Don't expect Republican presidential candidate W. Mitt Romney to be dropping the H-bomb anytime soon. Out on the campaign trail, the Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School alum has been careful not to flaunt his association with the University and has instead taken to bashing fair Harvard.
In speeches across the country, Romney has repeated a line that uses President Barack Obama's Harvard Law School degree to take aim at the president's foreign policy record. "That may be what they think in that Harvard faculty lounge," Romney has said, "but it's not what they know on the battlefield!" Romney has failed to mention that he himself graduated from Harvard with a dual degree in business and law.
Romney's derisive comments toward Harvard are nothing new. As governor of Massachusetts in 2005, he spoke out against plans to conduct embryonic stem cell research in some of Harvard’s laboratories. The next year, he opposed former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami's visit to the Institute of Politics, even refusing to provide police protection for the event and boasting about that decision in a later campaign ad.
Nevertheless, Romney has reportedly enlisted Harvard professors N. Gregory Mankiw and Meghan L. O'Sullivan as advisers for his 2012 campaign. Perhaps he's been spending some time in that faculty lounge himself.