Affirmative Action Queen

I'm talking about Princess High Cheekbones herself, Elizabeth Warren.  The nickname, of course, refers to her claimed American Indian heritage, ("because my mother told me") and the pictures of ancestors with the high cheekbones characteristic of the Cherokees.  Too bad her family actually traces back to the other side of the "Trail of Tears" - the ones pointing the guns at the Cherokees. 

While that's a funny story, this concerns her professorship at Harvard.  The Daily Caller writes:

In a 1994 interview, then-Harvard Law School dean Robert 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.

Let me point out the obvious: the fact she was hired at a time the HLS was actively looking for affirmative action hires doesn't mean she was hired only because of her sex or her claimed Indian heritage.  It might be coincidence.  For the definitive look at whether or not it was because of those and not her legal scholarship, I'll quote a professor from her Alma Mater, Rutgers, who knew her work:

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.

Translating professor to redneck that translates roughly as, "Where did she get this crap?!?".  Sounds like an affirmative action hire to me.  Let's be honest here: we've all met them.  Every industrial training video features the Mandatorily Interracial and Gender-Diverse cast.  The Lovely and Geeky Mrs. Graybeard was an electronics technician "in the early days" of women in the field.  She knew she had to demonstrate she really knew the stuff and wasn't an affirmative action hire.  

And this quote from Ms. Warren herself kinda seals the question:

Warren herself seems to have doubted her own fitness to be a Harvard Law professor. “If you’d told me [I would be granted a tenure offer], “I’d simply have laughed at you and said, ‘What a charming thought! I have as good a chance of flying a rocket ship to the moon,’” she told the Record in February 1993.

Affirmative Action.  It hurts the more qualified candidate bumped for the less qualified one.  It hurts the candidate by putting them in a place they know they can't live up to, perpetually over their head in life.   It hurts the candidates by depriving them of the motivation to push themselves to really excel.  And it hurts the rest of society as it has to suffer through the policies of someone like Elizabeth Warren.  Or the medical decisions of the AA doctor. 

Meritocracies really are better for everyone.