Biden Says He ‘Became A Professor’ After Leaving White House — Made $775,000, Never Taught A Class

In yet another weird claim, Joe Biden now says he “became a professor” after he left the White House.

During a campaign event in Georgetown, South Carolina on Wednesday, the former vice president said he “became a teacher, became a professor” instead of “taking a Wall Street job” when he left the White House in 2017.

But teachers teach. Biden didn’t teach. Not one class.

“The University of Pennsylvania did indeed make Biden the ‘Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor’ in 2017, but neither the school nor Biden expected him to teach any classes, according to comments at the time,” the Daily Caller reported.

“He will not be teaching classes,” Biden spokesperson Kate Bedingfield said in 2017.

One article at The Daily Pennsylvanian featured the headline “No One Is Really Sure What Joe Biden Will Be Doing At Penn.”

UPenn announced Biden’s hiring on February 7, just a week after he left office, and by the end of February Biden’s role was “still uncertain” and “being ironed out,” University spokesperson Stephen MacCarthy told the Pennsylvanian.

And it turned out to be a pretty sweet gig — every bit as lucrative as a Wall Street job.

Biden delivered four on-campus speeches in 2017 and four more the next year. Penn paid him $776,527 — “nearly double the average salary for everyday professors,” according to PhillyMag. In 2017, “the average annual salary for everyday full professors at Penn — excluding high-earners like doctors who don’t usually teach — was $214,000.”

In its 2019 piece, the magazine also said Biden “made $15.6 million over the past two years.”

Biden, 78, either has a really hard time remembering what he did — and didn’t — do, or he has an odd relationship with the truth.

In at least three campaign appearances over the last few weeks, Biden said that during a trip to South Africa in the 1970s, he was arrested as he sought to visit Nelson Mandela in prison.

“This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,” Biden said at a campaign event in South Carolina, the New York Times reported. “I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbens (sic) Island.”

“After he got free and became president, he came to Washington and came to my office,” Biden said later at a black history awards lunch in Las Vegas. “He threw his arms around me and said, ‘I want to say thank you.’ I said, ‘What are you thanking me for, Mr. President?’ He said, ‘You tried to see me. You got arrested trying to see me.’”

But Biden never mentioned the arrest in his memoir — and he’s never mentioned it on the campaign trail until now, a week before the vote in South Carolina, where blacks will play a large role in picking the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. And Biden said he was arrested in Soweto, a suburb of Johannesburg, a city in the northeast of the country. But at the time, Mandela was being held on Robben Island, near Cape Town in the southwest part of the country — The two sites are some 900 miles apart.

A campaign spokesman recast the whole tale this week, saying Biden wasn’t arrested, but instead “separated” from a congressional delegation for a short period while at a South African airport.

“He was separated from his party at the airport,” Kate Bedingfield told reporters after Tuesday night’s Democratic debate.

“It was a separation. They — he was not allowed to go through the same door that the — the rest of the party he was with. Obviously, it was apartheid South Africa. There was a white door, there was a black door. He did not want to go through the white door and have the rest of the party go through the black door. He was separated. This was during a trip while they were there in Johannesburg.”