A Question of Judgment?

A Question of Judgment

The Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday published a story on Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers. It spoke of her "playing a key role" in the late 1990s in establishing the Louise B. Raggio lectureship at Southern Methodist University, Miss Miers' alma mater. The article says Miss Miers "pushed for the creation" of the Raggio speakers' series. The Raggio lectureship brought an apparently unbroken string of pro- abortion speakers to the university's Dallas campus. Among those tapped to enlighten young law students were Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. Magazine and a veteran campaigner for liberal abortion laws. Also holding forth were Congresswoman Patricia Schoeder, Susan Faludi, author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, and even former Texas Governor Ann W. Richards, the pro-abortion Democrat whom George W. Bush defeated in 1994. This story needs to be handled with care. The Chronicle is certainly no friend of the pro-life cause and may have exaggerated Miss Miers' role in setting up the lectureship. But the issue does need to be carefully explored. It raises a host of questions about judgment. For example, how "key" was Miss Miers' role and how hard did she "push" to create this lectureship? Was this speakers' series named for Louise B. Raggio from its inception? Ms. Raggio is a high-profile Dallas lawyer who has received well- publicized awards from the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. Did Miss Miers know what kind of program she was helping to establish? Should she have known? The law students surely would have benefited from hearing contrasting points of view. All of these are reasonable questions. We need to see the documentation on the Raggio Lecture Series, how it was set up, who played what role, and how it was perceived at the time. There can be no question of attorney-client privilege here, nor of Executive Privilege. The atmosphere on all too many campuses is, tragically, pro-abortion. But the climate of opinion around the U.S. Supreme Court is more intensely so. The reporters, commentators, lawyers, and far too many clerks constitute a powerful pro-abortion monopoly of opinion. A man or woman must have strong principles and unshakable determination to resist those pressures. President Bush has assured us that Harriet Miers does have that inner toughness. We certainly hope she does.

Source: http://www.frc.org

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Supreme Court Nominee Helped Set Up Lecture Series That Brought Leading Feminists to Southern Methodist U.

By PETER SCHMIDT peter.schmidt@chronicle.com

Washington

For someone both heralded and feared as a potentially conservative voice on the U.S. Supreme Court, Harriet E. Miers has played a key role in exposing college students to some unmistakably liberal ideas.

In the late 1990s, as a member of the advisory board for Southern Methodist University's law school, Ms. Miers pushed for the creation of an endowed lecture series in women's studies named for Louise B. Raggio, one of the first women to rise to prominence in the Texas legal community. A strong advocate for women, Ms. Raggio helped persuade state lawmakers to revise Texas laws to give women new rights over property and in the event of divorce.

Ms. Miers, whom President Bush announced on Monday as his choice to fill the Supreme Court seat being vacated by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, not only advocated for the lecture series, but also gave money and solicited donations to help get it off the ground.

A feminist icon, Gloria Steinem, delivered the series's first lecture, in 1998. In the following two years, the speakers were Patricia S. Schroeder, the former Democratic congresswoman widely associated with women's causes, and Susan Faludi, the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991). Ann W. Richards, the Democrat whom George W. Bush unseated as governor of Texas in 1994, delivered the lecture in 2003.

Other speakers in the series have included Geraldine Laybourne, founder of Oxygen Media, a cable-television network for women; Gwen Ifill, moderator of public television's Washington Week and a correspondent for The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer; and Colleen Barrett and Herb Kelleher, both top executives at Dallas-based Southwest Airlines, who teamed up to give the lecture in 2004. A description of the lecture series on Southern Methodist's Web site says it "brings role models of vision and achievement to SMU to speak on gender and women's issues."

The series "expands students' opportunities to hear and interact with nationally renowned speakers in the area of women's studies," the site says, "as well as strengthens intellectual ties between the university and the greater community."

Ms. Miers's work in setting up the lecture series is part of a pattern of deep involvement with Southern Methodist, where she received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1967 and a law degree in 1970. She served on the law school's advisory board from 1989 through 2001, on the university alumni association's board from 1985 through 1988, and on a university board that promotes athletics in 1993 and 1994.

In addition, she worked for the law school in the early 1980s as an adjunct instructor who critiqued students' skills in arguing cases. The teaching job paid just a few hundred dollars a semester, essentially amounting to volunteer work for a lawyer who was successful in private practice.

"I would characterize her as a very loyal alum," said C. Paul Rogers, a law professor who was the school's dean during most of the period when Ms. Miers served on its advisory board. In an interview on Tuesday, he recalled her as an active board member but not an outspoken one. He did not recall her having played any role as university officials debated whether, or how, the institution should comply with a 1996 decision, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, that struck down the use of race-conscious admissions by the law school at the University of Texas at Austin (The Chronicle, <http://chronicle.com/che-data/articles.dir/art-42.dir/issue-29.dir/29a00101.htm> March 29, 1996). In the end, Southern Methodist complied with the Fifth Circuit's ruling, which was effectively nullified by the Supreme Court's 2003 decisions in two affirmative-action cases involving the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (The Chronicle, <http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i43/43s00101.htm> July 4, 2003).

Despite her involvement with Southern Methodist, Ms. Miers has little experience in dealing with education law. She has spent most of her legal career working for a large Texas-based firm that focuses on corporate law and never asked her to represent either an educational institution or anyone suing one.

She joined the current Bush administration in 2001 and has served in several capacities, most recently as counsel to the president. While she has promoted Mr. Bush's views on some issues of interest to colleges, such as stem-cell research, Ms. Miers is not known as a key player in setting White House education policy.

By contrast, John G. Roberts Jr., who was overwhelmingly confirmed as chief justice of the United States last week, dealt with a host of legal questions related to education as a district-court judge, a federal lawyer in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and a litigator for Hogan & Hartson, a Washington firm with an extensive education practice (The Chronicle, <http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i47/47a00101.htm> July 29).

Source: http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?id=e6yeo9i8hnrs60hye6marcd5rt52f6f5

Need more info about Ms. Miers ... here is a good compilation of quotes... both liberal and conservative...

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/005630.php

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