Yale certainly is ashamed of JD Vance LAW ’13, who was recently sworn in as the 50th vice president of the United States with his palm on the Bible belonging to his great-grandmother, who was from rural Appalachian Kentucky. Vance was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, which is a small town within the metropolitan area of Cincinnati. But Vance proudly proclaims his Appalachian heritage and doesn’t seem inclined to correct anyone who believes that his actual hometown and upbringing site was Jackson, Kentucky — a small area in eastern Kentucky about 82 miles to the northeast of where I grew up.

It isn’t coincidental that Vance chose Jackson, a small town in Breathitt County, as the setting for his written-to-be-a-best-seller, “Hillbilly Elegy.” In 2014, The New York Times went around the country to index the quality of life in every U.S. county. When they got to eastern Kentucky, they realized it was a place with a different kind of poverty. While the 10 counties with the lowest quality of life were all in the rural American South, six out of the 10 were in a more specific region, eastern Kentucky. 

Breathitt County — where Vance spent his childhood summers — ranked the sixth lowest county in the country for quality of life. Clay County, declared the worst place to live in the U.S. by the Times journalist working on the project, is directly adjacent to Breathitt County. The region the two counties occupy was specifically said to be more difficult to live in than “the ghost cities of Detroit, Camden and Gary, the sunbaked misery of inland California and the isolated reservations where Native American communities were left to struggle.”

It is this reality that makes me most sympathetic to my poverty-stricken fellow eastern Kentuckians. I certainly do not deny their poverty and dire socioeconomic circumstances. Nor do I deny the poverty that Vice President Vance — who refers to poverty as a “family tradition” — experienced during his childhood. It is Vance, however, who is guilty of stepping on the necks of poor people vis-à-vis his association with the Trump-Vance Administration.

Last summer, when Vance became the VP nominee, Bobi Conn, a Kentuckian, wrote in Time: “He claims to be for the working class. But it’s now time to ask what he will actually do for us. After all, we know what the working class has done for him.” Trump’s first term in office saw devastation for the poor, and his second term has already inaugurated economic policies which economists say will not favor the working class either. 

Another non-coincidence was where JD Vance found himself when the Times published “What’s the Matter with eastern Kentucky?” — not to spoil things, but you can be sure it was not eastern Kentucky. Given that Vance had graduated from this country’s preeminent law school a year prior, he was an apparently intelligent man, and I have to imagine that he read The New York Times investigation into the region he has long claimed as his home.

And then came his book. 

“Hillbilly Elegy” was not only a rags-to-riches story, it was written to be an educated, moderate Republican’s explanation of the 2016 presidential election and Donald Trump’s ascendance to the highest office in this land.

First on the “rags” of “Hillbilly Elegy.” It goes without saying that Cincinnatians are not often seen as “hillbillies.” In North America, Cincinnati is the 44th largest metropolitan area by population — roughly three times the size of the greater New Haven area. Since it was not the hillbillies of Cincinnati that Vance refers to in his bestselling book, which has sold over three million copies, it must have been the hillbillies that are closer to my neck of the woods he was referring to. Vance spent his summers there with his grandparents who meant a great deal to him. Does that qualify him as an eastern Kentuckian? 

My grandparents, who live in the Umpqua Valley of Southwestern Oregon, meant a great deal to me as a child, and I would often spend my summers at their farm, splashing in the creek and picking blueberries from their orchard. But I do not claim that Oregon is where I am from, even though I have more family there than Vice President Vance has in Kentucky. I take great issue with Vance’s casual exploitation of the region I am from to fulfill the “rags” component of his book. The place I am from has gotten little more than the “stepping stone” treatment by a man who has often adduced eastern Kentucky as evidence of his folksy, by-the-bootstraps upbringing. JD Vance must be the only man who gets counted as blue-collar while possessing a degree from what is arguably the most prestigious academic institution in the United States. As a Kentuckian, I am ashamed of Vance’s use of my home for the sake of accumulating a fortune as an author — he certainly did not accumulate his multi-million dollar net worth during his short, and fraught, career in venture capital. 

But as a Yale student, I am similarly ashamed of Vance for his use of this university to fulfill the second criterion of his rags-to-riches book. Yale, too, was used as a stepping stone for Vance. After his degree helped him complete the sequence of events he would use as material to write his book — which got the Hollywood treatment by way of Netflix, Glenn Close and Amy Adams — he now decries the kind of elite institutions he and his boss cut their teeth at. Convenient but not coincidental.

But what is most shameful is not Vance’s successful exploitation of my home and my university — rather, what he has done with the acclaim.

Vance was chosen to be the Republican vice presidential nominee by a man who, under the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment, should have never had the constitutional eligibility to be reelected to the office of the presidency. It is Vance who understood early on the dangers of Donald Trump. He was conscious of Trump’s similarities to Hitler. It was Vance who likened his would-be boss to the Führer, even when most Democrats weren’t willing to make that comparison. Vance debuted as an expounder and expositor of Trump’s danger, but it is Vance who has devolved into an enabler of Trump and his most fascistic impulses.

Yale did not take as kindly to the news of Vance’s ascension to the vice presidency as it did when William Howard Taft became the first alumni of the presidential kind, nor did it respond to Vance’s election with the same congratulatory spirit as Vance’s undergraduate alma mater, Ohio State.

But Yale students — and a good bit of society — take seriously this university’s role as a vanguard of democracy through educating students who become civil servants and civically-minded neighbors. In that sense, Vance’s vice presidency is not the success of a Yale student and it is most certainly not the success of this university either. 

JD Vance’s story was not coincidental or accidental. He explicitly juxtaposed a limited portion of his lifetime spent between Kentucky and Yale for the sake of publishing a best-selling book turned Hollywood hit. It is also this university, then, that has not coincidentally or accidentally disregarded his recent job promotion that exceeds any job promotion a Yale student has received since the election of former President George W. Bush, in 2001. 

Yale is ashamed of our 40-year-old law school alumnus who is enabling the most dangerous figure in American politics since Nixon. But not even Nixon caused a kind of chaos that warranted two impeachments, and he did not incite an insurrection. That was the man JD Vance is now beholden to for the foreseeable future — at least the next three years. 

When our school fit neatly as the setting of the second act of his bestselling narrative, he happily bandied the name about. But when a blue-collar became more fashionable than a white one, he hardly uttered “Yale” again. Whether or not he will try to squirm back into Yale’s good graces will no doubt be determined by his incessant desire for power. Just like it did when he ran for senate, and for vice president. 

In 2028, then, we will probably find out: Is JD Vance ashamed of Yale?

ZACHARY CLIFTON is a first year in Benjamin Franklin College. He can be reached at zachary.clifton@yale.edu.