The chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party is asking Harvard University to investigate whether Democratic Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren committed “academic fraud” in the 1990s and ‘80s by claiming to be a Native American minority.
“The problem is that Ms. Warren is not a Native American,” state GOP chairman Robert Maginn wrote in a letter to Harvard President Drew Faust on Sunday. “She is Caucasian.”
Warren found herself caught up in a controversy that wouldn’t go away last week after the Boston Herald revealed that Warren was described as a “minority” both by Harvard at one point and additionally in the American Association of Law Schools publication from 1984 to 1995.
Pressed by reporters, her campaign struggled to prove her ancestry.
“Despite her insistence that she is an American Indian based upon ‘family lore’ and her observation that some in her family had ‘high cheekbones like all the Indians do,’ she has failed to produce a single shred of evidence to substantiate her claim,” the state GOP chairman wrote in the letter.
Warren doesn’t refer to herself as a minority anymore. She has dismissed the notion that she did so in the past to give her a leg up professionally. Late last week, she said she referred to herself that way to meet others of Native American ancestry.
But the Massachusetts Republican Party still wants Harvard to conduct a probe.
“Harvard must investigate Ms. Warren’s false claims to be a minority; how it came to pass that Harvard accepted these claims; and the extent to which Ms. Warren’s alleged minority status afforded her advantages to which she would not otherwise have been entitled,” Maginn wrote.