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Midway through senior year, we decided to turn an issue of Rumpus, the Yale tabloid newspaper I founded with my girlfriend, roommates, and brother, into a parody of People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People. Yale’s 50 Most Beautiful People featured photos of students posing like fashion models accompanied by fawning Tiger Beat-like profiles: “She’s got legs and she knows how to use them. In cross-country, that is.”
As it was clear to most that this was a People parody, finding 25 willing men and 25 willing women wasn’t easy. Our invitation didn’t use the word “beautiful” but rather euphemisms like “pulchritude” and “campus presence.” Because many rejected or ignored their selection, the editorial defended our authority: “By our logic, one of the defining characteristics of being one of the 50 Most Beautiful People is having the courage to stand up and proclaim one’s beauty. Thus, anyone who lacked this courage is not beautiful. By this tautology, our list is perfect and complete.”
50 Most made a splash on campus and has been doing so every spring since that first perfect issue, mission-creeping over time to profile entire sports teams and singing groups, grad students, faculty, and – in a first this year – a student’s “smokin’ hot mom.” (Forced by 50 Most rules to write about the student, not the mom, the frustrated correspondent concluded: “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But again, this was supposed to be about the tree. That luscious, bodacious tree…”) But the most intriguing part was how quickly something that started as a joke became a status symbol. Within a few years, a beautiful person (BP) selection was a badge of honor. It became commonplace to lobby for inclusion. And I learned that one of the original BPs had listed her accomplishment on her résumé, the one whose profile started with, “The Yale attack-wing streaks down the lacrosse field with the ferocity of a velociraptor. But we’ve never seen a velociraptor look quite the way Jane does.”
So I wasn’t surprised to receive an email from the current editor saying he’d received an inquiry from a New York Times reporter asking for a copy of 50 Most from 2006. The BP in question was J.D. Vance’s wife Usha. Alumni eagerly tracked down a copy, hoping that if the Times wrote something, it would criticize her for participating in something so vulgar. As the custom was to title each profile Most Beautiful [blank], Usha was Yale’s Most Beautiful “Taj Ma-Hottie.” But as BP profiles go, this one was tame: a “junior with a smile as bright as the San Diego sun,” her Anglophilia (she went on to study at Cambridge), her preference for “a man who has a lot to say for himself,” and that “most of her liaisons have been tall, handsome, and conservative.”
As the resulting Times piece suggests, in marrying J.D., Usha ended up with one of three. (The article has a Beauty and the Beast vibe.) But her husband’s conservatism has proven politically profitable, landing him the Republican VP nomination and inheriting Trumpism. And although President Trump selected Vance in part due to his impressive academic credentials, Usha’s husband has built a nice little business out of attacking American higher education. (See his The Universities are the Enemy talk.) Perhaps Vance missed the classes on irony.
It would be amusing if the stakes weren’t so high. But the minimalist Republican education platform promises to “fire radical left accreditors” and “defund institutions engaged in censorship.” Meanwhile, Project 2025 – written by former and future Trump appointees – proposes to transform federal loans into government-backed private loans and eliminate the Department of Education. Vance himself has proposed increasing the excise tax paid by universities with large endowments from the current 1.4% to a ruinous 35%. He concluded his 2021 speech with the line “the professors are the enemy.” His objective seems to be to break the system.
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Does American higher education merit the fit-of-spite punishments envisioned by J.D. Vance? I’m reminded not of beautiful people, but of butterflies. On July 1, 1967, a month after the release of Sgt. Pepper’s and at the height of the Summer of Love, William Rees-Mogg penned an editorial in the Times of London about the three-month prison sentence handed down to Mick Jagger, lead singer of the Rolling Stones, for possession of four amphetamine tablets. Titled Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel? (a line borrowed from Alexander Pope), the editorial argued the offence was technical in nature since: (1) the pills were bought legally in Italy; (2) they were legal in the UK with a prescription; and (3) Jagger’s doctor’s testified he had authorized their use, but hadn’t issued a prescription. As the typical penalty for such a mild offense is probation, it was irregular that the judge decided on prison, particularly since Jagger claimed he didn’t know he was breaking the law.
Rees-Mogg surmised that Jagger’s disproportionate sentence must be connected to his “anarchic” performances and “decadence.” He concluded by asking whether “Mr. Jagger received the same treatment as he would have received if he had not been a famous figure?” In other words, asked Rees-Mogg, “if a promising undergraduate had come back from a summer visit to Italy with four pep pills in his pocket, would it have been thought right to ruin his career by sending him to prison for three months?” The answer was no; the sentence stemmed from what Jagger represented.
Similarly, in hatching their penal plans, Vance and his Republican colleagues aren’t focused on undergraduates and their career prospects, or even the actions of administrators, but rather on what universities represent, or – more accurately – what they’re trying to pass off universities as representing. And this is where Usha’s husband’s project goes off the rails. As the U.S. has dramatically underinvested in alternative or earn-and-learn pathways to career launch, for anyone unable to build a career on sheer pulchritude (Jane) or presence (Jagger), it’s been college-or-bust for the past 50 years (or college or Chipotle for as long as Chipotle has been around). Consequently, nearly two-thirds of Americans matriculate at a college or university and close to half complete a degree. So the values of university students and graduates are the values of Americans.
Vance won’t succeed in his effort to portray higher education as some kind of anarchic, decadent, satanic “other” because higher education is us. And while a college degree has become the primary partisan divide and about half of all Americans disagree with universal student loan forgiveness, there’s not much of an audience for Project 2025’s attempt to start a college culture war e.g., university presidents have “more in common with a socialist, European head of state than with the parents at a high-school football game in Waco, TX.” For the vast majority, higher education isn’t synonymous with politics or protests, but rather a personal experience at a school like UT El Paso, University of Central Florida, or Mesa Community College. Even those who have stopped out, dropped out, or graduated into underemployment aren’t likely to believe that colleges have somehow been taken over by an elite cabal with un-American values. More likely, they’ll agree that colleges are big, beautiful butterflies.
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The problem with butterflies, of course, is that they flutter by. With regard to Vance’s charges, it’s unlikely that any higher education leaders are scheming to establish campus environments that are inhospitable to any particular group. It’s much more likely that they’re struggling to apply cherished principles in the real world, and to apply them consistently.
One reason may be that many college and university leaders have never worked outside higher education. Recall how Florida A&M recently celebrated a $237M donation – nearly double the amount of its current endowment – and had the donor present a giant check and speak at its commencement ceremony. But while the university claimed it had done its due diligence, no one had heard of the donor who claimed to have grown rich from hemp farming. (He boasted that his hemp farming company had 7,000 employees, growing to 10,000 by the end of the year. However, on LinkedIn the company only had one employee: Gregory G.) And while the donor announced at commencement that “the money is in the bank,” he noted it wasn’t available as “liquid cash” quite yet. According to one expert, the donation raised “more red flags than the CCP raises in Beijing.” It turned out the value of the hemp farming stock donated to FAMU was “about zero.”
Advancement aside, academic butterflies aren’t doing the job Americans want them to do. According to a recent New America survey of 1,700+ adults, only 36% think higher education is “fine how it is” and around 70% think schools should lose access to federal aid if students have poor outcomes. And as I’ve written about now and again, colleges aren’t doing nearly enough to address the simultaneous and intertwined crises of completion, affordability, and employability.
They’re also not passing the “Make Your Bed” test. In a better commencement speech than the one delivered by the FAMU fraudster, Admiral William McRaven spoke to UT Austin grads in 2014 and conveyed how the first thing he learned in Navy Seal training was to make his bed. Not just throw the sheets and pillow back on the bed, but pull the covers tight, square the corners, center the pillow just under the headboard, and fold the extra blanket neatly at the foot of the rack. McRaven urged UT grads to start the day by doing something well, which encourages you to do many things well and engrains the importance of doing the little things right – both essential for long-term success. But as philosophy professor Patrick Casey pointed out last week in Inside Higher Education, colleges and universities aren’t asking students to put away their phones in class, let alone make their beds. Among the norms colleges have shied away from over the past few years, Casey homes in on the growing reluctance of butterfly colleges to enforce deadlines, arguing that graduates must know how to meet deadlines, and failure to develop that skill perpetuates or exacerbates inequity. Colleges “only have so much stock left with the public,” Casey concludes. “We’d better not squander it.”
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Mick Jagger wasn’t an angel in 1967, nor was he a devil; Sympathy for the Devil wouldn’t be released for another year. Colleges and universities aren’t devils yet either; there’s still time to double- and triple-down on student outcomes – a function of price and program, in turn a result of hundreds of decisions (and non-decisions) made (or more often fluttered around and not made) by well-meaning administrators and faculty. That’s a tough row to hoe. And although progress is slow, universities often get things right eventually (see e.g., forced resignation of hemp-happy FAMU president).
The people for whom Usha’s husband’s concerns are primary aren’t 18-year-olds worried about how to launch their careers and get ahead, but older, with time to play politics. He’s gotten their attention because, per another Yale Law classmate, he’s chosen contempt as a political strategy.
Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel? A political opportunist who doesn’t think about what it means to break a butterfly and who’d be hurt as a result. No one wants to see that, which explains why, following Rees-Mogg’s editorial, Mick Jagger was released after only one night in London’s Brixton Prison.
It would be vastly preferable if the 2024 Republican education platform could set out what it’s for, not just what it’s against. Unless and until that happens – even if this isn’t another Summer of Love – most Americans will choose Usha, beauty, butterflies, and (yes) universities over J.D. and his wheel of contempt.