JD Vance attacks higher education despite profiting from it

Without Yale Law School, JD Vance would be a common farmer.

With that, Vance became a hillbilly with the academic connections and credentials to write a book about his family roots in Appalachia and his troubled youth in Ohio. “Hillbilly Elegy” became a bestseller lauded by liberals, and the celebrity that came with it gave Vance an entrance into the world of politics, first as a U.S. senator from Ohio — and a sharp critic of Donald Trump — and now as Trump’s running mate — and a sharp critic of elite institutions of higher learning.

The dizzying turns in Vance’s thinking about Trump, from musing that he could be “America’s Hitler” to defending his actions in the events leading up to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, are ripe for scrutiny, though he’s hardly alone in such dramatic recalculations. The stereotypical depictions of family members and acquaintances with Appalachian roots in his book have been criticized by others from that region as exploitation for personal gain. But for me, his attack on higher education is Vance at his worst, and at his most hypocritical.

Yale gave Vance a path to the kind of success many craved, not to mention a place to meet his future wife. In his book, Vance describes the experience as both challenging and enriching. There was culture shock, but there was also a seminar whose participants he describes as “the island of misfit toys … a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia, the whip-smart daughter of Indian immigrants, a black Canadian with decades of street smarts, a neuroscientist from Phoenix, an aspiring civil rights lawyer born minutes from Yale’s campus, and a fiercely progressive lesbian with a wicked sense of humor, among many others.” As The Chronicle of Higher Education notes, that’s diversity, and it’s good for everyone, including hillbillies.

There was a time when Vance praised universities for the talent they nurtured and the opportunities they offered. That changed when he ran for Senate. A 2021 speech in which he attacked colleges and universities as “the enemy” exemplifies his shift in rhetoric. In it, he said, “If you’re a lower-class person in our country, regardless of race, and you want to have a good life, the narrative that you’re often told is that you have to go to college or university. … Who benefits from being told that you have to rack up $60, $70, $80, $200,000 in student loan debt to have a good life in our country?”

Yet going to Yale is precisely what gave Vance the good life, seemingly without the debt, because as he wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy,” he was poor enough to qualify for financial aid, something he said he wished more poor kids with dreams knew. As Lydia Polgreen noted in The New York Times, you could also say that Vance was a “THEI candidate,” a reference to the diversity, equity and inclusion programs now under attack by conservatives. They are an outgrowth of earlier efforts to diversify the student body based on income and background, which in Vance’s case meant being raised by his grandparents because of his mother’s drug addiction and finding direction by enlisting in the Marines.

In a post on X during the controversy surrounding Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University who was forced to resign partly because of accusations of plagiarism, Vance wrote that Gay “didn’t get her job because she checked a box.” He continued: “Our entire elite is like that. People who got their jobs because they checked boxes, not because they accomplished anything great or created anything significant.”

What boxes did Vance check to get into Yale? And now, thanks to the magic of his Yale affiliation, how is Vance not a member of the elite? Those questions, those in The February statements by the Ohio Capitol Journal, following Vance’s story on Gay, are even more relevant today as conservatives attack Vice President Kamala Harris as a potential “DEI president.”

Vance, who will turn 40 August 2, has a remarkable life story. Smart, tenacious, and resourceful, he overcame many adversities. But without Yale, would those qualities have been enough to catapult him to his current position in life? As he writes in the acknowledgments section of the latest edition of his book, “the person who deserves the most credit for the existence of this book is Amy Chua, my Yale contracts professor, who convinced me that both my life and the conclusions I drew from it were worth putting down on paper.” For Vance, that profitable connection with Chua, author of the “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom,” alone should make college professors something other than “the enemy.”

Colleges and universities should strive for more diversity, as Vance represents. But saying that isn’t as sexy or catchy as Vance’s more dramatic statements about colleges as “hostile institutions.” It’s sad to see someone who has benefited so much from higher education portray it as a plot to poison minds rather than a path to opportunity.

Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @joan_vennochi.