Harvard, Penn and the Warren Story Why wouldn’t Ivy League schools help an employee who claimed to be Native American? By James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-penn-and-the-warren-story-1539798838
Ivy League universities spend a lot of time talking about how much they promote diversity. But numerous Ivy law faculty now insist they didn’t lift a finger to give an edge to a woman claiming to be Native American and in fact didn’t even know she was calling herself a minority. Why not? The academic history of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) doesn’t seem to square with the policies of the universities that employed her.
On Monday Sen. Warren, who used to call herself Cherokee, presented an analysis of her DNA suggesting that she had a Native American ancestor “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.” Later that day, the Cherokee Nation in Ms. Warren’s home state of Oklahoma rejected this latest effort to justify her claim of Native American status.
One might have expected the senator to simply acknowledge the tribal statement and apologize. But a campaign website is still featuring a story about her “Native American Heritage.” And she’s not the only one who still has a few questions to answer. Her former employers in the Ivy League have offered explanations about her years as a law professor that are hard to reconcile with their schools’ stated efforts to recruit, promote and encourage minority faculty.
Here’s the Monday statement from the Cherokee Nation.:
“A DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship. Current DNA tests do not even distinguish whether a person’s ancestors were indigenous to North or South America,” Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr. said. “Sovereign tribal nations set their own legal requirements for citizenship, and while DNA tests can be used to determine lineage, such as paternity to an individual, it is not evidence for tribal affiliation. Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven. Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”
It is hard to see how the senator will be able to stick with her claim of Native American heritage when the relevant tribe has rejected it. Leaders of other federally-recognized Cherokee tribes have been more kind to Ms. Warren in their responses and specifically the chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee has lauded Ms. Warren’s policy work, but none is embracing her DNA claim. According to the Associated Press:
The DNA test that Sen. Elizabeth Warren used to try to rebut the ridicule of President Donald Trump angered some Native Americans, who complained that the genetic analysis cheapens the identities of tribal members with deeper ties to the Indian past… she’s not a member of any tribe, and many Indians take exception to anyone who claims to be part Indian without being enrolled in a tribe, especially for political purposes.
Still, the senator’s not ready to give up yet, nor is she relenting on her claim that she never gained any advantage from presenting herself as a minority law professor.
“Ethnicity not a factor in Elizabeth Warren’s rise in law” reads a recent headline in the Boston Globe. The Globe’s Annie Linskey reported:
The Globe closely reviewed the records, verified them where possible, and conducted more than 100 interviews with her colleagues and every person who had a role in hiring decisions about Warren who could be reached. In sum, it is clear that Warren was viewed as a white woman by the hiring committees at every institution that employed her.
This same message is carried by various former colleagues who are offering testimonials in the senator’s campaign materials. One Warren video features a number of Harvard Law colleagues who were involved in hiring Ms. Warren and in granting her tenure saying that her claim of Native American status had nothing to do with their consideration of her and that they didn’t even know she was identifying as a member of a minority group.
Before teaching at Harvard, Ms. Warren taught at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2012 the Boston Globe reported:
Robert H. Mundheim, the dean who hired Warren at Penn, laughed when asked whether he thought of her as a minority.
“Somebody who’s got a small percentage of Native American blood — is that a minority?’’ he said. “I don’t think I ever knew that she had those attributes and that would not have made much of a difference.’’
Professor Mundheim thought the question was laughable in 2012, and this week’s DNA claim certainly seems to have added to the humor. But when did her colleagues start getting the joke?
In the 1980s and 1990s when she was working at Penn and then Harvard, she was claiming in a legal directory to be a minority and was identified as such in federal forms filed by these universities, according to the Globe. And as far as this column can tell no one at that time was publicly rebutting her claim. So why was her status not being considered?
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