League University is this: When busted for plagiarism, Biden suffered real-world consequences. In a 1987 Democratic primary debate, while very much a viable candidate, Biden famously lifted a passage from a speech by Neil Kinnock, the former leader of Britain’s Labour Party, and tried to pass it off as his own.
The Michael Dukakis campaign caught the theft, and the media, still in their journalism phase, went digging for more purloined pearls of Biden wisdom. They were not hard to find. Under pressure, Biden had to confess that he had plagiarized a paper while in law school — the Syracuse University Law School, that is — and he was out of the presidential race even before the corn stalks withered in Iowa.
As Biden learned the hard way, a Syracuse University affiliation offers no immunity to the plagiarism bug. Harvard’s does. Yale’s does. And Princeton’s will likely do the same. But even the Ivy schools require the individual to boost his/her/their natural Ivy immunity with renewable doses of progressive toxins.
No Ivy Leaguer has done more to earn his immunity than “History’s Attack Dog,” Princeton University professor Kevin Kruse. In addition to his more prosaic tasks at Princeton, Kruse has assumed the responsibility of patrolling the daily news. “Online,” observes Emma Pettit in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “the historian specializes in serialized posts, called threads, that lend historical context to breaking news or skewer a version of history spouted by right-wing agitators.” It is the skewering that has netted Kruse his 502,000 followers on Twitter.
In May 2017, Kruse took particular pleasure in slicing and dicing former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke. Clarke set himself up for the kill by announcing his likely appointment as assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security under President Donald Trump. As a conservative and an African American, he made a tempting target for leftists eager to show Blacks the consequences of thinking for themselves.
Andrew Kaczynski of CNN’s KFile took the first stab at Clarke’s reputation, accusing him of having “plagiarized portions of his master’s thesis on homeland security.” This was a low blow. A police officer by profession, Clarke never pretended to be a scholar. In fact, he didn’t graduate from college until he was 43 and only then through a continuing education program. The mistakes he made on the thesis were amateurish, the sort one routinely sees on papers at this level. Still, compared to Dr. Jill Biden’s botch of a doctoral dissertation, Clarke’s thesis was downright Aristotelian.
Compelled to review the two cases, then-Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan and then-Harvard President Larry Summers dithered for months before finally declaring the offenses of their legal luminaries “inadvertent.” At this level, “inadvertent” was no worthier an excuse for Tribe and Ogletree than it had been for Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Nonetheless, it provided cover enough to allow the media to look the other way. (READ MORE from Jack Cashill: ‘Roots,’ ‘Dreams,’ and the Unequal Punishment of Fraud)
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Related: Ivy League Summary: Tax Break Subsidies And Government Payments: “Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.”