PHOTO: Republican candidate Ted Cruz at Princeton University


Following up a Wall Street Journal article on Presidents and the universities they ahve attended — “In Educating Presidents, the Ivies Still Have It” — Monocle 24’s The Briefing spoke with me on Tuesday about whether an Ivy League education is an advantage to winning the White House.

After explaining that some of the information in the article is inaccurate, I argued that the reality is far more complex than the headline. After all, a lot of Presidential hopefuls — including some in this election — have campaigned on being “anti-intellectual”. Paradoxically. one of them is Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who attended Princeton. And some Presidents, like Richard Nixon have been downright nasty, “The Ivy League schools are finished.”

The take-away? While I find that British politics is still led by Oxford and Cambridge elites, the US is a far more decentralized and “local” arena for education and the road to power.

Listen from 24:51: