In
preparation for her run for the Democratic nomination in 2020 against
twenty-three other candidates (suggested campaign slogan: “23 and
Me”), Elizabeth Warren did two things in order to clear her name of
the stench engendered by her misappropriation of racial identity. In
October of last year, she released the results of a DNA test
indicating that ten generations ago, she may have had a Native
American ancestor. Prior to that, however, she had released her
personnel file from Harvard, and this resulted in a September 1, 2018
article in the Boston
Globe in
which reporter Annie Linskey concluded that Warren’s claim to be a
Cherokee had had no effect on her career. While the DNA test got far
more attention from Donald Trump and the media, the Globe’s
blessing of Warren’s convenient claims of Indian ancestry deserves
more attention than it has received.
The
point is that there is one reason, and one reason alone, that
Elizabeth Warren can credibly run for president: she is a US Senator
from Massachusetts. And the reason she could credibly run for US
Senator in the first place was that she was a Professor at the
Harvard Law School. There is no comparable credential. Yale’s Law
School may occasionally be ranked higher than Harvard’s by the
people who rate such things, but there is simply nothing more
prestigious in the world of deep-thinking-on-public-affairs than
being a Harvard Law Professor. People like Lawrence Tribe, Alan
Dershowitz, Lani Guinier and Elizabeth Warren become celebrities.
Elena Kagan was a Harvard Law Professor before joining the US Supreme
Court. Even mere graduates of HLS become famous---four other current
Supreme Court justices also got their degrees at Harvard Law.
In
the Globe
article, Ms. Linskey interviewed 31 Harvard law professors (all she
could find), who were on the faculty at the time Warren was hired for
the academic year beginning in the Fall of 1992. She reports that 30
of them said there was no discussion of Warren’s Native American
claims in the deliberations that led to her hiring. One of the 31
said he thought it came up, but he wasn’t sure. In addition,
several of the 31 stated not merely that the issue was not discussed,
but also that her racial status had nothing to do with their decision
to recommend her for hiring. These interviews form the entire basis
of Linskey’s conclusion that, in fact, Warren’s status as a
“woman of color” or a Native American was not a factor in her
hiring.
This
conclusion cannot be taken seriously.
In
response to Linskey’s Globe
article, a woman named Jennifer Braceras, a law student at Harvard
during the relevant period, wrote a piece entitled “One of
Elizabeth Warren’s Harvard Law Students Explains Why Her
Native-American Gambit Matters.” She took Warren’s class, and
she even liked her as a teacher, but she points out that Warren used
her “family stories” at a time when elite law schools were
desperate to hire racial and ethnic minorities.
“In
the early 1990s, HLS was a hotbed of left-wing agitation. I was
there and remember well the explosive protests and sit-ins that
erupted over a lack of diversity on the faculty. In April 1992,
scores of protestors demonstrated outside Dean Robert Clark’s
office, some of them wearing masks of Clark’s face. Nine students
(my closest friend among them) refused to leave the Dean’s office
for over 25 hours. Their specific demand? That the administration
hire a faculty member who was a “woman of color.”
This
was the atmosphere when Elizabeth Warren arrived in Cambridge for her
job interview. And while it may be true that her racial identity was
not explicitly discussed, that was because it didn’t need to be.
Since 1986, when she taught at the University of Texas, Warren had
listed herself as a minority law professor in the Association of
American Law Schools Annual Directory, a standard reference. Her
name, in bold, was listed in each of the next eight editions.
So
on the face of it, the claims of the 31 faculty members interviewed
by the Globe
are
hardly credible, are they? I mean, what are they supposed to say to
a reporter from the
Boston
Globe?
“Sure. We just hired her because she said she was a Cherokee or a
Sioux or something. We didn’t care. We just needed a Red Indian
on the faculty before Jesse Jackson showed up.” (Which he did, by
the way.) I don’t think so. Assuming their true motives were
exactly what they appear to be, there is a zero percent chance any of
them would admit it today. Plus, given that this occurred more than
25 years ago, one can understand that even if their motives had been
fully as cynical as they probably were, the process of cognitive
dissonance would by now allow them to view themselves in a much more
favorable light. Memories change over time, usually in a way that
makes it easier for us to live with ourselves.
But
quite apart from the credibility of the 31 faculty members, there is
another reason Elizabeth Warren would NEVER have been hired to be a
Harvard Law Professor on her own merits. There is another, much more
obvious reason she would not have asked to join the faculty unless
the fix was in.
Ever
wonder who gets hired to teach at Harvard Law School? Ever wonder
what law school they
went to? Would you be surprised to hear that most of them went to
Harvard Law School?
The
HLS faculty is listed in a directory on the University website. I
looked at them all. For the ones whose law school degree was not
listed, I went a bit further and Googled their education. Then I made
a list of the full-time members of the faculty and where they went to
law school. I eliminated the Emeritus listings because most of them
are 120 years old and don’t teach much, and I eliminated the
“Clinical” professors because these are not primarily academic
positions, so they are much less prestigious.
For
the 92 full-time non-emeritus, non-clinical, members of the HLS
faculty, here’s a tally on where they got their law degrees:
Harvard
57
Yale
24
Chicago
5
NYU
3
Stanford
1
Columbia
1
Texas
1
The
next step was to check these schools on the 2020 U.S. News Ranking of
American Law Schools. The top six of these are, in order, Yale,
Stanford, Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, and NYU. These six schools
thus account for 91 of the 92 full-time law professors currently
teaching at Harvard. The University of Texas is listed at #16 (of
the 201 law schools ranked), so it too confers an elite status on its
graduates. The lone HLS professor who went to Texas, by the way, is
Kristen A. Stilt, a professor of Islamic Law who, prior to law
school, had obtained a Ph. D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies
from---wait for it---Harvard University.
There
is very little turnover in the U.S. News Rankings, which have been
compiled since 1987. There have only been fourteen law schools that
have ever made the top ten. And Texas is one of them.
Rutgers
Law School is not among that magic fourteen. It is ranked 75th
in the current U.S. News list, which is about where it always shows
up. That’s where Elizabeth Warren went to law school after her
undergraduate career at the University of Houston, a school primarily
known for its basketball teams.
I’m
not saying Elizabeth Warren is a dope, and I’m not saying that if
you don’t have a law degree from an elite school like Harvard or
Yale, you probably drool more than the rest of us. I’m not a snob.
But
the people at Harvard are. The elitists at a place like HLS think
the world of themselves; they like themselves a
lot.
They would NEVER hire a graduate of Rutgers Law School to teach at
Harvard because her mere presence there would reflect on them and
their own prestige. They would be afraid her Rutgers cooties would
rub off on them. Unless, of course, they were forced to hire her for
reasons of political correctness and “diversity.”
I
will wager that no one with a law degree from Rutgers, or a school
ranked lower, has EVER been offered a professorship at Harvard Law
School. The Boston
Globe’s
conclusion that Elizabeth Warren was hired purely on her own merits
is based solely on the self-serving tut-tuts of Harvard academics who
thought this had been swept under the carpet 28 years ago and are now
appalled (“Appalled,” I say!), that anyone would question them
now.
Even
the
Globe
acknowledges there were serious questions about Warren at the time
she was hired. For one thing, her primary strong point was
apparently her skill as a teacher, which tends to be pretty far down
the list of qualifications for a professorship.
“’I
thought she was going to be a whiz-bang in the classroom,’ said
Andrew Kaufman, a Harvard law professor who supported her. ‘You
just have to be in the room with her to see it. It was electric.
She would call on 40 people in the hour. The atmosphere was highly
charged. The questions were good. She made people think….’”
Linskey
continues:
“There
was less consensus over her brand of scholarship, in which she had
pioneered a way of using surveys and actual bankruptcy records to
determine how laws affected real people. Warren’s approach was a
little too practical, and not intellectual enough, for some.
‘The
views had a lot to do with the methodology she was using,’ recalled
David Wilkins, a Harvard Law professor who voted to offer Warren a
job. ‘Was it the right methodology?’”
The
argument presented here, that Harvard would never have hired
Elizabeth Warren, was not addressed in the article though it would be
obvious to anyone who knows anything about law schools and the hiring
of professors. Instead, Ms. Linskey simply trusted in the veracity
of those with a powerful motive to “misremember” what happened.
This was journalistic malpractice.
To
correct it, all that needs to happen is for Ms. Linskey or the Globe,
or
Harvard itself, to present another instance in the history of HLS
where a person of Warren’s credentials was hired, on his or her
merits, to a full (non-“clinical”) law professorship. Barring
that, this attempted white-wash by the Globe
cannot be permitted to remove the stain of these dirty racial
politics from Elizabeth Warren’s record.
Copyright
2019MichaelKubacki
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