Elena Kagan, the president’s nominee for the Supreme Court, has come under fire from liberals for hiring too few women and minorities as dean of Harvard Law School.
Kagan certainly cannot claim she was unfamiliar with such gender- and race-based hiring. A 1997 memo released this week shows that she was involved with helping the Clinton White House ensure it had minority employees.
“Check out these figures,” Bruce Reed, head of the Domestic Policy office at the Clinton White House, wrote to Kagan, who was his deputy, on Oct. 17, 1997.
Reed noted that if his office hired Neera Tanden, the daughter of Indian immigrants, that would bump up the percentage of minorities and women in the 25-person office.
“We’ll be 30 percent minority and 68 percent women,” Reed wrote in his e-mail to Kagan, advising her that the information “might come in handy next time you’re called to testify before [Congress].”
Reed was forwarding an e-mail from his chief of staff, Paul Weinstein, that broke down the hiring numbers in detail.
“Of the 25 positions, 16 are held by women (64 percent). Six positions are held by minorities (24 percent). Three are held by African-Americans (double-counting Julie Fernandes) (12 percent). Two are held by Hispanic-Americans (8 percent). One held by Asian-Americans (4 percent). One held by Native-Americans (4 percent).”
Kagan printed the e-mail out and wrote in pen to Reed that they should share the numbers with deputy White House chief of staff Sylvia Matthews, but not until they had subtracted one white male from the total count of staffers.
“Bruce,” she wrote, “We should send this to Sylvia — though first we should take out Carl Whillock.”
She signed it: “Elena.”
Whillock, a longtime friend of Clinton’s, is noted in obituaries (he died in 2005) as having begun work at the White House in 1997.
Kagan has been criticized by minority law professors for not hiring enough minorities and women at Harvard. In an article published a week ago, they noted that Kagan made 32 tenure or tenure track faculty hires, but only seven of those were women and only one was a minority.
“We were frankly shocked,” wrote the four law professors.
The White House and Justice Department have pushed back against the criticism. The White House has pushed a memo arguing that Kagan offered many more jobs to minorities and women than were accepted.
And the Justice Department has circulated a list of the gender and ethnicity of Kagan’s hires at the Solicitor General’s office. The list is formatted similarly to the list on the White House memo in 1997.
Kagan has hired six people into an office of 25 attorneys since taking over last year, a Justice official said. They included this list:
1 white man – assistant SG
3 women – 2 assistant SGs, 1 special assistant
1 asian man – special assistant
1 indian man – principal deputy SG