Many — especially Republicans — imagine greater Boston’s college scene (Harvard, in particular) to be a hot house of elite liberalism.
Barack Obama certainly nourished that notion. Obama (Harvard Law ’91) populated his administration with legions of old Crimson hands. The rocket-like ascent of Elizabeth Warren from the Harvard Law School faculty to the U.S. Senate fortified anti-Boston feeling in GOP precincts across America. The sum and substance of her opponent Scott Brown’s campaign was that Satan is a snooty progressive and Warren was his minion.
So it might surprise many to know that the two biggest newsmakers in the Trump White House these days — and a surprising number of others in the administration — trod some of those same Boston area campuses. Anthony Scaramucci (Tufts University ’86, Harvard Law School ’89) is the new White House Communications Director. President Trump’s right-hand man and son in law, Jared Kushner (Harvard College ’03) testified Monday before a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee, regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election.
But if you attended college in Boston, as I did (Tufts University ’89), you might have felt a pang of recognition watching them. It’s not just that you might have actually crossed paths with Scaramucci or Kushner; there’s a good chance you also, fairly or unfairly, feel like you had classmates like them: smug, arrogant, self-entitled young men from the New York tri-state region — especially Long Island (Scaramucci) and northern New Jersey (Kushner) — who left Boston with their diplomas to dive into money- and status-obsessed lives underpinned by callous conservatism.
For every do-gooder who uses their Boston-earned law degree for public advocacy, there has always been at least one who uses it to protect Wall Street interests. For every limousine liberal with a local diploma, there’s a hedge fund manager who contributed heavily to Mitt Romney’s campaigns.
Those campus conservatives don’t just originate from New York, of course, and not all went there immediately after sucking their education out of a region they disdain. But, many did, including Scaramucci, who went to work at Goldman Sachs, and Kushner, who moved his father’s real estate business to Manhattan.
So, while some might be surprised to find Boston-educated folks among Trump’s New York-heavy, liberal-bashing, college-trashing appointees, it really makes perfect sense.
Notorious White House chief strategist (and former Goldman Sachs investment banker) Steve Bannon went to Harvard Business School, as did Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao did too, after graduating from Mount Holyoke College.
Kris Kobach, the much-criticized immigration hard-liner, got his bachelor’s degree from Harvard before going on to become Kansas Secretary of State and head of Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity. Peter Navarro, director of the White House National Trade Council, has one degree from Tufts and two from Harvard. White House public liaison George Stiles went to Northeastern and Suffolk. KT McFarland, the FOX News commentator-turned-deputy National Security Advisor, spent three years at MIT. CIA Director Mike Pompeo and Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta both graduated from Harvard Law School.
There’s even a Boston local in the West Wing via the area’s higher education: Rob Porter, the staff secretary, is a Boston-raised Harvard graduate. His father teaches at Harvard, and is Master of Dunster House there.
Oh, and of course Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, went to that supposedly liberal hotbed of Harvard Law School. But, so did Antonin Scalia, the Ronald Reagan-appointed justice whom Gorsuch succeeded. So did Reagan-appointee Anthony Kennedy, and George W. Bush appointee John Roberts.
None of that will alter the impression among conservatives that Boston’s colleges are nothing but liberal indoctrination camps. As you might have heard, a majority of Republicans now believe that colleges have a negative overall impact on the country. Add their view of Massachusetts as the epicenter of liberalism, and the populist popularity of Harvard-bashing, and you’ve got a perfect storm of denigration.
And, to be fair, Boston’s campuses are, and long have been, well stocked with left-leaning students. In fact, one could argue that those campuses are where young conservatives, feeling outnumbered and buffeted by liberals, have not only hardened their own views in response, but developed some of the populist, anti-intellectual, anti-elitist attitudes that have come to define the new Trumpist conservative movement.
It can be striking to hear those attitudes coming from the likes of Scaramucci and Kushner. But, for many of us, it all – nonetheless – sound so familiar.
After all, the same Scott Brown who mocked Warren’s connection to an elite Boston-area institution graduated from Tufts just a few years before I went there.
