A professor at Harvard drew the ire of conservatives on Twitter when he thanked Joe Biden for enacting student loan forgiveness measures that will benefit tens of millions of Americans.
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor and notably left-leaning commenter, wrote a tweet praising Mr Biden’s move on Wednesday to forgive $10,000 of student loan debt and an additional $10,000 of debt for individuals who qualified for Pell Grants if they come from households making less than $125,000 per year.
“Good news for thousands of my former students,” Mr Tribe wrote. “I’m grateful on their behalf, Mr President.”
Mr Tribe shared an article about Mr Biden’s debt forgiveness along with his message.
While the vast majority of Mr Tribe’s respondents were supportive of his message, some conservative voices were annoyed by the praise.
Most of the comments focused on the fact that Mr Tribe is a professor at Harvard, one of the most exclusive schools in the country which is often equated by critics with elitism and wealth.
“Finally a break for the Harvard trained lawyers,” Georgia’s Republican Party Chairman David Shafer replied.
Another conservative journalist, Jordan Schachtel, asked if his “Harvard students needed a bailout?”
Others, like Defense of Freedom Institute spokesperson Angela Morabito, pointed out that he teaches at a school with a “$42 billion endowment”.
While Mr Tribe was targetted because he teaches at Harvard, the vast majority of people who will benefit from the loan forgiveness measures did not attend Harvard, and likely make substantially less money than the average Harvard graduate.
An estimated 45 million Americans have student loan debt, accounting for 13.5 per cent of the US, or one in 7 Americans, according to census data. Around 42 per cent of Americans over the age of 25 have a college degree, but one does not need to have a degree to have student loan debts.
Some critics of student loan forgiveness — including former US Secretary of Education and student loan company investor Betsy DeVos — have argued that it “isn’t fair” to individuals who have already paid off their loans, though arguing that making conditions better for people than they were prior could be made against any progressive policy in the history of humanity.
Conservatives frequently champion tax cuts for corporations and defend subsidies for farmers, but those groups only make up 8.9 per cent and 1.3 per cent of Americans, respectively. Student loan forgiveness will likely benefit a larger number of Americans than both of those groups combined.
