This is pretty amusing. Buttigieg inspires a weird kind of resentment in some academic types.

Oliver Traldi writes at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Why Academics Love to Hate Mayor Pete

Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., has performed well in the first few contests of the Democratic primary season. Supporters of other candidates and commentators at large have found a lot of reasons to dislike Buttigieg — his rhetoric, his record, and so on. But, among professors on Twitter and media personnel, no motive seems to be as widespread as this: He reminds them of someone they hated in college. This provides a good excuse for critics to mention all sorts of interesting things about themselves.

One popular Twitter user tweeted some months ago: “Pete Buttigieg reminds me of every reason I decided not to apply to Harvard in spite of being both a legacy and a recruited athlete.” (Her bio mentions that she attended Princeton.) A fellow Harvard graduate now working at a prestigious magazine and lecturing at Yale commented on a specific essay about Buttigieg: “My favorite part of this Buttigieg Bildungsprofil is the throwaway paragraph about taking a holiday from McKinsey to go to Somaliland as a tourist in 2008, and talking to officials there as part of his vacation.

I went there in 2002, but instead of talking to officials I performed Tuvan throat-singing on Radio Hargeisa, and instead of writing about it for the IHT, I wrote for a magazine published only in Basque. Here you see why Mayor Pete summitted [sic] the meritocracy ziggurat and I did not.” Tuvan throat-singing and writing fluency in Basque — talk about a throwaway paragraph!

A New Yorker writer and Smith College graduate wrote: “It’s weird that Mayor Pete went to Harvard because he’s got real strong ‘salutatorian at Duke’ energy.” There’s a burn: a mere Duke man, and a mere salutatorian! One might multiply examples ad infinitum.