Christine O'Donnell: A lying elitist?

Christine O&#039;Donnell padded her bio by claiming she attended distinguished universities such as Princeton and Oxford.

(Image credit: Getty)

last updated 8 January 2015

Republicans are "famously suspicious" of cultural elites with lofty educational credentials, says Ben Adler at Newsweek — scorning, for instance, the Ivy League backgrounds of President Obama and many of his appointees. So it's "pretty ironic" that Christine O'Donnell, the Sarah Palin-backed Republican Senate candidate in Delaware, "has just been caught for the third time dishonestly inflating her academic achievements." Although she has said for years that she graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University, she just completed her bachelor's degree last summer. Claims that she had taken graduate courses at Princeton also proved false. And now it has emerged that O'Donnell's LinkedIn bio lists "University of Oxford" as a school she attended — but the course in question was offered by the Phoenix Institute, which just rented space from the elite British school. Pathetic, says Adler, but also telling. Here, an excerpt:

What makes this irony particularly rich and amusing is that, unlike actually going to Oxford or Princeton, lying about where you went to school really is elitist. Rush Limbaugh and Jay Sekulow attacked Elena Kagan as an elitist for having gone to Harvard Law but the mere fact that she went there does not show that she thinks one's worth is measured by where they went to school.... By contrast, pretending that you took courses at Princeton or Oxford when you did not, and you are many years past college-age, demonstrates that you think having done so is really a necessary credential.