Background and Context
Bartlet's line comes from a campaign flashback: an aide, Doug, wants to cut the word "torpor" from Abbey's speech because voters might not know it. Bartlet's rebuke draws a line between two theories of communication — meeting an audience where it is versus refusing to insult it — and adds a barb aimed at any candidate who markets education while dumbing down his own language to seem safe. Mike's corollary lifts that logic out of campaign rhetoric and files it as a standing rule for an institution whose entire mission is education: if hiding your own erudition to court an audience is bad enough for a candidate, it is fatal for an organization whose product is learning.
Interpretation
The corollary is built as a conditional — "if that is the case, then" — which makes it worth tracing Mike's inference rather than treating it as a free-standing aphorism. Bartlet's premise is that an institution or person claiming the authority of education forfeits the right to disparage education itself; doing so isn't modesty, it's self-undermining rhetoric — a message that quietly contradicts the credibility it depends on. Mike's "if that is the case" accepts this premise wholesale and then re-scopes it: not a politician performing anti-intellectualism to seem relatable, but "we" — an organization positioned as "the premier education resource for today's military officers." The maxim's force sits in that re-scoping. A candidate who hides his education loses an election; an educational institution that disparages education loses its reason to exist. The contradiction Bartlet named as a rhetorical misstep becomes, in Mike's hands, an institutional identity failure — a mismatch between what an organization claims to be and how it talks about the thing it claims to provide.
"Disparage" is doing careful work here too. It doesn't mean simplify — Bartlet himself isn't arguing against plain language, he's arguing against treating the audience as too dim to meet halfway. Disparagement is something narrower and more corrosive: the casual, often unexamined habit — inside training organizations, military and civilian alike — of instructors, designers, or leaders speaking of "education" itself with a wink, as overhead, as something to get through rather than something the institution is actually selling. It shows up as "nobody reads the reading," "just give them the slides," "theory doesn't matter, just tell them what to do" — small, recurring gestures of contempt for the very asset the organization is asking its audience to trust it with. Each one is survivable alone. Repeated as culture, they hollow out the credibility the institution needs to be believed when it calls itself premier.
The maxim also carries an implicit warning about audience, particularly acute in a military-officer context. Officers are trained to detect exactly this kind of hypocrisy — an organization's actual regard for a subject reveals itself faster in offhand asides than in mission statements. If the people delivering officer education routinely joke about education's uselessness, the institution has told its most attentive audience, in the register that actually lands, precisely how much its own product is worth. Mike's corollary is a discipline against that leak: don't let the throwaway comment undercut the mission statement.
Current Relevance
The maxim speaks directly into a moment when disparaging expertise has become a recognizable cultural posture rather than a lapse. Anti-credentialism and "do your own research" skepticism of institutional knowledge have intensified across the past decade, and training and instructional-design cultures are not immune — the pressure to make everything "bite-sized," "snackable," and frictionless has, in plenty of organizations, curdled into open contempt for depth itself, where anyone asking for more than a bullet-point deck is treated as academic and out of touch. Generative AI compounds the pressure: it is now trivially easy to produce plausible-looking training content without anyone involved having done the underlying thinking, which makes the temptation to disparage the slower, harder work of actual education sharper than it was when Mike likely wrote this line. Military and corporate training alike face the same fork Bartlet described in the White House hallway: appeal downward and call it accessibility, or do the harder work of raising the floor and stand behind it.
Impact and Legacy
As a personal maxim rather than a public artifact, this line's legacy lives in the company it keeps: filed alongside Mike's maxims on incompetence, courseware design, and "the Pharisees of education," it reads as one plank in a working professional ethic built across a career in instructional design. Bartlet's own line, independently, has had real circulation of its own — quoted for two decades in educator forums and "best West Wing quotes" lists as a rallying line against political and cultural anti-intellectualism, evidence that Aaron Sorkin's writing struck a nerve well beyond the show's fictional campaign. Mike's contribution is narrower but sharper: he took a line built for a politician and turned it into an operating discipline for anyone running an organization whose credibility depends on visibly respecting what it teaches.
Contrasting Views or Controversies
The strongest objection is that "raising the lowest common denominator" can itself be a mask for gatekeeping. Simplification is not always disparagement — clear, plain language is often the product of good pedagogy, not a betrayal of it, and in operational military contexts (a rapid procedural checklist under combat stress, a briefing to a mixed audience under time pressure) prioritizing clarity and brevity over completeness isn't anti-education, it's fitness for purpose. An instructor who insists on academic thoroughness when a checklist would save lives faster isn't defending education, he's substituting his own comfort with complexity for the audience's actual need. Read uncharitably, Mike's corollary risks licensing exactly that substitution — treating every push toward accessibility as a symptom of institutional decay rather than sound design.
A second, related objection: Bartlet's line was written for a politician being asked to hide his intelligence to seem electable — a very different situation from an institution calibrating content to a genuinely mixed-skill audience of officers at different career stages. Collapsing the two risks flattering an instructor's preference for rigor as principle when it may simply be resistance to doing the harder design work of teaching well and accessibly at once — the two are not actually in tension when the design is good, and treating them as opposites is itself a false binary the maxim doesn't fully guard against.
Practical Application
- Individual (instructor/designer): Audit your own casual asides in the classroom or courseware review — "nobody reads this part," "theory doesn't matter here" — for the quiet disparagement they normalize, even when the formal material is rigorous.
- Organizational (training/education providers): Treat instructor credentialing, content review, and design time as investments that visibly match the "premier" claim, rather than settling for check-the-box content while marketing depth.
- Organizational (leadership): When trimming a curriculum for time or budget, distinguish cutting scope (defensible) from cutting rigor while calling it the same course (the disparagement the maxim warns against).
- Civic/Leadership: Leaders who claim authority through expertise — Bartlet's "Education President," Mike's "premier education resource" — should expect their own claimed standard to be the one their audience actually measures them against.
Background on the Author
Mike Hower's maxim collection is the record of a career built largely in instructional design, including work developing training for U.S. military officers — a fact he states directly elsewhere in his own writing in this corpus (see "Mike on Merit and Perception," which recounts his Air Force career). That dual vantage — someone who has both served within a military hierarchy and built the educational material meant to develop its officers — is what authorizes this particular corollary. It isn't an outside observer's complaint about institutional hypocrisy; it's an insider's rule for an institution he had a hand in building, aimed at a failure mode he was positioned to actually see: the gap between an organization's stated mission and the small, corrosive habits of language that undercut it from within.