august 5–18, 2019 | new york 81
consideration to people who’d been first
in their families to go to college, students
who had been in the military, who’d had
work experience outside of the academy.”
Shugerman said it was striking that War-
ren chose the admissions committee,
since big law-school muckety-mucks
often preferred the hiring committees.
This is part of how Ondersma came to
Harvard and wound up in Warren’s office
hours. It wasn’t pure serendipity: Warren
headed the committee that had decided to
admit Ondersma as a second-year law stu-
dent from Arizona State. Warren knew
exactly whom she was talking to when
Ondersma first came to her office and,
once she was there, took great satisfaction
in persuading the young radical to focus
her fight against injustice on the study of
commercial law.
When I asked Warren about her wooing
of progressive students into her own tradi-
tionally more staid field, she rubbed her
hands together, a cheerful spider in full
command of her web. She told me a story
about how she performed the same trick
with Katie Porter, a student who flubbed
an early answer in class, came to beg War-
ren not to give up on her, and blurted out,
“I don’t care about any of this bankruptcy
stuff!” Porter not only went on to study
bankruptcy with Warren; she wound up
teaching it as a professor and, in 2018,
flipped an Orange County California
House seat blue. Warren wants progres-
sives, she said, “armed with maces and
spears and sticks” in their fights for eco-
nomic equality. Porter now performs viral
eviscerations of bankers and bureaucrats
on the House floor, reminiscent of what
her mentor does in the Senate.
Porter isn’t the only elected progressive
to have emerged from Warren’s classes.
Boston city-council member Michelle Wu
was a Warren student; so, of course, was
Joe Kennedy. And both Warren’s chief of
staff, Dan Geldon, and her former policy
director, Ganesh Sitaraman, are former
students. She has, by some measures, used
her time in the classroom to build a small
army, which also includes prominent
bankruptcy professors Dalié Jiménez and
Abbye Atkinson.
But there’s another student of Warren’s
who now sits alongside her in the Senate:
the bloodred Tom Cotton from Arkansas.
Cotton once told Chuck Todd that, while
he knew from her scholarship that she was
a liberal, he hadn’t been able to divine her
politics in class.
Warren and Cotton appeared together
at a 2017 panel at Harvard for senators
associated with the school (at which War-
ren was the only woman and the only
panelist without a Harvard degree in theall-white group). During the discussion,
Warren was describing why she’d come to
teach at Harvard, how “every day I got to
walk into the classroom where [there
was] such privilege, such opportunity,
such incredible tools, but to say to people,
‘Come on, get better at what you’ve got
and widen it out, because the only mis-
take you can make is not to get out there
and do something with passion.’ ”
Cotton interrupted her: “That’s not ex-
actly the way I remember it,” he dead-
panned, explaining that “she was teaching
us that lesson by being very hard on us.”
Warren leaned over and looked at her
former student. “And are you sorry?” she
asked him.
Cotton backed down. “She was probably
the best professor I had,” he conceded.Writing about Warren in the
Times Magazine earlier this
summer, Emily Bazelon, her-
self a lecturer at Yale Law
School, wrote that “Warren didn’t sound
to me like a law professor on the trail, but
she did sound like a teacher.” Bazelon
worried, a bit, that “trying to educate
people isn’t the easiest way to connect
with them.”
In a presidential context, the question
of how women might make themselves
“likable” looms large and perpetually un-
solvable. Warren, like every other woman
who speaks loudly in public, has already
been tagged for being imperious and in-
authentic, for faking her love for beer, for
being too elite or too folksy. Male paths to
presidential endearment—academic ge-
nius, a facility for languages, shows of
muscularity, business acumen, bellowing,
football jokes, and the plausible enjoy-
ment of beer—are apparently off the ta-
ble. So what are women going to do?
The conviction that teaching—being a
literal teacher—might be an answer
feels, on some level, far-fetched. First, it
is hard work when part of the education
means schooling the public on the bias
and exclusion that have left non-male,
nonwhite candidates on the margins
to begin with. Warren’s colleague and
competitor Kamala Harris recently
observed—after engaging in a back-and-
forth with Joe Biden over the history of
busing—“there’s still a lot of educating to
do about who we are” and acknowledged
that those efforts can be draining. “In my
moments of fatigue with it all, I’m like,
‘Look, I’m not running to be a history
professor,’ ” Harris said.
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 shiverof dread when, during the second de-
bate, she stared at a distracted and gig-
gling 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.
Here’s the thing: Since there aren’t a lot
of other easy models for powerful women
to authoritatively communicate with
masses of people they’ve never been en-
couraged to lead, why wouldn’t it make
sense that the model by which a woman
could emerge in a presidential sphere
might be the same as the one that permit-
ted women entry into the public sphere to
begin with?
It is, after all, no coincidence that
many of the few women to have made
serious approaches toward the presiden-
cy in the past found their first profes-
sional foothold in a classroom: Shirley
Chisholm was a director of nursery
schools and an early-education consul-
tant who made early education central to
her political agenda; Hillary Clinton was
the second female law professor at the
University of Arkansas; Margaret Chase
Smith and Elizabeth Dole also did stints
as teachers.
It’s true that people may resent teachers.
It’s also true that people are primed to re-
sent teachers, because they resent women
who might wield power over them, and it is
still new and uncomfortable to think about
women having political—presidential!—
power. And yet: People who have had great
teachers love them in ways that are intense
and alchemical and irrational and some-
times difficult to convey—which is also,
oddly enough, how some people love the
politicians they believe in and choose to
fight for.
Ondersma, who was going to teach
women’s studies and critical race theory,
now teaches bankruptcy and commercial
law at Rutgers, where many of her stu-
dents are working-class children of im-
migrants and were first-generation col-
lege students. She cold-calls them, using
the Socratic method to draw them in.
Ondersma is still in touch with Warren,
whom she talks about the way many peo-
ple talk about the teachers who changed
their lives. “Every time I messaged her,
she always wrote back and said, ‘I’m
proud of you,’ ” Ondersma said, calling
those “the four most important words I’ve
heard from almost anyone in my life.”
It may be true that we don’t want a
president who asks us to do homework.
But we might want one who manages to
see in us, somehow, potential. ■Y ___ DD ___ AD ___ PD ___ EICTRANSMITTED________ COPY ___ DD ___ AD ___ PD ___ EIC1619FEA_Elizabeth Warren_lay [Print]_35541956.indd 81 8/2/19 6:38 PMaugust5–18, 2019 | newyork 81consideration to people who’d been first
in their families to go to college, students
who had been in the military, who’d had
work experience outside of the academy.”
Shugerman said it was striking that War-
ren chose the admissions committee,
since big law-school muckety-mucks
often preferred the hiring committees.
This is part of how Ondersma came to
Harvard and wound up in Warren’s office
hours. It wasn’t pure serendipity: Warren
headed the committee that had decided to
admit Ondersma as a second-year law stu-
dent from Arizona State. Warren knew
exactly whom she was talking to when
Ondersma first came to her office and,
once she was there, took great satisfaction
in persuading the young radical to focus
her fight against injustice on the study of
commercial law.
When I asked Warren about her wooing
of progressive students into her own tradi-
tionally more staid field, she rubbed her
hands together, a cheerful spider in full
command of her web. She told me a story
about how she performed the same trick
with Katie Porter, a student who flubbed
an early answer in class, came to beg War-
ren not to give up on her, and blurted out,
“I don’t care about any of this bankruptcy
stuff!” Porter not only went on to study
bankruptcy with Warren; she wound up
teaching it as a professor and, in 2018,
flipped an Orange County California
House seat blue. Warren wants progres-
sives, she said, “armed with maces and
spears and sticks” in their fights for eco-
nomic equality. Porter now performs viral
eviscerations of bankers and bureaucrats
on the House floor, reminiscent of what
her mentor does in the Senate.
Porter isn’t the only elected progressive
to have emerged from Warren’s classes.
Boston city-council member Michelle Wu
was a Warren student; so, of course, was
Joe Kennedy. And both Warren’s chief of
staff, Dan Geldon, and her former policy
director, Ganesh Sitaraman, are former
students. She has, by some measures, used
her time in the classroom to build a small
army, which also includes prominent
bankruptcy professors Dalié Jiménez and
Abbye Atkinson.
But there’s another student of Warren’s
who now sits alongside her in the Senate:
the bloodred Tom Cotton from Arkansas.
Cotton once told Chuck Todd that, while
he knew from her scholarship that she was
a liberal, he hadn’t been able to divine her
politics in class.
Warren and Cotton appeared together
at a 2017 panel at Harvard for senators
associated with the school (at which War-
ren was the only woman and the only
panelist without a Harvard degree in the
all-white group). During the discussion,
Warren was describing why she’d come to
teach at Harvard, how “every day I got to
walk into the classroom where [there
was] such privilege, such opportunity,
such incredible tools, but to say to people,
‘Come on, get better at what you’ve got
and widen it out, because the only mis-
take you can make is not to get out there
and do something with passion.’ ”
Cotton interrupted her: “That’s not ex-
actly the way I remember it,” he dead-
panned, explaining that “she was teaching
us that lesson by being very hard on us.”
Warren leaned over and looked at her
former student. “And are you sorry?” she
asked him.
Cotton backed down. “She was probably
the best professor I had,” he conceded.Writing about Warren in the
Times Magazine earlier this
summer, Emily Bazelon, her-
self a lecturer at Yale Law
School, wrote that “Warren didn’t sound
to me like a law professor on the trail, but
she did sound like a teacher.” Bazelon
worried, a bit, that “trying to educate
people isn’t the easiest way to connect
with them.”
In a presidential context, the question
of how women might make themselves
“likable” looms large and perpetually un-
solvable. Warren, like every other woman
who speaks loudly in public, has already
been tagged for being imperious and in-
authentic, for faking her love for beer, for
being too elite or too folksy. Male paths to
presidential endearment—academic ge-
nius, a facility for languages, shows of
muscularity, business acumen, bellowing,
football jokes, and the plausible enjoy-
ment of beer—are apparently off the ta-
ble. So what are women going to do?
The conviction that teaching—being a
literal teacher—might be an answer
feels, on some level, far-fetched. First, it
is hard work when part of the education
means schooling the public on the bias
and exclusion that have left non-male,
nonwhite candidates on the margins
to begin with. Warren’s colleague and
competitor Kamala Harris recently
observed—after engaging in a back-and-
forth with Joe Biden over the history of
busing—“there’s still a lot of educating to
do about who we are” and acknowledged
that those efforts can be draining. “In my
moments of fatigue with it all, I’m like,
‘Look, I’m not running to be a history
professor,’ ” Harris said.
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 shiverof dread when, during the second de-
bate, she stared at a distracted and gig-
gling 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.
Here’s the thing: Since there aren’t a lot
of other easy models for powerful women
to authoritatively communicate with
masses of people they’ve never been en-
couraged to lead, why wouldn’t it make
sense that the model by which a woman
could emerge in a presidential sphere
might be the same as the one that permit-
ted women entry into the public sphere to
begin with?
It is, after all, no coincidence that
many of the few women to have made
serious approaches toward the presiden-
cy in the past found their first profes-
sional foothold in a classroom: Shirley
Chisholm was a director of nursery
schools and an early-education consul-
tant who made early education central to
her political agenda; Hillary Clinton was
the second female law professor at the
University of Arkansas; Margaret Chase
Smith and Elizabeth Dole also did stints
as teachers.
It’s true that people may resent teachers.
It’s also true that people are primed to re-
sent teachers, because they resent women
who might wield power over them, and it is
still new and uncomfortable to think about
women having political—presidential!—
power. And yet: People who have had great
teachers love them in ways that are intense
and alchemical and irrational and some-
times difficult to convey—which is also,
oddly enough, how some people love the
politicians they believe in and choose to
fight for.
Ondersma, who was going to teach
women’s studies and critical race theory,
now teaches bankruptcy and commercial
law at Rutgers, where many of her stu-
dents are working-class children of im-
migrants and were first-generation col-
lege students. She cold-calls them, using
the Socratic method to draw them in.
Ondersma is still in touch with Warren,
whom she talks about the way many peo-
ple talk about the teachers who changed
their lives. “Every time I messaged her,
she always wrote back and said, ‘I’m
proud of you,’ ” Ondersma said, calling
those “the four most important words I’ve
heard from almost anyone in my life.”
It may be true that we don’t want a
president who asks us to do homework.
But we might want one who manages to
see in us, somehow, potential. ■