Articles: Warren, Obama, and Harvard's Culture of Corruption
Feeling the pressure, Harvard Law Review editors wanted to elect their first African-American president. "Obama cast himself as an eager listener," the New York Times reported in the article that would catch the eye of literary agent Jane Dystel, "sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once."
In effect, the pressure Bell had brought to bear launched Obama's political career, and it may have given Warren the idea to reinvent herself as Pocahontas. One could almost forgive Warren for cheating a little. At the time, the Law School faculty was flush with cheats, including Obama's two most prominent mentors.
One of them, liberal icon Laurence Tribe, hired Obama as his research assistant in 1989 and took a powerful liking to the young man. After the 2008 election, Tribe would gush, "His stunning combination of analytical brilliance and personal charisma, openness and maturity, vision and pragmatism, was unmistakable from my very first encounter."
Obama found a second prominent mentor in professor Charles Ogletree. In the run-up to the 2008 election, Ogletree would enthuse, "I'm so excited about this candidacy that I just can't tell you. I'm just overfull with joy." If anything, both Ogletree and Tribe should have been overfull with joy in the simple fact that they had hung onto their Harvard jobs.
In August 2004, Ogletree had been forced to apologize for somehow letting words from Yale scholar Jack Balkin's book, What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said, find their way into his own book, All Deliberate Speed. At Harvard, given Ogletree's standing, none dared call this plagiarism.
At the University of Massachusetts Law School, however, Dean Lawrence Velvel called it exactly what it was, and publicly. Tribe, something of an academic showboat, moved swiftly to defend Ogletree. Although conceding that plagiarism by the prominent had become "a phenomenon of some significance," Tribe questioned the "decency" of those like Velvel who go public on issues "about which your knowledge is necessarily limited."
In a delightful turn of the paddlewheel, Tribe's showboating caught up with him just a few weeks later. Amazed by the sheer moxie of Tribe's defense, an anonymous tipster reported that passages from Henry J. Abraham's 1974 book, Justices and Presidents, had somehow found their way into Tribe's 1985 book, God Save This Honorable Court.
Forced to review the twin cases, Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan -- yes, that Elena Kagan -- and Harvard president Larry Summers faced an obvious challenge: Ogletree was a black star on a faculty often criticized for being overly white, and Tribe was the superstar of the judicial left. Had the plagiarists-in-residence not been such sacred cows, Harvard would have likely ground them into hamburger.
Feeling the pressure, Harvard Law Review editors wanted to elect their first African-American president. "Obama cast himself as an eager listener," the New York Times reported in the article that would catch the eye of literary agent Jane Dystel, "sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once."
In effect, the pressure Bell had brought to bear launched Obama's political career, and it may have given Warren the idea to reinvent herself as Pocahontas. One could almost forgive Warren for cheating a little. At the time, the Law School faculty was flush with cheats, including Obama's two most prominent mentors.
One of them, liberal icon Laurence Tribe, hired Obama as his research assistant in 1989 and took a powerful liking to the young man. After the 2008 election, Tribe would gush, "His stunning combination of analytical brilliance and personal charisma, openness and maturity, vision and pragmatism, was unmistakable from my very first encounter."
Obama found a second prominent mentor in professor Charles Ogletree. In the run-up to the 2008 election, Ogletree would enthuse, "I'm so excited about this candidacy that I just can't tell you. I'm just overfull with joy." If anything, both Ogletree and Tribe should have been overfull with joy in the simple fact that they had hung onto their Harvard jobs.
In August 2004, Ogletree had been forced to apologize for somehow letting words from Yale scholar Jack Balkin's book, What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said, find their way into his own book, All Deliberate Speed. At Harvard, given Ogletree's standing, none dared call this plagiarism.
At the University of Massachusetts Law School, however, Dean Lawrence Velvel called it exactly what it was, and publicly. Tribe, something of an academic showboat, moved swiftly to defend Ogletree. Although conceding that plagiarism by the prominent had become "a phenomenon of some significance," Tribe questioned the "decency" of those like Velvel who go public on issues "about which your knowledge is necessarily limited."
In a delightful turn of the paddlewheel, Tribe's showboating caught up with him just a few weeks later. Amazed by the sheer moxie of Tribe's defense, an anonymous tipster reported that passages from Henry J. Abraham's 1974 book, Justices and Presidents, had somehow found their way into Tribe's 1985 book, God Save This Honorable Court.
Forced to review the twin cases, Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan -- yes, that Elena Kagan -- and Harvard president Larry Summers faced an obvious challenge: Ogletree was a black star on a faculty often criticized for being overly white, and Tribe was the superstar of the judicial left. Had the plagiarists-in-residence not been such sacred cows, Harvard would have likely ground them into hamburger.
