Times Americans Proved They Were Clueless

We all tend to assume that someone who graduates from an Ivy League school must be brilliant. But in thinking that, we are forgetting that there are two ways to get admitted to Harvard: you can be extremely intelligent, or you can be extremely rich. So it is very possible to get into Harvard and get a degree from it without being particularly bright.

Here is an example. What I would like to know is whether this person thought that New York and Ireland were on the same landmass, or whether he was thinking that there was a very long ferry that ran across the Atlantic. Or perhaps he had invented a car that could drive on the bottom of the ocean.