Bush's MBA from Harvard

The February 4th issue of The American Thinker has an interesting article up about the President's Harvard MBA:

President George W. Bush is the very first President to hold a Masters Degree in Business Administration. Even better (or worse, depending on your perspective), his MBA is from Harvard Business School, where postgraduate management training was invented in the early part of the last century, and which to many stands as a symbol of the good, the bad, and the ugly faces of modern management. Harvard MBAs, as well as their online masters degree programs, indisputably lead more major corporations, receive higher starting salaries fresh out of school, and carry with them more élan and glamour than the graduates of any rival business schools – facts which do not necessarily lead to admiration and love.

The comparatively small amount of attention paid by the political press to the President’s Harvard MBA partially reflects a generalized ignorance of, and hostility toward, the degree itself. More importantly, acknowledging that he learned any valuable intellectual perspectives would contradict the storyline that young W was a party animal, who coasted through his elite education, scarcely cracking a book. In other words, as the left never tires of claiming, he is too “stupid” to have picked up any tricks across the Charles River from Harvard Square.

This is patently incorrect. Having attended Harvard Business School at the same time as the President, graduating from the two-year program a year after he did, and then serving on its faculty after a year’s interval spent writing a PhD thesis, I am intimately familiar with the rigors of the program at the time, and the miniscule degree of slack cut for even the most well-connected students, when their performance did not make the grade.

Read the entire article. It's excellent fodder for those engaged with the dishonest members of the left and their gullible sycophants who want to portray this President as an intellectual lightweight.

Comments

[Susan]

Let us not forget that Mr. Bush finished his postgraduate work at the bottom 10% of his class. So he got through it, tough to be booted out. And obviously he waded through it not learning very much. I'm guessing that Mr. Bush is not an innately ignorant person but he chooses to be. A tragedy for us all.

[Rick]

I'm guessing that Mr. Bush is not an innately ignorant person but he chooses to be. A tragedy for us all.

The bigger tragedy, the real tragedy, is how people like you Susan shamelessly portray this President as someone he clearly is not and do so with venom and pride.

[bobby quertz]

"Someone clearly he is not" ... um, Rick, how do you know?

Do you know the president?

Nobody that I know knows the president because he runs with an extremely elite crowd. That's why I can't listen to you Republican twits who claim to know "he's a good Christian man." Really, GW wouldn't sit down and have a beer with any of you, despite your contant assertions to the contrary.

Finally:

"I am intimately familiar with the rigors of the program at the time, and the miniscule degree of slack cut for even the most well-connected students, when their performance did not make the grade."

Is a rhetorical houdini. Sure, he made the grade. Big deal. Bottom 10%. C's and D's. What are they going to do, kick him out? Yeah, right--I've got some sand to sell you in Iraq. I'm sure a lot of MBA professors--who all have business/investments on the side--want to give the head of the CIA's son a D ... let alone an F! Sorry, nice try. You're going to have to be a genuine thinker/writer to make the grade on the Internet sir. I'm sure your verbal trickery works wonders printed on wood, where your sophisticated twists can't be challenged ... but not here my good man. Not here.

[Nehmo]

Can we see something Bush wrote while in school?

[Nick]

Plain thoughts, delivered stupidly.

[Morgan K Freeberg]

So how many of you folks have an MBA from Harvard?

Just wonderin'.

[Locutisprime]

Class envy....is almost as bad as academic envy. But not quite. In the sanctified alumni of the stratified Ivy League, the outright levity of saucy condescending smirks? Transcends even the most neanderthal battles of the knuckle dragrers over who's the best driver in NASCAR, or who is going to win the WWE smack down.

George Bush finds himself in an unusual no man's land. A graduate of Yale and a post graduate of Harvard. Many of his well wishers, should find themselves so lucky.

George Bush barely scrapes through and goes on to be president of the United States. Bill gates drops out? And goes on to be a billionaire before he is thirty.

Life is weird. Ain't it. And to think, most people believe that the theory of relativity? Had something to do with physics, the time space continuum and chalk boards.

I wonder what Carl Sagan's take on the universe would have been, if he had been a proctologist.

[mrwiz]

A Harvard MBA and the worst economy since great depression.

[Fuquod]

Rick has an associate's degree!

and he's voting McCain...(Rick's always been a couple of bricks shy)

heh.

[Morgan K Freeberg]

This thing about Bush being in the bottom 10% of "his class"...you moonbats do understand, don't you, that that's a reference to a class, as in a class taught by one particular professor, Yoshihiro Tsurumi. Tsurumi has been an outspoken critic of President Bush, particularly the President's political views. I note, further, that the good Professor has made it an ongoing hobby to mix his criticisms of President Bush's classroom preparedness and performance, with said criticism of ideology.

Which may seem insignificant. But if someone were to come forward and show some praise about Bush's Harvard career, and then it were to turn out that person had donated ten bucks to the Committee To Re-Elect Ronald Reagan, I have to believe each and every one of you would be declaring that testimony tainted and inadmissible.

Do left-wingers have what it takes to discolor their appraisals of someone's intellectual acumen, based on the perception that someone might not agree with them politically?

Heh. For an answer to that, one need look no further than this very thread. :-)

[Rick]

For the record and though it matters little... Rick has multiple degrees...

What I don't have is an IQ smaller than my shoe size...

Heh...

[Mommynator]

And this comes up why?

After the dimocrats/libs decide to steal from the "rich" and give to the "poor" via bad and irresponsible loans, somehow this is Bush's fault.

But of course! He is at the bottom of all evil and tragedy in the universe!

And Bush COMPLETED his MBA. Al Gore left school and didn't complete anything. Bush had the smarts to fly fighter jets. What did Gore, Kerry, and the rest of the Clown Posse ever accomplish?

[Morgan K Freeberg]

These smarts they worship...it seems to be an unspoiled pattern that the smarts always have to do with theory and not practice.

From flying a jet to field dressing a moose -- they are exquisitely frustrated and disturbed by anyone doing actual work.

[walter77777]

There is something about MBA's which makeds them desirous to avoid blame at all costs. Fuld also has an MBA, and he has had the audacity to claim that he did nothing wrong, and that his leardership abilities were worth hundreds of miliions of dollars as he lead Lehman to bankruptcy.

W.

[jpk]

How's that MBA looking now?

[tim aka The Godless Heathen]

Jpk,

You go ahead and blame this mess on Bush, hell I believe he’s even responsible your lack of intelligence.

Don’t bother educating yourself about the situation; just keep going along with the crowd, being a sheep….bahhhaaaa… Bush baaaaaaaddddd…

[Marc]

I can understand that it is hard to admit a mistake. But now that there is a mountain of evidence that Bush is just an empty bag (and hence both Yale and Harvard failed) I cannot understand that there are still die-hards here who praise him (or even defend him).

[Smart Bloke (from England)]

Nonsense, Bush is an excellent but twisted product of Harvard and really epitomises the MBA.

If you dunces actually performed any research before posting these comments, you would have noted that his life is not marred with incompetence; rather it is a life marred with corruption!!

The margin on his presidency is unrivalled!!

[tim aka The Godless Heathen]

Smart Bloke, (yea not so much), have you noticed that Pres. Bush is not in office anymore?

Is the corruption you speak of the same policies Obama has kept in place?

Does dumping detainess in Bermuda count as corrution in your world?

BTW, you guys got Sharia Law yet Bloke?

[marianne dagher]

It is likely that a "C" student at Yale in the 1960s would not be as
low in his class rank as one would be today. Grade inflation has
since made graduating with "honors" almost meaningless at some our
most elite colleges. For example, 91% of the 2001 Harvard
undergraduate class graduated "cum laude" or higher honors.

[marianne dagher]

Google answers provided my answer about Bush. I find it a good source in this case.

[john]

Do you know how high yur IQ has to be to even be considered for Harvard?

Bottom 10% is still top 2% Intelligence in the WORLD..yes the world.

Liberals just show how utterly stupid and biased they are.

[Alfred Hussein Neuman]

Obama got into Harvard based on affirmative action. He graduated from Columbia with less than a 3.3 average (as he graduated without honors) so it could have been 2.X. Regardless, he did not qualify for the law school outside of his skin color. Then he graduated and became president.

Bush and Obama have both accomplished a tremendous amount - especially compared to the Liberal trolls.

All of you Bush-haters, get over it. He hasn't been President since January 20, 09. Apply the same standards to him as Obama. The economy sank under a Democrat congress that blocked all reforms.