Scott Walker (R-WI) must be the front-runner for the GOP’s presidential nomination. Why? He is earning significant scrutiny from mainstream media outlets, primarily over two issues, which are related–his lack of a college degree and his views on evolution. While we need a president with brainpower, smart presidents are not always good presidents. What we need is a president with wisdom, courage, and prudence.

Walker failed to finish his college degree at Marquette University. The Washington Post‘s David Fahrenthold wrote a long story on Walker’s college exploits which culminated in four years of study and more than thirty credits short of graduation. What happened? The picture is muddy because Walker’s basic claim, that he got a job and never got around to finishing, is obviously true, but he appears to have been a less than stellar student. His professors recall an unfocused pupil, and his friends remember him more as a political animal than as a budding scholar.

Walker, a self-declared evangelical Christian whose father was a Baptist minister, while in London last week, was asked if he believes in evolution. Walker chose to ‘punt‘ on the question and left it at that. Now, his high school science teacher and Al Sharpton have weighed in negatively. There is an interesting mix in how others have responded. Some pundits think Walker is right to leave the issue alone, and others think he should address the issue directly.

Are these things connected and do they matter? The assumption that seems to undergird both criticisms is that Walker lacks either the intelligence or the sophistication to lead the free world. Let me pull this apart just a little.

Without question, I want my president, whoever he or she may be, to be bright, inquisitive, and knowledgeable. I want them to be familiar with major strands of thought. I want them to understand American history and government and to possess a sense of America in light of both western and global trends. I want them to read voraciously and to challenge accepted patterns of thought as needed. Generally, people with these traits filter, or have filtered, into our educational institutions and many emerge with a degree. Many people with these traits don’t finish college or never go. That does not prove they lack these traits. Also, many people who have college degrees are neither bright nor inquisitive nor knowledgeable. The assumption that somehow a B.A. proves something about its holder is stale for a variety of reasons.

Education today does not necessarily yield an educated mind. So much of our education, even at the undergraduate level, is technical and narrow, often a reflection of the professors’ own graduate training. Gone are the days when chemistry majors also grappled with major questions of truth, beauty, or justice through a general educational curriculum. Even in the institutions that still require a demanding, liberal arts core of courses, students often only endure, much less embrace, such coursework.

In this sense, Walker’s lack of a college degree proves little. His views on evolution prove even less. If Walker becomes president, he would be an oddity. Of the presidents since Theodore Roosevelt, only Harry Truman did not have a college degree. The norm, naturally, is for our presidents, and those who aspire to the office, to flout Ivy League credentials, sometimes even bolstered by a stint at Oxford. But just as Walker’s lack of a degree proves little, others’ possession of such credentials signifies only that they got into college and finished.

An example might help. Woodrow Wilson was, by nearly any important measure, the most academically accomplished president since Thomas Jefferson. He was, intellectually speaking, a giant. He was president of the American Political Science Association, and he wrote some of our most important works on American government and politics. If there is any scholarly threshold presidents ought to clear ideally, Wilson managed it easily.

He was, at least in my estimation, a terrible president. Wilson sponsored and enforced the ruthless suppression of free speech during World War 1. He fought, hard, to undermine America’s constitutional legacy and the stench of his foreign policy, which was dangerously idealistic, is still with us. Wilson’s views on race were regressive and segregationist.

What we need is not a credentialed president, but a brave one. We don’t need a president who won all the academic prizes, but one with the prudence to know what is possible and what is not. Presidents, as they face a hostile world and work their way through a dizzying array of domestic coalitions, need wisdom far more than an impressive diploma.

Though he did not write any tomes on American government, Abraham Lincoln understood his country and his context better than anyone else. Lincoln was a master of rhetoric and a cold, clear thinker. He was principled. He was not always right, but Lincoln, who held virtually no intellectual credentials outside of being admitted to the bar to practice law, was brilliant and thoughtful.

We need more Lincolns and fewer Wilsons. Is Scott Walker Abraham Lincoln? Probably not, but we need to ask the right questions and peel away a few layers of political nonsense to figure that out.

Evolution? That is a different matter that bears more thought and discussion. More on that later…