Biden Claims He “Became a Full Professor at the University of Pennsylvania” — He Never Taught a Single Class

On 10/21/2022, President Biden spoke at Delaware State University about student loan forgiveness and repeated a claim he had made multiple times throughout his career: “I became a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania.” Biden framed the professorship as what he did after leaving the vice presidency — “I wasn’t going to get involved in politics anymore, so I became a full professor.” He also claimed three universities had approached him about becoming their president. The problem: Biden never taught a single class at the University of Pennsylvania. He held an honorary title, collected a reported $900,000 over multiple years, and made roughly a dozen public appearances — but performed none of the duties Americans associate with being a “full professor."

"I Became a Full Professor”

Biden told the story during remarks at Delaware State University, framing it as a personal narrative about his life after the vice presidency. “I wasn’t going to get involved in politics anymore,” Biden said. “So I became a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania.”

The claim was technically tethered to reality — UPenn did grant Biden the title “Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor” in 2017. But the title was honorary in practice. Biden never taught a class. He never held office hours. He never graded papers, designed curricula, or mentored students in the way that actual full professors do. He never conducted academic research or published scholarly work through the university.

What Biden did at UPenn was make approximately a dozen public appearances over two academic years, participate in some campus events, and lend his name and prestige to the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement — a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that bore his name but was located 100 miles from the university’s Philadelphia campus.

For this honorary arrangement, Biden received approximately $900,000 in compensation from the university — roughly $371,000 in 2017-2018 and $540,000 in 2018-2019, according to his financial disclosures. The compensation exceeded what most actual tenured professors at elite universities earned for full-time teaching, research, and service.

The “Professor” Claim Over the Years

Biden’s UPenn professorship claim was not a one-time slip. He had described himself as a professor or teacher at the university on multiple occasions throughout his political career. The repeated use of “professor” and “teaching” to describe what was functionally an honorary sinecure suggested the characterization was deliberate rather than accidental.

The pattern fit a broader tendency in Biden’s personal storytelling: inflating his credentials and experiences beyond what the facts supported. Over the decades, Biden had claimed to have marched in the civil rights movement (he later said he was not actually marching), graduated in the top half of his law school class (he graduated 76th out of 85), attended law school on a full scholarship (he received a half scholarship based on financial need), and earned three undergraduate degrees (he earned one). Each claim shared the same characteristic: a kernel of truth stretched beyond its breaking point.

Three Universities Wanted Him as President

Biden added another credential to the story. “But before that occurred, three universities came to me and said they wanted to interview me to consider my being a president of the university,” Biden said.

The claim — that three universities actively recruited a former vice president with no academic administrative experience to serve as their president — was unverifiable. University presidential searches are typically conducted through formal search committees with extensive academic and administrative criteria. While a former vice president might receive honorary consideration or polite inquiries, the claim that three universities formally approached Biden for presidential candidacy was extraordinary and unsupported by any public record.

Jill Biden’s Response

Biden concluded the story with an anecdote about Dr. Jill Biden’s reaction. “My wife, who’s a professor at a community college — she has two masters and a PhD — but she’s smarter than me,” Biden said. “And she looked at me, she said, if you do that, I’m leaving you. She said it’s one of the toughest jobs in America, especially if you start arguing about parking spaces and office windows.”

The anecdote served multiple purposes: it reinforced Biden’s “I married up” narrative, highlighted Jill Biden’s academic credentials, and provided humor to end the story. The joke about parking spaces and office windows was a reference to the common observation that academic politics can be petty — but it came from someone whose own academic appointment involved no parking space disputes because he was rarely on campus.

The contrast between Biden’s honorary arrangement — no teaching, no campus presence, $900,000 — and Jill Biden’s actual career as a working professor who taught classes daily was striking. Jill Biden genuinely earned her academic title through decades of classroom instruction. Joe Biden’s “full professor” title was a prestige arrangement with a compensation package that actual professors could only dream of.

The Penn Biden Center

Biden’s UPenn connection was primarily channeled through the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which opened in Washington, D.C. in February 2018. The center was staffed by former Biden aides and served as a policy shop and soft landing pad for Biden’s political network between the Obama administration and Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.

The center would later gain notoriety for a different reason: in November 2022 — just weeks after this speech — classified documents from Biden’s vice presidency were discovered in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center. The discovery prompted a special counsel investigation and complicated Biden’s political position, particularly given the administration’s aggressive pursuit of former President Trump for retaining classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

The classified documents at the Penn Biden Center raised questions about the security arrangements at a facility that was funded by a university that had received tens of millions of dollars from anonymous Chinese donors — a connection that Republicans highlighted as a potential national security concern.

The Delaware State University Setting

Biden made the professor claim while visiting Delaware State University, a historically Black university, to promote his student loan forgiveness program. The setting was carefully chosen: HBCUs and their students were among the primary intended beneficiaries of Biden’s forgiveness plan, particularly the provision offering $20,000 in forgiveness for Pell Grant recipients.

The irony of Biden inflating his own academic credentials while speaking about student debt was subtle but real. Biden was telling students burdened by the cost of education that he had been a “full professor” — while his actual arrangement exemplified the kind of credential inflation and institutional access that people without powerful connections could never achieve. No ordinary American could receive $900,000 from an Ivy League university for not teaching.

The Pattern of Embellishment

Biden’s professor claim fit within a decades-long pattern of biographical embellishment that had been documented throughout his political career. The most famous instance came during his 1988 presidential campaign, when Biden was caught plagiarizing a speech from British Labour leader Neil Kinnock — not just borrowing the words but adopting Kinnock’s personal biography as his own, claiming his ancestors had worked in coal mines when they had not.

The 1988 plagiarism scandal sank Biden’s first presidential campaign. But the underlying tendency — embellishing personal history to create a more compelling narrative — persisted throughout his career. The “full professor” claim was a milder version of the same impulse: taking a real but modest connection (an honorary title) and presenting it as something substantially more impressive (active teaching professorship).

Key Takeaways

Biden claimed he “became a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania” — he held an honorary title and never taught a single class.
He received approximately $900,000 from UPenn for roughly a dozen public appearances over two academic years.
Biden claimed three universities approached him about becoming their president — an unverifiable assertion with no supporting public record.
The Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C. would later become the site where classified vice presidential documents were discovered in November 2022.
The professor claim was part of a decades-long pattern of biographical embellishment documented throughout Biden’s political career.

Transcript Highlights

The following is transcribed from the video audio (unverified — AI-generated from audio).

I wasn’t going to get involved in politics anymore. So I became a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Three universities came to me and said they wanted to interview me to consider my being a president of the university.
My wife, who’s a professor at a community college, she has two masters and a PhD, but she’s smarter than me.
She looked at me, she said, if you do that, I’m leaving you.
She said it’s one of the toughest jobs in America, especially if you start arguing about parking spaces and office windows.
I wasn’t going to get involved in politics tomorrow.

Full transcript: 101 words transcribed via Whisper AI.