Pete Buttigieg’s Harvard Professor Explains Why He’s the Perfect Candidate for These Times

Pete Buttigieg’s undergraduate professor James T. Kloppenberg talks about the civic minded student and masterful crafter of careful, successful policy that he taught at Harvard, and why he thinks he should be president and to shine light into Buttigieg’s past where he has been a stalwart champion of progressive Democratic ideals. Kloppenberg writes in Commonweal that despite the inchoate results of the Iowa Caucus which has stained every following primary vote, Buttigieg’s ascendence is no accident.

Kloppenberg: “Instead, the big surprise has been the meteoric rise of a formerly unknown newcomer, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who seemed to come out of nowhere. Except that he did not. I have known Buttigieg since he was an undergraduate at Harvard. I taught Peter, as he was known then, in two classes during his senior year, 2003–2004. He was a frequent visitor to office hours, and seeing him two or three times a week during nine months meant that we became pretty well acquainted. We stayed in touch after he graduated. Although his transcript showed that I was one of the few Harvard professors to give him anything less than an A grade, he asked me to write one of the letters of recommendation for the Rhodes scholarship that took him to Oxford. A few years after he returned from England, I met with him, and with a couple dozen of his politically active peers, to talk about my book Reading Obama at a gatheringE he helped organize. When Buttigieg was elected mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and he returned to Cambridge for conferences at the Kennedy School of Government, we got together to discuss everything from the details of smart sewers and street paving to the intractable, perennial challenges of urban renewal and race relations in a once-prosperous city struggling with deindustrialization.”

READ THE FULL STORY HERE.