The College Fix

The Sen. Ted Cruz pile-on continues.

The Harvard Crimson on Wednesday published a mean-spirited blog post regarding rumors that Cruz, while at Harvard Law School, would only study with other students from Harvard, Princeton or Yale, stating: “But when Senator Ted Cruz—a 1995 Harvard Law School graduate and Republican from Texas—was a student at HLS, his own study groups had an admissions standard almost as inflated as his own ego.”

The Crimson cited another mean-spirited article, this one from the October GQ, which stated: “The elite academic circles that Cruz was now traveling in began to rub off. As a law student at Harvard, he refused to study with anyone who hadn’t been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Says Damon Watson, one of Cruz’s law-school roommates: “He said he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown.”

Then GQ had to run a correction, sort of:

Editor’s Note: While GQ stands by  its reporting that Cruz told law school colleagues he would only study with  Harvard, Princeton or Yale graduates — Zengerle’s source, Damon Watson, was  quoted accurately above, and the day GQ’s article was published online,  Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall independently verified the study-group claim— the Texas senator did evidently make at least one exception. (For a Northwestern alum—not even a  “minor Ivy.”) GQ’s original article should have reported that Cruz voiced his reluctance rather than flat-out refused.

But the claims have been out-right refuted by others. Breitbart reports:

Cruz’s Harvard classmate Jeff Hinck told Breitbart News he would study with Cruz at Harvard even though he did not graduate from an Ivy League undergraduate program. Hinck was actually a member of Cruz’s study group and would know whether Cruz would study non-Ivy League graduates.

“The claim that GQ published is silly and flat-out wrong,” Hinck wrote in an email to Breitbart News on Monday evening. “I was in Ted’s study group – along with his first-year roommate David Panton – and I graduated from Northwestern, not an Ivy League institution.”

It seems many will stop at nothing to trash Cruz, regardless of whether the claims are fair or accurate. If you want to know what The College Fix thinks of Cruz, read this.

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