The First blow to the Democratic majority was the election to fill the Senate seat of Ted Kennedy which was surprisingly won by Republican Scott Brown. In the regular election the Democrats are trying to retake the seat with the candidacy of Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren. Much has been said about Elizabeth Warren’s claim of Indian ancestry and what impact it had on her academic career.
Professor Warren claimed minority status as a Cherokee Indian when applying to her academic position as a law professor at Harvard. Her claim was based on family ‘lore’ and her belief in her Indian heritage because of the predominance of high cheek bones in her family. Investigators, however found there was practically no documented ancestry to validate her claim. One investigator determined that she may have been 1/32 Cherokee. But Guy Benson noted in Townhall, Surprise: Genealogist Who “Confirmed” Warren’s 1/32 Cherokee Heritage Admits Error, that even this claim was in error and undocumented.
Ms. Warren claimed that she did not use the false heritage to gain advantage falsely, but that she just wanted to meet interesting people. Yet she was listed on the University of Pennsylvania’s and Harvard’s faculty directory as a minority. Furthermore she asserted that her success was not due to her minority claim but due to her work and accomplishments.
She graduated from low ranked undergraduate (University of Houston) and law school (University of Syracuse). Her research has been poorly rated by peer reviews .
Investor’s Business Daily noted in Cherokee Liz’s Shoddy Scholarship:
A Northwestern University peer review of her 2005 paper on the subject, for example, ripped it apart, arguing “the methods were so poor they gave cover to those who want to dismiss the problems of the uninsured — they can say the only paper out there uses a suspect method.”
ABC News suggested she was exercising a hidden agenda to promote a government-run health system. Sure enough, President Obama in 2009 seized on her findings to argue for socialized medicine: “The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every 30 seconds.”
In fact, as ABC pointed out, the claim cannot be supported by empirical evidence. Asked where he got the flawed data, the White House cited the 2005 study by “Professor Warren.”
In 2010, as Obama was floating Warren’s name as someone to run his new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “The Atlantic” magazine reviewed her academic work and found a disturbing “pattern” of using bogus metrics to inflate the case for left-wing causes. “Deeply, deeply flawed,” it said of her research. “This isn’t Harvard (Law) caliber material — not even Harvard undergraduate.”
Her curriculum vitae shows she bounced from college to college, working as a lecturer or researcher, for a full decade after graduating from Rutgers Law, ranked 82nd by Top-Law-Schools.com. (She got her bachelor’s degree from the University of Houston, one of the least competitive colleges in the country).
She was offered a full professorship after she started listing herself as a minority. Harvard hired her in the mid-1990s, when the school was under fire for not having enough minority professors.
Yet with this inauspicious academic background she earns $429,981 as a law professor plus hundreds of thousands more in consulting and royalty fees.
What is a terrible embarrassment for her, should be an even greater embarrassment for a University with the stature of Harvard. (Paleface in National Review Online, 5/21/12.) It is also a humiliation for those who want to keep affirmative action from becoming an avenue of fraud and mediocrity.
Post script on Warren:
For Elizabeth Warren, a bump becomes a hurdle
Cherokees to Protest Warren at State Convention
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