Harvard Law School was looking for women when it hired Elizabeth Warren.

I'm reading "Ethnicity not a factor in Elizabeth Warren’s rise in law" by Annie Linskey, in The Boston Globe.

Harvard Law School’s internal statistics from the time showed the institution was looking for female professors and had set a goal of hiring a tenured woman that year. Oddly, the law school’s internal metrics found that they believed they had sufficient minorities on staff, despite employing only five.

One area that 30 of the 31 professors interviewed by the Globe agreed on: There was no talk about her Native American claims during the meetings over her appointment. One professor emeritus, Lloyd Weinreb, said he believes her Native American ancestry was discussed. But, in an e-mail he questioned his own recollection: “I am not sure enough for you to rely on me,” he wrote.

If it were discussed, in what way would it have been discussed?

It’s not even clear that Warren would have been accepted as a true minority hire if she’d been pitched to the faculty that way. “It wouldn’t have even worked in the most diehard communities,” said [David] Wilkins, who was one of the only black law professors on staff. “Let’s be blunt. Elizabeth Warren is a white woman. She may have some Native American roots, but so do most people.”

That one comment is more significant, I think, than the fact that  30 out of 31 Harvard lawprofs affirmed to the Globe that there was "no talk about her Native American claims during the meetings over her appointment."

By the way, did the Globe ask these professors if there was any talk outside of the meetings? Was there any written communication? Were the professors asked if they knew that Warren was listed as Native American in the American Association of Law Schools book that all law professors get a copy of every year? Did they know and did they think about it? There could be a decorum according to which you don't openly talk about it in meetings but everyone knows and is taking it into account. And one reason not to talk about is that you know that — as Professor Wilkins clearly stated — the black law professors would have objected if her case had been presented as a minority hire. But those voting on the case may nevertheless have considered it a plus that the school would be able to say that it had a Native American law professor — which in fact it went on to do.

The Harvard Law School students who were clamoring for more diversity also did not view her as a woman of color when she was offered a job.

“In order to show a real commitment to diversity they need to do more than pass a resolution and bring in white women,” said Julie A. Su, then a second-year Harvard Law student who was quoted in the Harvard Crimson the day after Warren was offered the job.

I believe this.

And, remarkably, Warren doesn’t even remember getting the offer. “I guess it should have been a big moment,” Warren said, reflecting on her inability to recall the details.

That's weird, but it's doesn't affect the matter under discussion. If her putative Native American ancestry were a factor in hiring her, I can't believe it would be part of the communication of the offer.

I mean, at my school, this sort of thing was out and proud. Under our chancellor Donna Shalala, we had "The Madison Plan," which funded 4 hires in one year. Our hires included a Native American whom Professor Wilkins might have looked at and called "a white man," but he was — and this was considered crucial — a citizen of the Cherokee nation.

Perhaps most telling was the role of Randall Kennedy, a law professor who was on the Harvard appointments committee at the time, and was in charge of recruiting minority candidates.

“She was not on the radar screen at all in terms of a racial minority hire,” Kennedy told the Globe. “It was just not an issue. I can’t remember anybody ever mentioning her in this context.”

Kennedy says he remembers no mentions, and that seems to refer to discussions outside of meetings as opposed to meetings alone, which tweaks my suspicion about what "30 of the 31 professors" told the Globe.

If you're wondering whether Professor Kennedy is a member of a minority group, I refer you to this book he wrote, the title of which I won't write. (I'd read that book, but I would not listen to the audio version.)

The Boston Globe takes care to give us quotes from Harvard Law School professors Warren antagonists probably know and like — Alan Dershowitz ("occasional Trump defender")....

“This is a made-up issue... This is not an issue that’s worthy of the president or anyone else.”

... and Charles Fried ("the former solicitor general to president Ronald Reagan")...

“It had nothing to do with our consideration and deliberation... How many times do you have to have the same thing explained to you?”

They sound testy! And imperious. Like people are idiots who don't understand their words — when really it's that people don't believe them. Actually, the testy, imperious denial may heighten suspicion.  And race is something that can affect decisionmaking without anyone needing to say it explicitly. Later, maybe no one remembers anything. They may not even see it at the time. But that's too complex and unknowable to see and talk about, unless it's one of those times when we're told we must.

ADDED: Are the last 11 words of this post too enigmatic? I'm thinking of the many calls for a "conversation on race" that are about getting ordinary people to understand the "systemic racism" and "white privilege" they're supposedly failing to see.

The face of the Democratic Party's old-age problem.

Donna Shalala — who was Bill Clinton's Secretary of Health and Human Services (and, before that, the Chancellor here at UW) — is running for Congress, seeking elective office for the first time at the age of 77.

I see the NYT ran an interview just before the primary (which she won yesterday). Let's see if they addressed the question of whether she's too old to begin a congressional career, the general oldness of the Democrats in Congress, and whether all the Democrats these days are either too old or too young (as if middle age doesn't exist anymore).

No. They didn't.

"If Bill Clinton hadn’t twisted my arm, I would have stayed at Wisconsin forever."

Bill Clinton twisted Donna Shalala's arm, according to Shalala, who was the chancellor here at UW-Madison until she became Clinton's Secretary of Health and Human Services. Upon leaving that job, she became president at the University of Miami. She's still there, where the UW football team will play Miami in the Orange Bowl on December 30th, which is why there's an article about her today in the Wisconsin State Journal.

Shalala says her "loyalties are sort of half-split" — loyalties to the 2 football teams.

We're given a truncated list of famous alumni from the 2 schools. From Miami:

... actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, singer and songwriter Gloria Estefan, former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus of Kenosha, Pro Football Hall of Famers Jim Kelly and Michael Irvin, and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

From Wisconsin:

... Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, author Joyce Carol Oates, Sierra Club founder John Muir, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, astronaut Jim Lovell and John Bardeen, the only two-time recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics.

As long as we're catching up with Donna Shalala and thinking about Bill Clinton twisting her arm, here's a CNN report from September 11, 1998, "Clinton apologizes to Cabinet":

One of the participants, speaking on condition of anonymity, said... Shalala told Clinton that women feel a special bond with him because of his policies, but they are especially sympathetic toward his wife and daughter.... Shalala listened to Clinton apologize, ask for forgiveness and promise to improve as a person. "To say it is one thing," she was quoted as saying, "to demonstrate it is another."...

IN THE COMMENTS: mockturtle said...

Sounds to me like physical abuse, man vs. woman, ergo, sexual assault.

Rob said...

"If you're a president, they let you do it, you can do anything--twist their arm."

Rush Limbaugh muffs his paean to Scott Walker.

From yesterday's show:

Ladies and gentlemen, the Republican Party has a genuine star. The Republican Party has a demonstrated, genuine hero and potential star in its ranks, and he is the governor of  Wisconsin. His name is Scott Walker. Scott Walker has won three out of four elections in the last five or six years, regular gubernatorial races and a couple of recalls....

He was supposed to say: Scott Walker has won 3 elections in 4 years, 2 regular gubernatorial races and one recall. That's 3 victories and no losses, within a shorter period, 4 years. If you want to declare someone a big star, get the evidence in his favor right!

That undercuts the value of what comes next. I don't feel that Rush has really been following the Scott Walker story, and this was one of those occasions when I felt that Rush was reading from a script. He tries to talk the same as when he's riffing, ad lib, with the same spontaneity and drama, but he always trips up a little, and when the tripping up comes in the form of misreading factual statements, and he doesn't notice the mistakes, it's really bad.

I'm reading the rest of the transcript — which I also heard as audio — and I'll just pull this out:

I watched his acceptance speech last night and I saw the epitome of class. I saw the epitome of dignity. I saw a guy who was genuinely happy and respectful, and not one shred of bitterness. No evidence of anger whatsoever. The entire Democrat Party power structure went into Wisconsin to take out Scott Walker three times in six years. 

Four years!

Scott Walker defeated his opponent, Mary Burke. Scott Walker defeated every national labor union. Scott Walker defeated Bill and Hillary Clinton. Scott Walker defeated Barack and Michelle Obama. In other words, Scott Walker defeated the A team, not once, not twice, but three times. And he did it with a conservative agenda. Scott Walker has been elected three times to stop Democrats in Wisconsin. You don't get much bluer as a state than Wisconsin used to be. University of Wisconsin is there, Madison. That's where Donna Shalala was the university president, where she came from. It is a blue state like Minnesota is a blue state, like New York is a blue state.

Not to get too fussily intra-Wisconsin, but Donna Shalala wasn't "the university president," she was the chancellor at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, which is a branch of the University of Wisconsin System, which contains 13 4-year universities, 13 freshman-sophomore college campuses, and a statewide extension program. The president has the less glamorous task of running this elaborate and less elite higher education program that is distributed around the state. That's not what Donna Shalala did. I don't think I'm being too picky with this correction, because it's an important distinction when you are talking about the politics and populism of the people of the state of Wisconsin.

What's happened in Wisconsin doesn't get very much chatter because it's Wisconsin. 

Ha. He's admitting he doesn't pay much attention to Wisconsin. I know! It shows!

It's the upper Midwest, no real stars there...

Paul Ryan? And, look, he's knocking not just Wisconsin but the whole "upper Midwest." Where the hell is his audience? I love the way he's implying that his own audience is boring people. He rails against coastal Americans, but he lets us see that he thinks they're the important people. He's paying attention to them. And we boring people of the Midwest are supposed to pay attention to him... as he talks about our governor and gets the basic facts wrong.

"The student was McGinn’s paid research assistant on a project relating to the evolution of the human hand."

"McGinn, who is 63, admits to engaging in sexual banter with his assistant. He notes, however, that the subject of his study, the human hand, tempted such banter.... McGinn describes his relationship with the student as an 'intellectual romance.' But the student says she received an email from him saying that the two should have sex in his office during the summer when no one else is around. McGinn denies sending such an email. However, he admits sending an email that said 'had a hand job imagining you giving me a hand job.'"

That's Paul Mirengoff writing about the case of the philosophprof Colin McGinn, whom we were talking about the other day here. Mirengoff links to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that says:

While he resigned of his own accord, he says that he “couldn’t win,” because Donna E. Shalala, the university’s president, was determined to drive him out.

I remember when Donna Shalala stood by men accused of sexual harassment:

The highest profile members of the administration, no doubt, will also be sorting out their feelings. In January [1998], Clinton assured his Cabinet he was innocent, and Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state, stepped out onto the White House driveway to back him up.

"I believe the allegations are completely untrue," she said.

"I'll second that. Definitely," said William Daley, the commerce secretary.

"Third it," said Donna Shalala, the secretary of health and human services.

Third it. Ha. That's a lot to live down.

As for McGinn and "hand job." Should we empathize with a brilliant writer's impulse to riff amusingly with images and puns? The need for the inclusion of women in all of the academic fields trumps male complacency about sexual banter. I can't imagine wanting to use a student as a sounding board for anything that could be misconstrued as a sexual advance (unless one really were moving in on this student). McGinn openly attests to his high opinion of his own intelligence, but how can you not see all that risk? I've got to hypothesize that the risk was titillating and he chose to take it. I suspect the presence of Shalala as the authority figure in his territory only made the risk hotter.

Former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz advocates blowing up a public sculpture.

He writes:

Blow it up. That’s right. Attach some dynamite to the base of the darn thing and launch it. We could make a big party out of it... People could gather to watch the event from a safe distance...

I wonder what Cieslewicz thought about the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas?

"They drilled holes into the torsos of the two statues and then placed dynamite charges inside the holes to blow them up."

Do you feel glee at the notion of blowing up a work of art that you find ugly? Should the people of a particular place have the power to destroy a work of art if they hate it? I supported moving one famous sculpture that was an arrogant and hated imposition on the people who had to live with it.

As for the particular hated sculpture Cieslewicz wants to blow up — I like it. I think it's smart and amusing — an obelisk that is "ruined" to the point where we can see that it is composed of footballs — set outside the football stadium.

It’d be one thing if it had been Pablo Picasso trying to force his vision on us. But who the heck is Donald Lipski? I doubt seriously that Madison will be embarrassed someday as the town that didn’t appreciate Lipski.

So, if the public hates it, don’t force it down their throats.

Why would you say "don’t force it down their throats" about something that's obviously a phallic symbol? Why exactly does the obelisk upset you? Before exploding this thing, I urge you to submit to a Freudian session of deep (throat) thought. Throats... Lipski... are the lips key?

Think, Madison, think. Why does this sculpture — "Nail's Tales" — bother you? Why does it make you think of explosions?

By the way, when Chicago's monumental Picasso sculpture was unveiled in 1967, Mayor Richard J. Daley said: "We dedicate this celebrated work this morning with the belief that what is strange to us today will be familiar tomorrow." Various politicians complained that the thing should be removed.  Ald. John J. Hoellen wanted it replaced by a statue of "Mr. Cub . . . Ernie Banks."

In the philistine tradition of Alderman Hoellen, Cieslewicz recommends replacing the obelisk with a statue of Donna Shalala.

ADDED: I posted about Our Football Obelisk back in 2008... with my photograph of it:

The Shalala Bowl.

Miami and Wisconsin.