Claims about Kamala Harris’ college studies began as satire

More than 30 years after Vice President Kamala Harris graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and law school in California, her former college professors are speaking out about her poor performance. At least that’s what viral social media posts claim.

“Howard University professors confirm: “Kamala was the worst student ever,” read a now-deleted Sept. 13 Facebook post. The post features a photo of Harris and a man seated behind a desk and links to a website for more information. We saw similar claims on X.

A different Instagram post uses similar language but features a different man, purportedly another professor. “Kamala’s Berkeley law professor says she topped his ‘worst student ever’ list,” the Sept. 12 post claimed. 

The Facebook and Instagram posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Threads and Instagram.)

Neither professor’s critique actually happened. These claims started as satire but were shared out of context. It also appears one satirical post inspired another on a second satire website.

The Facebook post’s language originated Sept. 10 from a satire website, Esspots.com, and was shared on that site’s Facebook account. The website and its Facebook account, SpaceX Fanclub, are marked as satire.

A reverse-image search shows the photo of the man in the Facebook claim is Bradford Grant, Howard University architecture professor. Grant came to Howard in 2007, according to his CV, long after Harris graduated in 1986 with her bachelor’s degree in political science and economics.

The man in the Instagram post, meanwhile, is Jerry Sandusky, a reverse-image search found. Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State University, was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison in 2012 after being convicted of 45 counts of child sex abuse.

The Instagram post also claims to quote Harris’ Berkeley law professor, but Harris graduated law school in 1989 at what was then University of California Hastings, now called the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, or UC Law SF — not Berkeley Law in Berkeley, California. (Harris was born in Oakland and spent much of her childhood in nearby Berkeley but did not attend graduate school there.) 

The Instagram post’s language comes from America’s Last Line of Defense, a network of satirical websites and social media pages that posts memes and made-up headlines involving political and cultural figures designed to make fun of conservatives. 

Satire websites have been the sources of recent viral false social media posts posing as news about politics and culture. Christopher Blair, the man behind America’s Last Line of Defense, told The New York Times in June that more accounts and websites were using AI to mimic his  content.

We rate these claims about Harris’ college professors dissing her academic acumen Pants on Fire!