Are you keeping up with the Elizabeth Warren brouhaha up in Massachusetts? She is in a senate contest with Scott Brown, the usurper who walked off with Kennedy's seat in the last election. You remember that guy? The one with the pick-up truck?

So who is Elizabeth Warren and why am I writing this post? She has been a Harvard professor for quite some time now and had listed her heritage for 10 years in faculty minority law professor directories as such but removed it at Harvard because she didn't think it pertinent or something.

Now she comes out and says she checked the box all those years in an effort to get included in get-togethers "with other people who are like I am" and she assumed the heritage was true because she grew up in a family that talked about being Native American and her grandfather "had high cheekbones like all Indian have".

Now, I don't know and I don't care what the truth is to her heritage and her hiring at Harvard but they did use her heritage to tout their faculty's diversity so clearly, Harvard cared.

Harvard Law spokesman Mike Chmura told the Crimson that of 71 law school professors and assistant professors, 11 were women, five were black, one was Native American and one was Hispanic.
"Although the conventional wisdom among students and faculty is that the Law School faculty includes no minority women, Chmura said Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren is Native American," the Crimson reported.

Well, I read this quote on MJHAWEYE'S blog this morning and got such a chuckle of it I wanted to share :

But if you took a look at MJ Hawkeye, age, 66, I could pass for Tonto. I have cheekbones so high they're above my eyebrows. My hair has to be thinned with a lawnmower. I could live to be older than Methuselah and I'd never go bald. Some guys wear caps when it gets cold. I wear my hair. I have a chest so big it should have staves around it. My complexion so dark I tan in January. I'm the kind of guy who could run around shouting, "Whoo-whoo-whoo and get away with it". Elizabeth Warren is a phony. 

And that's all I have to share.

Oh except this: She is trying to deflect the criticism to her opponent. It's all Scott Brown' fault that she is getting bad press

“The only one as I understand it who’s raising any question about whether or not I was qualified for my job is Scott Brown and I think I am qualified and frankly I’m a little shocked to hear anybody raise a question about whether or not I’m qualified to hold a job teaching,” she said, pushing to put Brown on defense. “What does he think it takes for a woman to be qualified?”

I didn't interpret this has anyone questioning her qualifications to hold a teaching job.  Did you? I interpreted this as questioning whether the job she got at Harvard was under false pretenses, intentional or not. The fact is she listed herself while as a professor at U Texas and U Penn as minority and she dropped it after hiring on at Harvard. Now, unless there was another American Indian working at Harvard, Lucy has some 'splainin' to do.

Unless, by 'minority', she was referring to her sex. I think there were only 11 women out of the 71 law professors.