Elizabeth Warren is the most professorial presidential candidate in modern history. But does America want to be taught?
Warren teaching at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in the early 1990s. Photo: Leif Skoogfors/Corbis via Getty Images The story of Elizabeth Warren’s career in education — at least in legal education — begins with one word: assumpsit. It is literally the first word of the first case she had to read for the first class she ever took as a 24-year-old law student at Rutgers University in 1973.
Assumpsit — which, Warren told me, “means that the action is in contract rather than in tort” — became Professor Warren’s calling card, though she says no matter how widely advance warnings spread, 96 percent of new law students would walk in unprepared for it.
Warren’s work as a teacher — the profession she dreamed of from the time she was in second grade — remains a crucial part of her identity, self-presentation, and communicative style. Her 2014 book, A Fighting Chance, opens with these sentences: “I’m Elizabeth Warren. I’m a wife, a mother, and a grandmother. For nearly all my life, I would have said I’m a teacher, but I guess I really can’t say that anymore.
Plenty of our former presidents have been teachers. Some of them, including William Howard Taft and Barack Obama, taught law; some, including Millard Fillmore, primary school. Warren has been both law professor and primary-school teacher, and as a person who ran for office for the first time in her 60s, her four decades as a teacher define her in a way Obama’s stint as an instructor in constitutional law never did. Here, as in all else, it matters that she’s a woman.
And that doesn’t begin to touch on what would happen should she get out of the primary: In February, Donald Trump Jr. offered a preview of how his father will likely frame a fight against an educator, telling the young conservatives at one of his father’s rallies, “You don’t have to be indoctrinated by these loser teachers.” It’s obviously a broader Republican line of argument.
Warren at an American Federation of Teachers town-hall event in May. Photo: Matt Rourke/AP Photo It should probably go without saying that, as a child growing up in Norman, Oklahoma, Warren, then called Betsy Herring, loved school. It was an era in which not many paths were open to ambitious young women. But her second-grade teacher, Mrs. Lee, “of ample bosom and many hugs,” Warren said, took her aside and said, “‘You know, Miss Betsy, you could be a teacher.’ And bam! I was sold.
Warren won a full-ride debate scholarship to George Washington University, where she majored in speech pathology and audiology so she could teach students with speech and hearing impairments. But her mother’s dire view of the world for unmarried women had a deep enough impact on Warren that when her old high-school boyfriend proposed to her just before her junior year, she promptly said yes, dropping out of school and giving up that scholarship.
The pair’s struggle to find double teaching appointments led them from Houston to the University of Texas at Austin to Penn and finally to Harvard, where she was hired in 1995 and where Mann came on as a professor of law and history in 2006. By the time she arrived, Harvard Law School was in the midst of a controversy over diversity in hiring; Professor Derrick Bell had taken an unpaid leave in protest of the fact that none of the school’s 60 tenured professors were women of color .
In the wake of that crash, Warren stepped into her role as America’s teacher, defying those “smart boys” by explaining to big audiences what had happened with a clarity that felt as comforting to some as Mrs. Lee’s hugs had felt to Warren back in the second grade. In 2010, Bill Maher told her, “I just want you to hold me,” before putting his head in her lap and embracing her. The same year, Jon Stewart took a hot-for-teacher route, telling her, “I wanna make out with you.
Warren reiterates this argument today, suggesting that “what Lani was criticizing was the Socratic method done really badly.” She said to me, “The reason I never took volunteers is when you take volunteers, you’re going to hear mostly from men. ’Cause they have a lot more confidence, and they’ll get those hands up.”
Ondersma was slightly embarrassed — she had zero interest in commercial law — but was so grateful that a professor who didn’t know her would take time to meet her that she went anyway. She explained herself to Warren. “I didn’t care about how corporations were structured, and I didn’t care about financial intricacies between predators and debtors,” she related to me recently. “I didn’t think that was crucial to the mission of social justice.
Jed Shugerman, now a law professor at Fordham, recalled coming to Harvard as a brand-new hire in 2005. He had been advised to attend other teachers’ classes to get a feel for how things were done. Observing Warren, he said, was a little scary: “She knew every one of 80 students by name. She used no notes. She had the day’s material memorized in her head as she walked around the room and asked detailed questions about the cases.
Her first question was “How do you think Noah felt when he heard this voice?” They giggled. “‘He thought he was going crazy. He had a worm in his ear.’ But they actually got interested in the question: What would it be like to be somebody who had a job, who had a family, and hears God talking to him? Does he know it’s God? Would you really sell your stuff? Before you knew it, it was time for juice and cookies and then everybody went home,” she said. “I thought, Dang, that worked.
When she was first doing town halls, after proposing a wealth tax, she said, “I’d look at the faces and think, I don’t think everybody is connecting. It’s not quite gelling. So I tried a couple of different ways, and then it hit me. I’d say, ‘Anybody in here own a home or grow up where a family owned a home?’ A lot of hands would go up. And I’d say, ‘You’ve been paying a wealth tax forever. It’s just called a property tax.
Along with the rules, there were the dogs. Good Faith used to sit with Warren during office hours. After Faith came Otis. Alison Schary, who graduated in 2008 and is now an intellectual-property lawyer, recalled that Warren used to post office hours for Otis. “You could sign out Otis and take him for a walk around campus.”
When I asked Warren about her wooing of progressive students into her own traditionally more staid field, she rubbed her hands together, a cheerful spider in full command of her web.
Cotton interrupted her: “That’s not exactly the way I remember it,” he deadpanned, explaining that “she was teaching us that lesson by being very hard on us.”Cotton backed down. “She was probably the best professor I had,” he conceded. Then there’s the fact that it’s a very short step from clarifying truth-teller to the emasculating scold who shames you or puts you in a time-out. I felt a shiver of dread when, during the second debate, she stared at a distracted and giggling audience in the midst of her story about activist Ady Barkan’s struggle to pay for his ongoing ALS treatment and admonished, “This isn’t funny. This is somebody who has health insurance and is dying.” Eep, I thought. But everyone shut up and listened.
Indonesia Berita Terbaru, Indonesia Berita utama
Similar News:Anda juga dapat membaca berita serupa dengan ini yang kami kumpulkan dari sumber berita lain.
Meet Jaden, the 11-Year-Old Reporter Who Scored an Exclusive Interview With Elizabeth WarrenHe was the real star of Warren's town hall in Toledo, Ohio.
Baca lebih lajut »
Meet Jaden, the 11-Year-Old Reporter Who Scored an Exclusive Interview With Elizabeth WarrenHe was the real star of Warren's town hall in Toledo, Ohio.
Baca lebih lajut »
Elizabeth Warren: Trump should not 'wink and nod and smile' about white supremacy'White supremacy is a domestic terrorism threat in the same way that foreign terrorism threatens our people,' Elizabeth Warren told CNN. 'And it is the responsibility of the President of the United States to help fight back against that.'
Baca lebih lajut »
WGA Presidential Candidate Phyllis Nagy Pre-Emptively Addresses Anonymous Complaints About Teaching Methods At UCLAWGA West presidential candidate Phyllis Nagy has gotten out in front a series of anonymous critics of her teaching methods and track record as head of the UCLA screenwriting program. Following inqu…
Baca lebih lajut »
Elizabeth Warren went to college for $50 a semester, 'but the chances I got don't exist anymore'In an op-ed for CNN, Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren detailed how she was able to work a part-time waitressing job to cover her tuition at The University of Houston — and how that would be impossible today.
Baca lebih lajut »
Euphoria's Makeup Artist Is Here To Teach You How To Master All the Beauty LooksEuphoria's Makeup Artist Is Here To Teach You How To Master All The Beauty Looks
Baca lebih lajut »