Without Yale Law School, JD Vance would be just another hillbilly.
With it, Vance became a hillbilly with the academic contacts and credentials to write a book about his family roots in Appalachia and scarred childhood growing up in Ohio. “Hillbilly Elegy” became a bestseller that was praised by liberals, and the celebrity that went along with that gave Vance entrée to the world of politics, first as a US senator from Ohio — and harsh critic of Donald Trump — and now as Trump’s running mate — and harsh critic of elite institutions of higher learning.
The head-spinning twists and turns of Vance’s thinking about Trump, from musing that he might be “America’s Hitler” to defending his actions in the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, are ripe for scrutiny, although he is certainly not alone in such dramatic recalculations. The stereotypical ways in which his book depicts relatives and acquaintances with Appalachian roots have also been criticized by others from that region as exploitation for personal profit. But to me, his attack on higher education is Vance at his absolute worst and at his most hypocritical.
Yale gave Vance a path to the kind of success coveted by many, not to mention a venue for meeting his wife-to-be. In his book, Vance writes about 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 super-smart daughter of Indian immigrants, a Black Canadian with decades’ worth of street smarts, a neuroscientist from Phoenix, an aspiring civil-rights attorney born a few minutes from Yale’s campus, and an extremely progressive lesbian with a fantastic sense of humor, among others.” As The Chronicle of Higher Education points out, that is diversity and it is good for everyone, including hillbillies.
There was a time when Vance praised universities for the talent they nurtured and the opportunity they offered. That changed when he ran for a Senate seat. A 2021 speech that attacked colleges and universities as “the enemy” is emblematic of his change of rhetoric. In it, he said, “If you are a lower-class person in our country of any race and you want to live a good life, very often the story that you’re told is that you must go to a college or university. … Who benefits from being told they have to go and acquire $60, $70, $80, $200,000 of student debt to live a good life in our country?”
Yet going to Yale is exactly what gave Vance the good life, seemingly minus 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 about. As Lydia Polgreen noted in The New York Times, you could also say Vance was a “DEI candidate,” a reference to the diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that are now under attack by conservatives. They are offshoots of earlier efforts to diversify the student body by income and background, which in Vance’s case involved being raised by grandparents because of his mother’s drug addiction and finding direction by enlisting in the Marines.
In a post on X during the controversy involving Claudine Gay, the Harvard University president who was forced out in part because of allegations of plagiarism, Vance wrote that Gay “got her job not through merit, but because she checked a box.” He went on to say, “Our entire elite is like this. People who got their jobs because they checked boxes, not because they achieved something amazing or accomplished something meaningful.”
What boxes did Vance check to win admission to Yale? And now, thanks to the magic of his Yale affiliation, how is Vance not a member of the elite? Those questions, raised in February by the Ohio Capitol Journal after Vance’s post about Gay, are even more relevant today as conservatives attack Vice President Kamala Harris as a potential “DEI president.”
Vance, who will turn 40 Aug. 2, does have a remarkable life story. Smart, tenacious, and resourceful, he overcame a great deal of adversity. But without Yale, would those qualities be 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 this book’s existence is Amy Chua, my Yale contracts professor, who convinced me that both my life and the conclusion 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 university professors something other than “the enemy.”
Colleges and universities should strive for more of the kind of diversity that Vance represents. But saying that is not as sexy or headline grabbing as Vance’s more dramatic pronouncements of colleges as “hostile institutions.” It’s sad to see someone who so benefitted from higher education depicting it as a plot to poison minds rather than as a path to opportunity.
Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at joan.vennochi@globe.com. Follow her @joan_vennochi.