Political Candidates’ Undergraduate Theses: Should We Care?
As we learned the other day, the White House will be releasing Elena Kagan’s Princeton undergraduate thesis in order to dispel rumors that writing about the history of socialism in America makes you a socialist, just as the Obama campaign did nearly two years ago with Michelle Obama’s thesis in order to dispel rumors that writing about African-American Princeton alumni made Obama racist. It’s laughable, of course—if you are what you write your thesis about, I’d be a prominent 19th-century intellectual—but are there any circumstances under which someone’s senior thesis can have implications for how they’re able to do in a government job?
In Kagan’s case, as Matt Yglesias pointed out yesterday, certainly not: Kagan is up for a position on the Supreme Court, not a spot in a history Ph.D. program. Her work as a 22-year-old historian—a discipline in which she has not focused her adult career—has little-to-no bearing on her ability to serve on the Supreme Court. And as Yglesias said, middle-aged adults cannot be held accountable for things they wrote in their early twenties. That’s just ridiculous, and it would be as if your departmental honors in college were based on the work you did in a different subject in high school. It’s not logical or relevant. (Though for the record, I have read parts of Kagan’s thesis, now, and I will be very happy if I can write something this articulate and well-researched when I’m a senior in the same department. As a college senior, Kagan was obviously very smart and good at what she did, even if I don’t have enough background in the subject to know whether Yglesias is correct in disagreeing with her claims.)
However, this is not to say that all academic work by members of the U.S. government is irrelevant. The senior theses of Princeton alumnae like Obama, Sotomayor, and Kagan, who are now doing very different things with their lives, certainly have no bearing on their abilities to perform their present jobs. But I think it was misguided for Daniel Luzer of The Washington Monthly to suggest yesterday that Virginia governor Bob McDonnell’s master’s thesis was equally irrelevant to his campaign for governor. McDonnell wrote his master’s thesis when he was not 22 but 34, and it was not a work of history or sociology but a policy proposal “that McDonnell said the Republican Party should follow to protect American families.” Given that McDonnell’s new Virginia government has pursued some of the aggressively socially conservative policies which he outlined in that thesis (particularly with respect to the treatment of LGBT Virginians), it cannot be regarded as irrelevant in the same way that Kagan’s thesis—which advances no personal political beliefs or policy proposals—can. The Kagan and McDonnell theses certainly don’t count as equally irrelevant, and it’s falling into the “the left and the right are equally ridiculous” trap to claim that they are. We should question the policy proposals political candidates made as adults, but I certainly hope that if I am ever nominated to public office, no one decides to misread my juvenile attempts at historiography as evidence of ideological sympathy—that’s just not how projects in the discipline of history work.
Emily is a staff writer for Campus Progress. She attends Princeton University.
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