36 new york | august 5–18, 2019
mother-daughter battle was so intense
that one night, after interrogating Betsy
about why she thought she was so special
that she should go to college, her mother
hit Betsy in the face.
Warren won a full-ride debate scholar-
ship 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 un-
married women had a deep enough im-
pact 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. “For 19 years I had ab-
sorbed the lesson that the best and most
important thing any girl could do was
‘marry well,’ ” Warren has written. “And for
19 years I had also absorbed the message
that I was a pretty iffy case—not very pret-
ty, not very flirty, and definitely not very
good at making boys feel like they were
smarter than I was.”
Warren and her husband settled in
Texas, where she finished her undergradu-
ate degree, then moved to New Jersey,
where she found a job as a special-needs
teacher for public-school students with
speech and learning disabilities. But at the
end of one term, she was visibly pregnant
with her first child, Amelia; the principal
did not ask her back. She enrolled at Rut-
gers University Law School in Newark,
then one of the most diverse and progres-
sive law schools in the nation.
Warren graduated nine months preg-
nant with her son, Alex, and there were no
firms eager to hire a new mom of two.
That’s when one of her Rutgers professors
suggested she might teach a night class at
the school. That first year of teaching law
school, she has recalled, was the second-
grade reading group all over again: “I
watched faces, and it felt like a victory ev-
ery time I saw the click! as a student
grasped a really hard idea.”
From Rutgers, Warren secured a
tenure-track job at the law school at the
University of Houston and taught Sunday
school. She divorced her husband and later
married Bruce Mann, a law professor and
historian whom she had met at a law con-
ference. Warren proposed to Mann in a
classroom after watching him teach a class
in property law. “It was the thing I needed
to know,” she explained to me. “I couldn’t
be married to another teacher if I didn’t
respect his teaching. And watching him
teach, he was good and engaged, and he
cared and he was cute and I was already
pretty crazy about him. But it was really
important for me to know that.” WhatWarren especially appreciated while
watching Mann teach was his clear belief
in his students. “That’s the heart of really
great teaching,” she said. “It’s that I believe
in you. I don’t get up and teach to show
how smart I am. I get up and teach to show
how smart you are, to help you have the
power and the tools so that you can build
what you want to build.”
The pair’s struggle to find double teach-
ing 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 di-
versity in hiring; Professor Derrick Bell
had taken an unpaid
leave in protest of the
fact that none of the
school’s 60 tenured pro-
fessors were women of
color (in 1990, only five
were women, all of them
white). And while much
attention has been paid
to the question of whether Warren’s self-
identification as Native American on a va-
riety of forms during her career had any
impact on her hiring trajectory, it is quite
likely that, as a white female law professor
in a massively male-dominated sphere in
the 1980s and ’90s, she did benefit from
affirmative-action policies. White women
have been affirmative action’s dispropor-
tionate beneficiaries.
Warren was an odd duck at Harvard,
not just because she was one of only a
handful of female professors; she was also
among the only faculty whose degree had
been issued by a public university. She be-
gan to speak to the masses in more direct
ways, about the research she was doing on
why families were going into bankruptcy,
on television programs like Dr. Phil and
The Daily Show. She didn’t publish aca-
demic books but ones about bankruptcy
and personal finance co-authored with her
daughter Amelia.
Warren believed that the law and its
remedies should not be simply the do-
main of the already powerful, and her ap-
proach to communicating with her
students—and later, as a more public fig-
ure, with a wider audience—came back to
her drive to make seemingly complicated
concepts available to those who didn’t al-
ready have an expertise, specifically by
decluttering the language she feels is
meant to drive people away from engage-
ment with the policies that shape their
lives, rather than drawing them in and
making them full participants.A perfect example, she told me, was the
lead-up to the financial crash in 2008,
“where the smart boys, as the economy is
tumbling over the edge, only wanted to
talk in terms of reverse double-half- nelson
derivatives and said, in effect, ‘The rest of
you aren’t smart enough to understand
this. We the elite will take care of this.’ And
they were wrong.”
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 embracingher. The same year, Jon Stewart took a
hot-for-teacher route, telling her, “I wan-
na make out with you.” In fact, for all the
reasonable concern about how men espe-
cially may rear back from schoolteachers,
the reception Warren has sometimes
earned offers plenty of evidence that some
of them take deep solace, in perilous
times, in the plainspoken educator who
can tell a straight story about how we got
here and where we need to go next. After
her second debate performance last week,
CNN commentator Van Jones told War-
ren, “You make me feel like help is on the
way ... You make me feel good.” What she’s
offering is belief—in her students, the au-
dience, voters.
It’s the same, in Warren’s view, as nudg-
ing people to understand that they can
read: “We can all understand this, and we
can all demand some oversight and ac-
countability and then make some real
changes so it doesn’t happen again.” Con-
veying information; inviting in people who
feel shut out; making stories, syllables, let-
ters clear and legible—this is precisely, War-
ren says, “what a good teacher does.”C
hrystin ondersma was a
second-year transfer stu-
dent at Harvard Law
School in the fall of 2005
and did not feel at home.
The working-class daugh-
ter of a waitress and a father who filled
vending machines, she had grown up in
the conservative Dutch Christian Re-“ It was the thing I needed to know
another teacher if I didn
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1619FEA_Elizabeth Warren_lay [Print]_35541956.indd 36 8/2/19 6:38 PM
august 5–18, 2019 | new york 37
formed community in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, attended Calvin College (alma
mater of Betsy DeVos), and taken her first
year of law classes at Arizona State.
Ondersma had come to Harvard to take
classes in constitutional law and civil
rights, with an eye to becoming a gender-
studies professor. She’d also hoped to
study with the civil-rights theorist Lani
Guinier, who in 1998 had become the first
woman of color appointed a tenured pro-
fessor at Harvard Law and, in the 1990s,
had levied a critique of how law-school
classes were taught. Guinier particularly
took issue with the Socratic method—
whereby professors cold-called students
in large lecture halls, asking them to
cough up information about case law infront of their peers—as being fundamen-
tally unfriendly to the least-privileged
students in a classroom.
Ondersma agreed with Guinier about
the limitations of the Socratic method, and
when, during her first semester at Har-
vard, she saw a notice about a lunchtime
lecture on the Socratic method offered by
Elizabeth Warren, a professor she’d never
heard of, she decided she’d go and argue
her case. By phone, Ondersma remem-
bered how, in a small conference room
packed with students, Warren had laid out
a case “for how, if you really care about
equality in the classroom, if you care about
racial justice, gender justice, and you just
rely on voluntary discussion in classrooms,
you’re only going to hear from the two
white guys that love to talk.” For Warren,
the Socratic method did not further ineq-
uities; it was a tool to mitigate them.
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.”
Several of her students mentioned the
rumor that she targeted only guys with
the assumpsit query because Warren was
determined not to kick off her class by
putting her more vulnerable students on
the spot. (It was, perhaps, not accidental
that Joseph Kennedy III found himself
her prey.)Troy Schuler, a tutor now working on an
education start-up, took Warren’s con-
tracts class the last semester she taught it,
in 2011. He remembered another way she
obsessed about equal access: In the run-up
to exams, when people came to her office
with questions, “she made everyone write
up those questions and send them to her,
then she wrote up her answers and sent
them back out to the entire class. Because
if one person has a question, it probably
means that a lot of people had the same
question, and it was very important to her
that people were not going to have any
structural advantage because they were
the kind of person who knew to come to
talk to a professor in office hours.”
Warren’s argument about her commit-ment to inclusion was so persuasive that
Ondersma put aside her plans to chal-
lenge her on the Socratic method and, as
soon as the lunchtime session was over,
wrote Warren an email that began, “I went
to your lecture and feel like a convert.”
Warren responded right away, asking her
to come to office hours and noting, “I al-
ways love to talk to students interested in
commercial law.”
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.”
Warren listened for a long time, Onder-
sma remembered. “And then she said, ‘If
you really care about social justice, you
should think about focusing on commer-
cial law and bankruptcy.’ ”
The professor told her it was a shame
that so many of those who were committed
to fighting injustice went into public law,
leaving private, commercial practice domi-
nated by more-conservative young law-
yers. (Warren had herself been a conserva-
tive and moved to the left through her
research into how Americans were going
bankrupt.) “ ‘Economic law has a huge im-
pact on women and folks of color,’ ” Onder-
sma remembered Warren telling her.Ondersma ended up taking every class
Warren offered and became her teaching
assistant in the first-year contracts class.
In this position, Ondersma remem-
bered, she had one job: to make sure ev-
eryone got called on equally. “The whole
idea was that she wanted everybody in the
classroom to participate.” Ondersma
would sit with the class list and check off
every student who’d gotten a cold-call
question. Then, in the last ten minutes of
the class, “I’d hand her a notecard with the
names of all the students she’d not yet
called on,” and Warren would try to get to
them all.
Jed Shugerman, now a law professor at
Fordham, recalled coming to Harvard as a
brand-new hire in 2005. He had been ad-vised to at tend other teachers’ classes to
get a feel for how things were done. Ob-
serving 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 de-
tailed questions about the cases.”
It sounds impossible, Shugerman said,
to call on more than two dozen people dur-
ing a class. “Calling on more than 50 peo-
ple sounds absurd, and like the questions
and answers must have been superficial,”
he said. “But she was so responsive and
such a good listener that she could build on
the last person’s answer with someone else
afterward so it would build up to more
complicated and sophisticated points that
would go deeper.”
After class, Warren asked Shugerman to
lunch. When he told her that watching her
had intimidated him, Warren asked him,
“Do you think I could do that when I was
your age? I had no clue. It takes years to
find your own teaching style.” But she ex-
plained to him the thinking behind hers:
90 minutes, she said, is a long time to sit
and be talked to. The Socratic classroom as
she handled it forced everyone in it to pay
close attention not only to what she was
saying but also to what their fellow students
were saying. She was not the leader of con-
versation; she was facilitating it, prompting
the students to do the work of building to
the analysis.
It’s a pedagogical approach that Warren
sees as linkingt was the thing I needed to know. I couldn’t be married toanother teacher if I didn’t respect his teaching.”(Continued on page 80)Y ___ DD ___ AD ___ PD ___ EICTRANSMITTED________ COPY ___ DD ___ AD ___ PD ___ EIC1619FEA_Elizabeth Warren_lay [Print]_35541956.indd 37 8/2/19 6:38 PMaugust5–18, 2019 | newyork 37formed community in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, attended Calvin College (alma
mater of Betsy DeVos), and taken her first
year of law classes at Arizona State.
Ondersma had come to Harvard to take
classes in constitutional law and civil
rights, with an eye to becoming a gender-
studies professor. She’d also hoped to
study with the civil-rights theorist Lani
Guinier, who in 1998 had become the first
woman of color appointed a tenured pro-
fessor at Harvard Law and, in the 1990s,
had levied a critique of how law-school
classes were taught. Guinier particularly
took issue with the Socratic method—
whereby professors cold-called students
in large lecture halls, asking them to
cough up information about case law infrontoftheirpeers—asbeingfundamen-
tallyunfriendlytotheleast-privileged
studentsina classroom.
OndersmaagreedwithGuinierabout
thelimitationsoftheSocraticmethod,and
when,duringherfirst semesterat Har-
vard,shesawa noticeabouta lunchtime
lectureontheSocraticmethodofferedby
ElizabethWarren,a professorshe’d never
heardof,shedecidedshe’dgo andargue
hercase.Byphone,Ondersmaremem-
beredhow,ina smallconferenceroom
packedwithstudents,Warrenhadlaidout
a case“forhow,if youreallycareabout
equality in the classroom, if you care about
racial justice, gender justice, and you just
rely on voluntary discussion in classrooms,
you’re only going to hear from the two
white guys that love to talk.” For Warren,
the Socratic method did not further ineq-
uities; it was a tool to mitigate them.
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.”
Several of her students mentioned the
rumor that she targeted only guys with
the assumpsit query because Warren was
determined not to kick off her class by
putting her more vulnerable students on
the spot. (It was, perhaps, not accidental
that Joseph Kennedy III found himself
her prey.)Troy Schuler, a tutor now working on an
education start-up, took Warren’s con-
tracts class the last semester she taught it,
in 2011. He remembered another way she
obsessed about equal access: In the run-up
to exams, when people came to her office
with questions, “she made everyone write
up those questions and send them to her,
then she wrote up her answers and sent
them back out to the entire class. Because
if one person has a question, it probably
means that a lot of people had the same
question, and it was very important to her
that people were not going to have any
structural advantage because they were
the kind of person who knew to come to
talk to a professor in office hours.”
Warren’s argument about her commit-menttoinclusionwassopersuasivethat
Ondersmaputasideherplanstochal-
lengeherontheSocraticmethodand,as
soonasthelunchtimesessionwasover,
wroteWarrenanemailthat began,“I went
toyourlectureandfeellike a convert.”
Warrenrespondedrightaway,askingher
tocometoofficehoursandnoting,“Ial-
wayslovetotalktostudentsinterestedin
commerciallaw.”
Ondersmawasslightlyembarrassed—
shehadzerointerestincommerciallaw—
butwassogratefulthat a professorwho
didn’t knowherwouldtake timetomeet
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.”
Warren listened for a long time, Onder-
sma remembered. “And then she said, ‘If
you really care about social justice, you
should think about focusing on commer-
cial law and bankruptcy.’ ”
The professor told her it was a shame
that so many of those who were committed
to fighting injustice went into public law,
leaving private, commercial practice domi-
nated by more-conservative young law-
yers. (Warren had herself been a conserva-
tive and moved to the left through her
research into how Americans were going
bankrupt.) “ ‘Economic law has a huge im-
pact on women and folks of color,’ ” Onder-
sma remembered Warren telling her.Ondersma ended up taking every class
Warren offered and became her teaching
assistant in the first-year contracts class.
In this position, Ondersma remem-
bered, she had one job: to make sure ev-
eryone got called on equally. “The whole
idea was that she wanted everybody in the
classroom to participate.” Ondersma
would sit with the class list and check off
every student who’d gotten a cold-call
question. Then, in the last ten minutes of
the class, “I’d hand her a notecard with the
names of all the students she’d not yet
called on,” and Warren would try to get to
them all.
Jed Shugerman, now a law professor at
Fordham, recalled coming to Harvard as a
brand-new hire in 2005. He had been ad-visedtoat tendotherteachers’classesto
get a feelforhowthingsweredone.Ob-
servingWarren,hesaid,wasa littlescary:
“Shekneweveryoneof 80 studentsby
name.Sheusednonotes.Shehadtheday’s
materialmemorizedinherheadasshe
walkedaroundtheroomandaskedde-
tailedquestionsaboutthecases.”
Itsoundsimpossible,Shugermansaid,
tocallonmorethantwodozenpeopledur-
inga class.“Callingonmorethan 50 peo-
plesoundsabsurd,andlikethequestions
andanswersmusthavebeensuperficial,”
hesaid.“Butshewassoresponsiveand
such a good listener that she could build on
the last person’s answer with someone else
afterward so it would build up to more
complicated and sophisticated points that
would go deeper.”
After class, Warren asked Shugerman to
lunch. When he told her that watching her
had intimidated him, Warren asked him,
“Do you think I could do that when I was
your age? I had no clue. It takes years to
find your own teaching style.” But she ex-
plained to him the thinking behind hers:
90 minutes, she said, is a long time to sit
and be talked to. The Socratic classroom as
she handled it forced everyone in it to pay
close attention not only to what she was
saying but also to what their fellow students
were saying. She was not the leader of con-
versation; she was facilitating it, prompting
the students to do the work of building to
the analysis.
It’s a pedagogical approachthat Warren
sees as linkingt was the thing I needed to know. I couldn’t be married toanother teacher if I didn’t respect his teaching.”
(Continued on page 80)