Scott Walker Didn’t Finish College

And…?

I, for one, am glad Howard Dean went to medical school before becoming a doctor. But most liberal arts degrees are overrated as a precondition for success and they are indisputably overpriced — hence the current student loan crisis. In the Internet era, there are many, many new ways to become educated. This sudden suspicion of Scott Walker seems a product of the fact that higher education is a world that liberals control utterly, and the entire economic model supporting it is on the verge of collapse.

Also, it seems to be the only “dirt” they can find on him.

52 thoughts on “Scott Walker Didn’t Finish College”

  1. The only reason anyone cares about college degrees today is that HR people don’t want to get in trouble for discrimination. They need credentials they can point to.
    I recently took online classes, for free, from MIT, Johns Hopkins, and Caltech. The professors were very much involved in helping us in the homework forums, and in two of them I was offered a “teaching assistant” position (also unpaid) for the next iteration of the class. Who in his right mind would pay money for very expensive, vastly inferior classes from Wherever State Univ.?

    Except that HR people need the credential, not what you know.
    It isn’t going to last much longer. Already many of the online courses are offering options at small fees to get official credit.

  2. Let’s see, Scott Walker or a Harvard trained constitutional scholar…

    Living in an area with an overabundance of college educated people, I’ve noticed that only one percent has any insight into our nation’s history and its philosophical traditions. The rest are all trained in specialties with only the required general eds as their liberal arts education.

    They picked up a liberal bias by osmosis because, at 18 to 21 years old, they believed the person in front of the classroom actually knew what they were talking about. Ask any tech in the sciences or engineering a political question and the majority will give you a knee jerk response pulled from some distant memory of a bearded prof or pissed off feminist pontificating on social justice.

    Because these folks in tech are bright, it’s always worthwhile to question their assumptions. It doesn’t take much to show how illogically trained they were in political/economic theory.

    1. “Let’s see, Scott Walker or a Harvard trained constitutional scholar…”

      Walker’s best defense is the performance of other recent Presidents who attended our elite institutions.

      1. The last four presidents are all graduates of Yale and Harvard. The best president of my lifetime (born in 1957) graduated from Eureka College. Two of the four presidents on Mount Rushmore never graduated college.

  3. I don’t care whether Walker finished college. But it is amusing to hear the same people who thought it was vital that Obama release his college transcripts now insist that Walker’s educational record is no big deal.

    1. Isn’t it amazing that we already know more about Walker’s college years than we do about Obama’s? Walker isn’t even a nominee or the President.

    2. It’s amusing to watch you change the subject. Obama never released his transcripts and the press never hounded him like they did with republicans.

      1. You are imagining things. Name one Republican presidential candidate who’s released his college transcript in response to press “hounding”.

    3. But it is amusing to hear the same people who thought it was vital that Obama release his college transcripts now insist that Walker’s educational record is no big deal.

      You know, it’s not too late for Obama to release his college transcripts. It’ll be interesting to see if there really was anything to hide in there. I think there was.

    4. “But it is amusing to hear the same people who thought it was vital that Obama release his college transcripts now insist that Walker’s educational record is no big deal.”

      You REALLY cannot see the difference?

      Really?

      Are you that stupid or just willfully obtuse?

      1. Jim is testimony to the fact that a college education does not automatically impart critical thinking skills.

    5. The reason for wanting Obama’s educational records is because it was an actual credential offered as a reason to elect him president in 2008.

      You will recall he had no actual experience so his academic performance was offered as evidence of his supreme suitability.

      Looking back, I imagine people would be stunned that such a thing could happen. Maybe even deny it since it is perfectly moronic to think a man’s academic work could qualify him for the presidency. But there it is.

      You still hear people raising Harvard as a reason to think he’s intelligent. It’s telling that they don’t point to any ideas originating from Obama to indicate he is something other than an imbecile.

      1. The reason for wanting Obama’s educational records is because it was an actual credential offered as a reason to elect him president in 2008.

        The only facts about his educational background that were widely known were the fact that he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, and was the first black president of the law review. His college transcripts will not tell you anything about those claims. Today one of the things you will hear about Ted Cruz is that he too graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and was an editor on the law review; you don’t see Democrats demanding his undergraduate transcripts.

        You will recall he had no actual experience so his academic performance was offered as evidence of his supreme suitability.

        Anyone who doesn’t consider work as a lawyer, law professor, state legislator or U.S. Senator as “actual” experience isn’t asking questions about Obama’s college transcripts out of good-faith curiosity.

    6. “But it is amusing to hear the same people who thought it was vital that Obama release his college transcripts now insist that Walker’s educational record is no big deal.”
      This seems totally confused to me. It was relevant that Obama release his college transcripts, because his claim to fame was his awesome college career, about which no one was allowed to know anything at all. People suspected that his college career wasn’t awesome at all. Walker’s college career is public, his subsequent career is public. His claim to fame is the job he’s done since college. No one is keeping secrets, or claiming that secrets are being kept.
      The comparison seems to be making some wrong assumption.

      1. It was relevant that Obama release his college transcripts, because his claim to fame was his awesome college career, about which no one was allowed to know anything at all.

        Where does this idea come from? I’d be surprised if more than 10% of American voters could even name where Obama went to college.

        I followed the Obama campaign closely, volunteering from its beginnings here in New Hampshire eight years ago. I never heard him or his campaign claim that he’d had an exceptional college career. His claim to fame was that he’d been against the Iraq war when almost everyone in national politics was for it, and had given a famous speech in 2004. He got the nomination because he ran a smart campaign in caucus states and Democratic primary voters wanted someone who wasn’t tainted by Iraq, and he won the White House because the economy was collapsing, and any Democrat would have won in 2008. Nobody voted for Obama because he went to Occidental and Columbia.

  4. If there was any serious dirt on Walker, the public-employee unions would have found it years ago.

    By that logic if there was any serious dirt on Obama, the GOP would have found it years ago. And yet they keep digging….

          1. My assumption is that anyone who’s been in politics as long as Scott Walker has told plenty of lies, and stonewalled plenty of uncomfortable questions. I haven’t been following Walker’s lies closely, but here’s a starting point.

          2. Hey, don’t turn this around, you’re the one claiming that Walker hasn’t been lying or stonewalling! I freely admit that Obama has lied and stonewalled — find me a politician who hasn’t. If there is one, it isn’t Scott Walker.

  5. Now they’re jumping on Rand Paul, because he referred to having a biology degree, when in actual fact he was able to go straight to medical school without completing the undergraduate degree. This is a gotcha moment? The guy has an MD, for the love of God.

    The left sure is getting desperate. And you can see the candidates they most fear.

  6. Baghdad Jim probably went to college, and his hero ” I’ll Dufe” went to Harvard; so in terms of smarts, how valuable can it be if you can get the sheepskin and never learn how to think?

  7. OK, people.

    You have Ted Cruz who is not only an attorney, meaning completed an undergrad and a postgrad degree, he served as a law clerk for a Supreme Court Justice. You have Rand Paul, who is a physician, meaning that not only does he have a college degree, he completed medical school and some manner of resident medical training. You have Chris Christie, who is not only an attorney, he was a Federal prosecutor, putting him in a much more elite circles than the lawyer wannabe who has the job and the kind of lawyer that Federal prosecutors try to put in jail who wants the job.

    And Jim, take some piano lessons, bro, because I am with you here, but you have to figure out how to make music by pressing more than one key. If your argument is that the Conservatives (OK, OK, Libertarians) are stoopid because Mr. Walker is no brighter than the President whom they have been saying is not very smart, you are validating the argument that Mr. Obama is not much smarter than Mr. Walker whom the Liberals claim is not smart. This means you have been fiercely defending a guy who is not very bright in his role as President?

    Yeah, yeah, Mr. Obama is a very smart, capable man who has been leading our country under very difficult circumstances, and that his is not smart is a partisan slander offered by his opponents. So if the Conservatives/Libertarians followed their own reasoning, Mr. Walker would be upper bounded in brightness by someone they think is dull, making Mr. Walker very dull indeed?

    But if we believe you, Jim, the Conservatives don’t reason, they just make stuff up. So we are back to the point that Mr. Obama is actually pretty smart and arguably smarter than Mr. Walker, which leaves a lot of room for Mr. Walker to be smart enough, and maybe he quit college to seize an opportunity in Bill Gates fashion rather than quit because studying was too hard?

    Where does this leave Howard Dean? Hung out to dry by your remarks: You gotta put more effort into commenting here than a simple moral equivalency argument.

    1. You have Ted Cruz who is not only an attorney, meaning completed an undergrad and a postgrad degree, he served as a law clerk for a Supreme Court Justice.

      Actually, beyond that, he has argued and won cases before SCOTUS.

    2. The last time I looked, we don’t elect someone to be the Scholar in Chief or Chief Lawyer. We elect someone to be the Chief Executive. Obama is proof of what happens when you elect someone with no executive experience. For that matter, Obama had precious little real world experience of any kind but we were assured that he was the smartest man in any room. If he’s so damned smart, why does he do so many stupid things?

      1. Obama had precious little real world experience of any kind

        What sort of “real world” experience counts? He’d been an business analyst, community organizer, lawyer, law professor, and state legislator. Scott Walker’s worked in marketing for the Red Cross, and in government. Is there a definition of the “real world” that includes the Red Cross but doesn’t include the University of Chicago or Altgeld Gardens?

        Obama is proof of what happens when you elect someone with no executive experience.

        Is that reason to not vote for Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz?

          1. I assume they were businesses in the “real” world, and the result was that he got a paycheck and enough familiarity with that line of work to decide to do something else. Just as I assume that Scott Walker marketed the services and benefits of the American Red Cross in the “real” world, and did so well enough to earn his salary.

            The point isn’t that Obama was a business whiz, just that it’s silly to claim that he didn’t have any “real world” experience just because he — like Scott Walker — didn’t make a career in the for-profit private sector.

          2. I assume they were businesses in the “real” world, and the result was that he got a paycheck and enough familiarity with that line of work to decide to do something else.

            There is no reason at all to assume that. He has never demonstrated any knowledge whatsoever of how business works. He has demonstrated only ignorance.

    3. If your argument is that the Conservatives (OK, OK, Libertarians) are stoopid because Mr. Walker is no brighter than the President whom they have been saying is not very smart

      That isn’t my argument. My argument is merely that rightists’ intense interest in Obama’s college transcripts is shown to be completely hypocritical by their newfound open-mindedness with regard to Scott Walker’s educational background.

      which leaves a lot of room for Mr. Walker to be smart enough,

      There’s no question that Walker is smart enough. The college business only hurts him insofar as it paints him as a life-long politician who couldn’t even bear to sit through another year of classes before angling for public office. But it helps him by making him more relatable to an electorate with millions of voters who similarly bailed on formal education short of a bachelor’s.

      Where does this leave Howard Dean? Hung out to dry by your remarks:

      I think Dean is reaching, like almost every partisan pundit on cable news.

  8. If you really respect and admire people with college degrees, and disparage people without one (even though those people manage to support themselves and their families through their non-college-degree work and don’t suck off Uncle Sugar’s teat), the next time your one toilet is hopelessly stopped up, call a Ph. D.

    1. I know how to clear a stuck toilet. Many of us in the Department are our own home handymen/women.

      I had a colleague with a family name that would be instantly recognized to space geeks, so let’s call him the grandson of the Moon landing. He was well supported by Federal grants, publishing papers no one around here would understand, myself included, in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. The work was highly theoretical but it had direct application to wireless networks.

      He liked to work on his car and was able to “field strip” the CV joints of a Honda. I am not saying he left because of a certain political leader’s policies, but where he is at he doesn’t have to listen to people saying he is deriving metaphorical mammalian sustenance from the US Federal Government or the State of Wisconsin.

      There seems to be something about having completed a degree that offers a somewhat better understanding of higher education, who the people are, what they do, and what they contribute to our highly technological economy.

        1. Yes, the value of education depends on the type of degree as does the value of the research and outreach contributions.

          And the recent policy proposal is indiscriminate, affecting the training of the next generation of large-animal vets, needed to keep food on our tables with such people said to be in short supply, in an ag state, as much as the “studies” departments.

  9. When was the last presidential nominee from a major party defeated by dirt? It’s long been defeat by narrative. Get a good story going and people will adhere to it even in the presence of blatant contradicting evidence. For example, both McCain and Romney are cast as being worse choices than Obama. Even though now we see six years of Obama throwing money to wealthy patrons and foreign policy that has enveloped the US into at least one possibly two hard to win wars, these defenders of the story will assert that somehow it’d be worse with the other guy in charge.

    1. Or that Obama just hate insurance companies and wants to punish them while making it illegal not to buy their products.

  10. “Or that Obama just hate insurance companies and wants to punish them while making it illegal not to buy their products.”

    But Mr. Obama does not hate the insurance companies, and they do not hate him — they rather like him, thank-you-very-much, if you catch my drift. Please try and keep up . . .

  11. This is really such a non-story to me. Obama didn’t win anything because he went to Harvard, and Walker didn’t win anything because he didn’t finish college. Obama won because he promised a lot and then failed to deliver, which was ignored by the media (Healthcare.gov was and is a wholesale failure and stories about its failure were literally squashed by network newsrooms). Walker promised a lot too, delivered, was challenged because he delivered, and won twice again because he delivered on his promises. It is those things that will matter. The education will interest the small minority of people interested in politics, which is a subset of the people who vote, which is hardly half of the American people.

    1. Delivered on what?

      Mr. Obama campaigned on delivering a Health Care Plan, and he delivered a Health Care Plan. He skewered Ms. Clinton in the primaries on an Individual Mandate, but he delivered one of those, he lambasted Captain McCain, USN, Ret. on an Employer Mandate, and he will kinda, sorta deliver one of those “after the next election.” But deliver a Health Care Plan he indeed did do, whether we wanted it or not.

      Mr. Walker ran campaign commercials where he packed his austere brown-bag lunch into a fresh, store-bought brown lunch bag (we at the U don’t waste money like that — we are packing our bag lunches into old grocery bags and then reusing those). So he campaigned on austerity, and he didn’t actually tell us what we had in mind, but he cut state employee compensation, which everyone figured was going to happen.

      But during the campaign, the unions were flat-out hyperventilating, accusing him of wanting to bust the unions, which I didn’t give a moments thought because unions are always hyperventilating about something, but he did deliver on actions that set the unions back quite a bit but never told us about ahead of time. I never thought the unions ever made sense about anything they said about a Republican before.

      He also tried to deliver on voter ID, which was never on the campaign radar but he hasn’t really delivered because it is hung up on the docket of the US Supreme Court, with the justices issuing an emergency stay but not eager to hear the case either.

      The Governor almost delivered on flipping the State Supreme Court from a conservative-leaning majority to a liberal-leaning majority, where a conservative incumbent almost lost to this woman with a wild look in her eyes who even President Obama turned down from consideration for a Federal judicial appointment.

      He delivered on ending an inconvenience to deer hunters of the Save-a-Buck program, which had required hunters to shoot “bald” deer in an attempt to reduce an out-of-control deer population, which impacts (excuse the pun) motorists and landowners trying to grow trees for profit, which the deer chew to nubs. I don’t remember that as a campaign promise.

      He campaigned last November on having “straightened out the State’s finances”, brushing off the shrill claims of his opponent of him leaving a “billion dollar” budget hole, another woman Democrat with the look of an apparent affective disorder. It turns out that the State has a 2 billion dollar budget hole, so the black sheep of the Trek Bicycle company had her figures wrong.

      To fix the budget hole, the University of Wisconsin System is getting a 300 million dollar budget cut. And tuition is capped. Maybe the U will prioritize “real” majors like engineering over “studies” majors, but engineering is a lot more expensive to teach.

      I heard that the state prisons are directed to eliminate the 3rd shift in the guard towers, because, the prisoners are in bed asleep at night. I guess the Count of Monte Cristo is taught Senior Year, which got missed. Other than that, most of the 2 billion will be borrowed, along with 200 million to build a new stadium for a basketball team that no one cares about ever since their star player changed his name and moved to LA.

      Oh, and the Governor strung along an Indian tribe about their plans for a mega off-reservation casino on the Illinois border, which he just nixed — after the election. What were the campaign promises and what got fulfilled?

      Yes, he campaigned on austerity without giving specifics, and he campaigned against the passenger train to Madison, which he stopped. OK, what else?

      1. Correction: Earn-a-Buck. To shoot an antlered deer, those darned Dems and their double-darned Department of Natural Resources (DNR — darn near Russia), required you to shoot a doe first. We are overrun with those cloven-hoofed pests, so shooting a doe is a conservation measure. It conserves on expensive repairs to automobile hoods, fenders, and windshields, not to say saves lives of motorists.

        The idea that you shot only antlered deer (male white tails) was a wildlife conservation measure from back in the day when market hunting made deer scarce. Now that we are overrun, it makes no sense, but I guess the hunters are imprinted on getting that trophy buck.

        So much for the ethic of hunters being stewards of the land, stepping in as the top predator to keep disease from being rampant in an overcrowded herd (as in west of Madiosn). The governor’s first action was to end Earn-a-Buck. Totally against the interest of the motorist and the land owner.

    2. On the topic at hand, we have two potential candidates who are arguablly intellectually gifted (Cruz and Paul) and two who are pretty smart (Christie and Bush). Why are we even having this conversation?

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