Not Every Ivy League Grad Sits Atop the Progressive Heap

Founded way back in 1638, Harvard College (today University) is America’s oldest and most prestigious seat of higher learning. Indeed, of America’s 46 presidents, 7 (John, and John Quincy Adams), Rutherford B. Hayes, cousins Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, George W. Bush (who also graduated from Yale), and Barack Obama) have earned degrees there. 10 future Secretaries of State (Elihu Washburn, Robert Bacon, Dean Acheson, William Evarts, Edward Everts, Christian Herter, Richard Olney, Thomas Pickering, Henry L. Stimson, and Mike Pompeo have been graduates of America’s best college. 119 senators (including Richard Blumenthal, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Sam Ervin, Al Franken, Tim Kaine, Edward Kennedy, Carl Levin, Martha McSally, Elizabeth Warren, Paul Sarbanes, and Chuck Schumer have earned degrees there in fields as diverse as political science, law, and education, as well as nearly 370 members of the House of Representatives. Then too, the lead floor managers of both of Donald Trump’s impeachment trials were graduates of Harvard Law: California’s Rep. Adam Schiff and Maryland’s Rep. Jamie Raskin.

Not all Harvard Graduates entered into public service. Among the most famous of her graduates (as well as those who never completed degrees) one finds Helen Keller; poets T.S. Elliot and E.E.. Cummings; conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein and cellist Yo Yo Ma; writer/poet Gertrude Stein; actors Jack Lemmon, Stockard Channing, Tommy Lee Jones, Ashley Judd, and Natalie Portman; “Unibomber” Ted Kaczynski; writers William S. Burroughs (“The Naked Lunch”), John Updike and Norman Mailer, as well as writer/M.D. Michael Crichton; Transcendentalist author Ralph Waldo Emerson, theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer; architect, systems theorist and futurist Buckminster Fuller . . . and Bill Gates. (And let’s not forget that there are lots of “Elis” -(Yalies) Princeton Tigers, and graduates of other Ivy League schools serving in the current 117th Congress who cover the political spectrum from such far-right senators as Missouri’s Josh Hawley, Texas’ Ted Cruz and Nebraskan Ben Sasse to Ohio’s ultra-progressive Democrat Sherrod Brown).

Then there’s Donald Trump’s “Mini-Me” - former House member and current Florida governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis is anything but an uneducated redneck; he earned a B.A. (magna cum laude) from Yale in 2001 and a J.D. (cum laude) from Harvard Law in 2005. (It should be noted that while attending Yale, DeSantis was captain of the school’s varsity baseball team, where he played the outfield, and as a senior led the team in batting with a .336 average.)

There’s hardly a political nerd, geek, or junkie who doesn’t know that the 43-year old DeSantis wants nothing more than to be the Republican standard-bearer in 2024. In order to fulfill this dream, several things would have to happen:

He would first have to be reelected governor in 2022;
Donald Trump must stay out of the race because he is either hospitalized, on trial, or out on bail;
The voting public has not yet figured out just how anti-(small-D) democrat De Santis really is, and
That DeSantis figures out a way to keep 45’s core constituency - and their cash - in his back pocket.

Although DeSantis is a bit less Narcissistic than his hero and a tad more polished to boot, he nonetheless possesses the same rigorously authoritarian streak as the Lord of Mar-a-Lago. Where Donald Trump is an avatar of unbridled contrarianism . . . a monster of the ages (a Queen’s born Larry “Lonesome Rhodes”), the Florida governor is more self-controlled. DeSantis appears to be less puerile than Trump, but equally demanding when it comes to putting personal loyalty above all else. And where Donald Trump has spent years in the public eye bragging about his elite education and utter brilliance (!), Governor DeSantis tends to let his policies, appointments and pronouncements get the same point across . . . that he is smarter than anyone in government . . . without all the swagger.

You wanna bet?

Last week, Governor DeSantis appointed a new Florida Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, M.D., PhD, a graduate of Harvard Med. Truth to tell, before DeSantis’ announcement, the vast majority of people in Florida weren’t aware that Florida had a Surgeon General - or that Governor DeSantis even cared; before his appointment, Dr. Ladapo’s predecessor, Dr., Scott Rivkees hadn’t had a face-to-face meeting with Governor DeSantis since the end of 2020. In many respects, Governor DeSantis and Dr. Ladapo are two peas in a pod: both are graduates of Harvard; both are diehard conservatives; both put politics way ahead of science when it comes to COVID-19.

At his initial press conference on September 21, Dr. Ladapo (who was simultaneously appointed to a high-salaried professorship at the University of Florida School of Medicine) introduced himself to members of the press and then boldly told reporters "Florida will reject fear.” The new Surgeon General has a record of writing op-ed after op-ed after op-ed after op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, questioning the very reality of COVID-19, the value of vaccines and the efficacy of masks. There was also, of course, a New York Daily News op-ed touting hydroxychloroquine. Just as importantly, Ladapo has boasted about his support for the so-called "Great Barrington Declaration," a highly controversial joint statement, released in October 2020, that endorsed protections for the elderly and those with compromised immune systems, while simultaneously arguing that the authorities should pursue "herd immunity" by allowing the deadly virus to spread untrammeled through the rest of the population.

Like former president Trump, Governor DeSantis has been a disaster when it comes to the pandemic. He has done everything in his power to put “freedom” and “a person’s right to choose” ahead of vaccinations (although both he himself and his wife have already been inoculated). DeSantis has made it all but impossible for counties, municipalities and local school boards to set their own rules or mandates . . . without being arrested, severely fined or suffer loss of personal income. This, from a man who firmly believes that government should be as close to the people as possible. Like Donald Trump, he has had his legal wrists slapped by more than one conservative court. Is it any wonder that he appointed Ladapo to be his Surgeon General?

As mentioned above, Dr. Ladapo, who before his appointment here in Florida was a professor at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine is a leading member of “America’s Frontline Doctors,” and signer of the widely criticized Great Barrington Declaration, the coven for physicians who are COVID deniers. Dr. Ladapo does not have a background in public health and has never been in charge of so much as a med school department. At UCLA, he was an associate professor and health policy researcher “. . . whose primary research interests include[d] assessing the cost-effectiveness of diagnostic technologies and regarding the population burden of cardiovascular disease,” according to his UCLA bio (which was recently taken down). He has an MD and PhD in Health Policy from Harvard and is board-certified in Internal Medicine. In other words, Dr. Lapado is to Governor DeSantis what Dr. Scott Atlas (professor of radiology at Stanford and member in good standing of the highly conservative Hoover Institution) was to Donald Trump: completely without relevant experience in the fields of epidemiology, infectious diseases or public health.

In my view, the only reason Dr.Lapado got the job was because DeSantis needed window dressing for his anti-science views on managing the state’s COVID response. Dr. Ladapo proved his loyalty to DeSantis on his very first full day in office by issuing an “emergency” rule giving parents sole discretion over whether their children wear masks at school. The rule also says that if a student has been exposed to COVID-19, parents can choose to keep their children in school “without restrictions or disparate treatment, so long as the student remains asymptomatic.”

This is totally unbecoming and wrong-headed for anyone who was both educated and trained at America’s oldest and most prestigious university. As mentioned above, Dr. Ladapo has even written about (and relentlessly endorsed) the use of hydroxychloroquine (and now Ivermectin, which is meant for horses) in the fight against DOVID-19. In discussing this with my fellow medical ethics board members (the overwhelming majority of whom either teach, were educated at, or practice within a few blocks of Harvard Med), they agree that both DeSantis and Dr. Ladapo have placed politics way ahead of science. DeSantis should learn from the 2020 election; one of the key reasons why Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden is that the former, outside of being in office during the miraculous development of anti-COVID vaccines, didn’t have the slightest idea of how to lead the nation to recovery. His main concerns were with the economy; he placed presidential power, personal aggrandizement and politics way ahead of science. DeSantis and his new Surgeon General are doing virtually the same thing here in Florida. To quote the Harvard-trained philosopher Georges Santayana (who was also a member of the faculty): “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I for one would greatly prefer pay attention to the pronouncements of Dr. Anthony Fauci than Governor Ron DeSantis or Dr. Joseph Ladapo. But then again, Fauci only graduated from Cornell . . . which didn’t enter the Ivy League until 1865, 3 years before my beloved University of California.