Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [161]
The day before my evening presentation, I met with students and faculty including a classmate, Roberta Romano. Even then we knew that Roberta was destined to teach. She was always insightful and thorough in ways that separated her from even the brightest of her very bright classmates. Of the other, older faculty who were teaching at Yale when I was a student, Burke Marshall was especially warm. Professor Marshall had been a high-ranking official in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. His contributions to the Civil Rights Act enforcement of the 1970s was something we took for granted as students. When I went to Washington, I more fully appreciated his importance to the era. Dean Jim Thomas, one of the most outstanding individuals in law school administration and teaching, was a major influence on my decision to go to Yale. He was as hospitable in 1992 as he had been when I visited the campus in 1977. He invited me to meet the students at the college where he was a master.
During the afternoon I had a chance to walk to my old neighborhood and visit the corner grocery and pizza parlor which I regularly visited. The owner of the grocery recognized me from the hearing. Over a slice of pizza, his treat, he told me that while he and his wife watched the hearing together he remembered me from my visits to his store. I could not imagine that of all the students he must have seen over the years that he could remember me but I was glad that he felt that he had. But none of this calmed my nervousness about the speech.
That evening the dean introduced me to the crowd of about six hundred; Stephen helped me with questions; my friend Ivy McKinney had driven from her home in Stamford to be in the audience. The scene was set for my ease and comfort. As I stepped up to the podium, I looked out at the crowd in the law school auditorium. In the back of the room, I saw the faces of two of my former professors, Elias Clark and Joseph Goldstein. All at once, I was a nervous, insecure first-year law student again. I had more than the jitters. What befell me did not go away. I progressed through my prepared remarks, never so happy to finish a speech. My only consolation was that I was spared reliving that part of the law school experience where professors ask questions.
I had learned so much at Yale. The intensity of the questioning and probing was such that I learned to expand my reasoning. The experience had given me a sense of certainty about my abilities as I faced the world. It no doubt contributed to my ability to address the Senate Judiciary Committee without being in awe of their prominence. Yet, amazingly, none of that confidence applied during my first time back inside the walls of the law school itself. The experience of being a student was so potent that twelve years later I saw myself in that role. That kind of intensity will certainly take more than one visit to undermine. Perhaps the intensity of the law school experience was what brought me close to many of my classmates, creating friendships that continue today.
Some fellow Yale Law School graduates have been less than sympathetic. In an opinion piece written for the press, one graduate was downright condescending in his sympathy with my history of sexual harassment. He suggested that my history with sexual harassment would explain why I preferred that my students call me Professor Hill rather than Anita and why I objected when a new student