Poisoned Ivy: How Egos, Ideology, and Power Politics Almost Ruined Harvard Law School. - book reviews

National Review, March 6, 1995 by Cameron Powell

By Eleanor Kerlow (St. Martin's, 340 pp., $22.95)

IF HARVARD LAW'S internecine strife from 1989 to 1992 was a recipe for an insightful meditation on political correctness versus discrimination, Miss Kerlow is not the cook. The ingredients were there: students marched, sat in the dean's office demanding diversity, sued the law school for discrimination in faculty hiring. Students on the right retaliated; words grew bitter; camps were set up. Then, in 1991, Boston law professor Mary Joe Frug was murdered by an unknown assailant. After fierce debate, Harvard Law Review editors published Professor Frug's controversial feminist work-in-progress. Some dissenting conservative male editors authored a tasteless parody of the professor and her work. The dean was asked to resign. Miss Kerlow's treatment, unfortunately, will appeal only to those who like both left-wing bias in their journalism and fawning prose romanticizing Ivy League institutions. Drawing from no disinterested sources, the author trades access for objectivity and supplies exoneration to nearly every participant willing to speak to her, judgment for the rest. Miss Kerlow's bias embraces both careless writing and strident argument, though her ungainly aid to the Left can only give comfort to Harvard's conservatives. Worst of all, her artless subjectivity frustrates a disturbing story's ability to tell itself.