Dave Brat, The Tea Party Professor
Dave Brat’s unexpected victory over Eric Cantor dominated the news cycle this week but one detail has been more overlooked than any other.
Dave Brat is a professor at Randolph-Macon College.
That fact was not lost on the Chronicle of Higher Education. Jack Stripling writes.
Higher Ed, the Tea Party’s Unlikely Farm Team
College campuses may seem to be unlikely laboratories for producing viable Tea Party candidates, but this election season the record is surprisingly good.
A Randolph-Macon College professor’s unexpected primary-election victory over Rep. Eric I. Cantor, a Republican and majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, this week came less than a month after Midland University’s president won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Nebraska. Both David A. Brat, an economist at Randolph-Macon, and Benjamin E. Sasse, the departing president of Midland, ran anti-establishment campaigns that found favor with Tea Party voters.
Neil L. Gross, a co-editor of Professors and Their Politics, said there may be some good reasons that the Tea Party has gotten cozy with men from academe. The movement’s members risk having their ideas dismissed as irrational or unfounded, Mr. Gross said, so having a professor carry the torch lends “a veneer of academic respectability.”
“It’s not surprising there would be support for Tea Party candidates that have higher-education credentials, that can make claims of having intellectual heft behind them,” said Mr. Gross, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia.
Higher Ed, the Tea Party’s Unlikely Farm Team (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Comments
Tea Party people I know are usually very wary of college professors since the majority of them are Lefty loons.We only admire folks who have solid Conservative credentials and are willing to fight for them no matter what their profession or color is. Both of these academics you mention fit that bill so we are willing to follow them, work for them, donate and vote for them.
We don’t need academics for credibility when we have the Bill of rights, the Constitution, The Founding Fathers, history, common sense and simple logic.
Indeed!