Cherokee Liz’s Shoddy Scholarship

Flawed research that wasn't even Harvard undergraduate, let alone Harvard Law, caliber. AP

“Flawed” research that wasn’t even Harvard undergraduate, let alone Harvard Law, caliber. AP View Enlarged Image

Preferences: Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren insists she’s a pre-eminent scholar who didn’t need minority status to join Harvard’s faculty. But critics have long questioned her research.

The blond, blue-eyed Bostonian has been caught up in a bizarre racial-quotas scandal as she battles to take back Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat.

Turns out throughout her academic career, Warren has listed her race as Native American in law school directories that administrators use as a tip sheet when making diversity hires.

She claims to be 1/32nd Cherokee Indian, even though the Cherokee Nation has never counted her as a member. She bases her ancestry on family lore and her grandfather’s “high cheekbones.”

After the Boston Herald broke the story, GOP foe Sen. Scott Brown accused her of using phony minority status to advance her career. Warren says she listed herself as a minority merely to meet other people with tribal roots — “in the hopes that I would be invited to a luncheon.” She expressed shock that “anybody” would question her qualifications.

In fact, colleagues and media for years have complained about her scholarship. It’s notoriously sketchy. And so is her pedigree.

First the research. Claiming to be an “authority” on bankruptcy law, Warren has written papers and books wildly inflating the role medical bills play in personal bankruptcies.

A Northwestern University peer review of her 2005 paper on the subject, for example, ripped it apart, arguing “the methods were so poor they gave cover to those who want to dismiss the problems of the uninsured — they can say the only paper out there uses a suspect method.”

ABC News suggested she was exercising a hidden agenda to promote a government-run health system. Sure enough, President Obama in 2009 seized on her findings to argue for socialized medicine: “The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every 30 seconds.”

In fact, as ABC pointed out, the claim cannot be supported by empirical evidence. Asked where he got the flawed data, the White House cited the 2005 study by “Professor Warren.”

In 2010, as Obama was floating Warren’s name as someone to run his new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “The Atlantic” magazine reviewed her academic work and found a disturbing “pattern” of using bogus metrics to inflate the case for left-wing causes. “Deeply, deeply flawed,” it said of her research. “This isn’t Harvard (Law) caliber material — not even Harvard undergraduate.”

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