Daniel J. Flynn offers Human Events readers this morning a different take on the flap surrounding Elizabeth Warren’s Native American heritage. Flynn is concerned less about the degree to which Warren used that heritage to get a Harvard professorship than he is about what Harvard’s hiring of Warren says about the school and its home state.
Harvard Law School lists nearly one hundred professors and assistant professors of law in its employ. More than half of them received law degrees from Harvard Law. Yale Law matriculated another two dozen of them. It’s a small, monolithic world, and one that undoubtedly became more diverse with Elizabeth Warren’s tenure. It just wasn’t the diversity Harvard had bargained for.
Outside of a few specialists who obtained doctorates in fields outside of law, every professor and assistant professor at the elite school has a degree from a top-ten law school. In fact, so exclusive is Harvard Law that just five of its assistant or full professors obtained degrees from schools in the bottom-half of that top ten. The exception is Elizabeth Warren, Rutgers Law class of ’76, who insists that Harvard hired her on her scholarly and teaching abilities.
How much peyote does one have to smoke to believe that?
Harvard Law is incestuously selective, so it makes sense that their hire from the nation’s 82nd ranked law school had an “in” with Harvard’s in-crowd. On top of her dubious ancestral claims, Warren married the school’s Carl F. Schipper, Jr. Professor of Law, Bruce Mann. Even when the cliquey Cantabrigians reach outside of their cloistered world, it’s clannish and corrupt.
Warren is nepotism and ethnic favoritism rolled into one. But that’s Massachusetts politics.