Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., has performed well in the first few contests of the Democratic primary season. Supporters of other candidates and commentators at large have found a lot of reasons to dislike Buttigieg — his rhetoric, his record, and so on. But, among professors on Twitter and media personnel, no motive seems to be as widespread as this: He reminds them of someone they hated in college. This provides a good excuse for critics to mention all sorts of interesting things about themselves.
One popular Twitter user tweeted some months ago: “Pete Buttigieg reminds me of every reason I decided not to apply to Harvard in spite of being both a legacy and a recruited athlete.” (Her bio mentions that she attended Princeton.) A fellow Harvard graduate now working at a prestigious magazine and lecturing at Yale commented on a specific essay about Buttigieg: “My favorite part of this Buttigieg Bildungsprofil is the throwaway paragraph about taking a holiday from McKinsey to go to Somaliland as a tourist in 2008, and talking to officials there as part of his vacation. I went there in 2002, but instead of talking to officials I performed Tuvan throat-singing on Radio Hargeisa, and instead of writing about it for the IHT, I wrote for a magazine published only in Basque. Here you see why Mayor Pete summitted [sic] the meritocracy ziggurat and I did not.” Tuvan throat-singing and writing fluency in Basque — talk about a throwaway paragraph!
His critics seem interested in reminding us that they’ve had their own successes.
A New Yorker writer and Smith College graduate wrote: “It’s weird that Mayor Pete went to Harvard because he’s got real strong ‘salutatorian at Duke’ energy.” There’s a burn: a mere Duke man, and a mere salutatorian! One might multiply examples ad infinitum. Criticism of Buttigieg sure provides a great opportunity to boast about just about anything: athletic prowess, proficiency in foreign languages, ability to distinguish among a variety of elite universities, proximity to a high number of Harvard graduates, and so on. No wonder it’s becoming such a fun pastime.
It’s not just journalists and Twitter personalities who find Buttigieg redolent of their old campus insecurities. A George Washington University professor tweeted in December: “I’m gonna let you in on a little secret: every college professor has had a student in class who acts like Pete Buttigieg on stage tonight. We secretly can’t stand that student.” A University of Washington professor replied: “Every few quarters I have a Liz Warren student and she is a joy. She shows up to office hours with a color coded binder and a list of starting questions.” The Buttigieg “type” is so overwhelming and oppressive that professors resent any whiff of it they catch from the front of their lecture halls.
Why does Buttigieg evoke such strong higher-ed associations? He’s certainly not unique among presidential candidates. Current front-runner Bernie Sanders went to the University of Chicago, where he was arrested for protesting de facto segregation in city schools. Michael Bloomberg attended the Johns Hopkins University and then Harvard Business School. George W. Bush had also gone to business school at Harvard, after going to college at Yale, where his father had gone, as did his 2004 opponent, John Kerry. Elizabeth Warren taught at Harvard Law; Barack Obama taught law at Chicago. Cory Booker went to Stanford, then to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, then to Yale for law school; Michael Bennet and Amy Klobuchar also went to Yale, which is, of course, where Bill and Hillary Clinton met. And so on.
But Buttigieg in particular reminds people of college both because of something about Buttigieg and because of something about the people he upsets so much. He is certainly schoolboyish: the way he seems to have learned a bunch of different languages up to a certain level, the way he answered a Telemundo reporter asking the name of the president of Mexico as though he were being quizzed by a professor: “President López Obrador, I hope.” And yet, he was the only one who gave the right answer! To both his supporters and his detractors, he seems like an overeager student: not just a nerd, not just intellectually curious, but someone who’ll do the extra credit that will garner him some points somewhere.
The more important factor, though, is the sociological profile of his critics. Usually hailing from prestigious private colleges themselves, and now ensconced at various kinds of elite jobs in journalism, academe, or other high-status fields, their distaste arises from an odd brew of identification, resentment, and projection. It’s as if they’d like to go back to the time when points were assigned so clearly, when they got into maybe slightly worse schools or got maybe slightly worse grades or slightly worse internships than the jerks like Buttigieg, and see how they would measure up now. On the one hand, this guy who bested virtually everyone at the games of college admissions and undergraduate performance now suffers from an embarrassing air of having never moved past the seminar room. On the other hand, his critics seem interested in reminding us that they’ve had their own successes, that they move in the same circles, that there’s another measuring stick by which they’re ahead of him (and ahead of so many of the rest of us, too, of course) — mastery of Tuvan throat-singing, for instance. Everyone seems to want to disparage a certain kind of status game while simultaneously embracing a new way to play it.
Perhaps it speaks poorly of higher education that the candidate who most reminds us of it does so through seemingly superficial accomplishments, by-the-book intellectual achievements, hoop-jumping, and point-scoring. But by reminding us of their own standing in these games, Buttigieg’s critics remind us also how comfortable it can be to know where one stands. Members of the well-educated, largely progressive professional class usually don’t give up the prestige racket; they just find its spoils harder to rank. Most people at your 10- or 20-year high-school reunion will know you’re claiming success when you say you went to an Ivy League school. But working at a prestigious magazine or nonprofit — or even the right law firm or hedge fund? That’s a different story.
Critiques of “meritocracy” have gained a lot of currency among precisely the group of commentators most allergic to Buttigieg. But these same critics go out of their way to describe in great detail how they’ve been there, in these very prestigious places, as they tell you how they’re built all wrong. The great thing about being a traitor to your class, as they call it, is that you get to be both rich and virtuous. What could be better? It’s worth asking whether these supposed anti-meritocrats — who all went to the best schools and who inevitably only work at companies, nonprofits, and publications whose names you’d recognize, staffed by fellow top-college graduates — are in fact more obsessed with the prestige system than the people they claim to criticize. When you seem to have a different insult tailor-made for each elite American institution of higher learning, when you say you’ve failed in the meritocratic rat race after having graduated from one Ivy League institution to teach at another, it starts to seem as though prestige is your own obsession.
And isn’t there something in the very inappropriateness and intimacy of the disdain with which these journalists and professors inveigh against Buttigieg that speaks well of college? That all these different sorts of people have to sit next to each other, competing against each other for grades and internships and romantic partners, before the great sorting mechanisms of adulthood push the future McKinsey consultants to one corner, the future magazine writers to another, and so on? What an institution — and no wonder the rivalries it engenders remain so tender, so primal, even when we’re all grown up and playing at running the world.