Published: 12:24 AM 09/10/2012
By Charles C. Johnson
In a 1994 interview, then-Harvard Law School dean Richard Clark said his institution was actively applying an affirmative action policy to hiring female faculty, The Daily Caller has learned. The famed law school first offered Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren a professorship in 1992 and granted her tenure in 1995.
And charges leveled in a 1990 academic law journal raised serious questions about her qualifications to teach at Harvard at all.
In 1991, Rutgers Professor Phillip Schuchman reviewed Warren’s co-authored 1989 book “As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America” in the pages of the Rutgers Law Review, a publication Warren once edited. Schuchman found “serious errors” which result in “grossly mistaken functions and comparisons.”
Warren and her co-authors had drawn improper conclusions from “even their flawed findings,” and “made their raw data unavailable” to check, he wrote. “In my opinion, the authors have engaged in repeated instances of scientific misconduct.”
The work “contains so much exaggeration, so many questionable ploys, and so many incorrect statements that it would be well to check the accuracy of their raw data, as old as it is,” Schuchman added.
Harvard Law School appears to have overlooked that review, in part, because of its commitment to hiring a woman professor.
“We’re clearly trying to add more women to the faculty,” Clark told the Harvard Law Record in March 1994.
“Clark said HLS was engaging ‘affirmative action’ to the extent it was working to increase the number of women considered and interviewed,” wrote the Record’s Greg Stohr. “He also said the Law School would be willing to hire a qualified woman, even if her area of expertise did not fit an immediate need, but he stopped short of saying the school would lower its qualification requirements for women.”
“I guess what we’re not ready to do is to have a different standard,” Clark told the Record.
But Warren, now on a leave of absence from Harvard to run for office, is the only law school professor there who did not graduate from a top-ten law school. Of the 350 Ivy League law school professors, Warren graduated from the second worst ranked school — Rutgers, ranked no. 82 according to a May 2012 analysis by The Washington Examiner.
Clark had been feeling pressure. In 1992, positive tenure decisions about four white male faculty members touched off student protests and demonstrations which included taking over the dean’s office.
Warren’s first tenure offer in February 1993 coincided with a Friday vigil held by law students demanding more female and minority professors. Students agitating for more campus diversity praised Clark’s commitment to bringing more women on campus, but wanted more minorities.
Hiring more women and minority professors “was something that people were doing already and with their own sense of how to adjust to all the different values and goals we have,” Clark told the Record in October 1994.
“Noting that he wanted to ‘increase diversity on all fronts,’ Clark said HLS needed to remedy its lack of women professors,” the Record reported in February 1995 after Warren accepted the job.
“No matter how you count it, we’re short [on women faculty], and I’ve been trying to address that,” Clark said then.
In a letter to the Harvard Law Record in December 1995, Clark praised his own successes.
“I should note that if one includes visiting professors, lecturers, and clinical instructors, the number of women teaching here full-time in 1995-1996 is 33,” he wrote. “Including part-time teachers the number of women is 51. Of the 15 appointments made over the last four years, seven have been women.”
“It is my goal to offer women students the best possible environment for the study of law and to increase the number of women students and the number of women on the faculty. I think we have made substantial progress in this direction.”
NEXT: Warren thought her tenure odds were 'as good a chance of flying a rocket ship to the moon' >>
No comments:
Post a Comment