Today’s Globe has a hilarious and pathetic op-ed from Eric Fehrnstrom, consultant to several losing candidates from Massachusetts (notably for present purposes, Scott Brown in 2012). Fehrnstrom, who revels in concern-trolling, thinks that Elizabeth Warren would be a poor choice for vice president. Guess why?
If Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton puts Warren on the ticket, Clinton will be engulfed in an affirmative action controversy over whether her running mate claimed to be Native American to advance her career…. [I]t’s the Native American issue that has the potential to create a Rachel Dolezal-type spectacle that will send Clinton’s campaign crashing to earth.
It doesn’t, actually. But dream on, Eric.
Warren’s defenders believe the issue was laid to rest when she beat Republican Scott Brown in the 2012 senatorial election. (Disclosure: I was a consultant to Brown in that race).
That’s like saying Chappaquiddick was neutralized as an issue for Senator Ted Kennedy because he won reelection in Massachusetts following the 1969 accident. In a national campaign, everything old is new again.
Hmm, right, because a listing in a law school faculty directory is very similar to being involved in the death of another person. Makes total sense. Thanks for the disclosure, though.
Warren was a Rutgers Law School graduate who held various teaching positions at public universities until she started to list herself as “Native American” in directories published by the Association of American Law Schools. From there, her career took off.
Warren attained a full professorship at the University of Pennsylvania. Then Harvard came calling, and she became the only tenured professor there who had graduated from a public law school.
This is a curious line of argument from someone who, one assumes, is sympathetic with the usual Republican protests against “coastal elites.” Fehrnstrom seems to be saying that no graduate of a public law school could ever be good enough to teach at Harvard purely on academic merit. Absurd, of course. But do go on…
Harvard would go on to cite Warren in defending itself from charges the faculty lacked diversity.
Warren and her former colleagues insist her claim to minority status played no role in her rising career…. To this day, Harvard refuses to release the personnel records that would settle the matter once and for all.
Chronology is important here, and Fehrnstrom is ignoring it. Back in 2012, I spent a good deal of time looking over contemporaneous accounts of Harvard Law’s wooing and eventual hiring of Warren. From those accounts, most of which come from the Harvard Crimson newspaper (which was strongly in favor of increasing the diversity of Harvard’s law faculty), it seems extremely unlikely that Native American heritage had anything to do with Warren’s hiring. After reviewing dozens of articles, here’s what I concluded:
The bottom line: there was a lot of talk about the fact that Elizabeth Warren is a woman, and that Harvard Law School didn’t have a very good record at the time of tenuring women faculty. But, as far as I can tell, her Native American heritage was not publicly mentioned until at least a year after she was hired. Since it’s well known that the lack of minority women on Harvard Law’s faculty had been a hot issue for years – recall then-law student Barack Obama’s now-famous introduction of Derrick Bell, who ultimately gave up his Harvard professorship over the issue, at a law school rally in 1990 – it would be extraordinary if Warren’s background were known but never mentioned.
The fact that the student-run – and diversity-supporting – Harvard Crimson never thought to mention Warren’s heritage, even in its Feb. 22, 1995 editorial praising her hiring – seems to strongly support Professor Charles Fried’s insistence that Warren’s background simply never came up in the hiring process. We don’t know, because Harvard won’t say, what led law school spokesman Mike Chmura to comment publicly on her background in 1996, apparently for the first time, but even his 1996 comment supports the notion that precious few people at Harvard were aware of Warren’s heritage, since he said that the “conventional wisdom among students and faculty” was that even after Warren’s hiring, there were no minority women at Harvard Law. In any event, that comment seems to have made Warren’s Native American heritage part of the narrative at Harvard, judging from subsequent Crimson stories. But it seems clear that, while Warren’s gender was certainly relevant to her hiring by Harvard, her Native American ancestry was not.
It’s true that Harvard hasn’t released its personnel records. I’m not sure that releasing confidential personnel records over something like this would ever be a good idea. But, in any event, there really is zero evidence that I’m aware of tending to show that Warren’s hiring was related to the issue of Native American heritage.
This is maybe my favorite line of Fehrnstrom’s piece:
Even though she won election due to a heavy Democratic turnout, the controversy damaged Warren. She underperformed President Obama by 15 points, lost independents and, according to exit polls, ended up less popular on Election Day than her rival.
Wow. Talk about a sore loser (as well as failing to take responsibility for your own shortcomings). Eric, Warren whipped your candidate – a sitting U.S. Senator, drove him out of the state, and relegated him to hawking shady diet pills. #Bqhatevwr.
All of that said, this piece really isn’t Fehrnstrom’s fault. It’s exactly what you would expect from him. The fault lies with the Boston Globe, who really should decline to publish drivel like this. It does not advance public discourse. It just requires those of us who took the time to debunk these claims four years ago to do so again. We all have better things to do.
His profile is high enough, and this issue really is a touchstone with Republicans, who (those I know anyway) believe firmly that Senator Warren used her background to get hired by Harvard. And this is a perfect storm of sorts, because they believe it points to the hypocrisy of liberal elitists when it comes to affirmative action. No evidence will ever convince them otherwise.
So the Globe, which is MUCH smaller and always needs material, I’d cut some some slack here. But Fehrnstrom is just being a jerk, and knows it.
although the Republicans would no doubt continue to raise it. Just curious, is there any evidence for Ferhrnstrom’s claim that Warren listed herself as “Native American” in Assn. of American Law Schools directories? I had never heard that. If true, maybe not good judgment on Warren’s part, but certainly Ferhnstrom has gone off the rails in trying to compare this to Chappaquiddick.
It will make it harder for him to get paid work.
She WAS so listed in a directory, and the ‘controversy’ was over whether she checked the box or they assumed. IMO, this silly story is why Scott lost. It didn’t change ANY minds and alienated some undecideds with its pettiness.
And I speak as a parent of a 6 foot tall 1/32 Cherokee with white-blond hair (although he does have some paperwork about great-grandmother Chinqilla to back him up). Anybody from OK knows that having Injun Blood wasn’t the kind of thing that got bragged on or recorded back in the day.
Brown lost the election when he opened his debate prologue with this asinine talking point. It’s excellent material for bringing out “low information voters,” using the politically correct term, but a losing technique in a general election.
I respectfully refrain from posting the pic from the old taco commercial.
We stole their land, destroyed their culture, and continue to mock them with racist mascots and terminology for prominent major league and college sports teams. There are very few “full blooded” Native Americans left. Even Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who frequently wore his tribes headress on the floor of the Senate, has only a partial ancestry.
If someone with even a partial amount of that heritage wants to claim it with pride, so be it. We know it had no bearing on her hiring, and the tomahawk chops were demeaning and racist towards one of the least regarded and consistently put down upon cultures in our country’s history.
This is just another example of why I characterize the MA GOP as I do. It is, similarly, an example of why John Henry’s Boston Globe is not worth my time or its online subscription price.