Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [25]
My first-year instructors were highly regarded legal scholars. Guido Calabresi was my torts teacher. Geoffrey Hazard taught our section civil procedure, and Robert Bork, constitutional law. Ellen Peters taught me contracts in a small class of about twenty students. The fact that one of these, Robert Bork, had a national reputation in politics as well left no impression. What mattered to me and most of my classmates was that they were known to be leaders in their field and that they were very much in charge of the classroom and of our learning.
At the urging of some of my classmates, I ran for first-year class representative. Surprisingly, I won. This was probably the first and last political office I would ever hold. A strike by Yale custodians and workers in the fall of 1977 left the campus mostly abandoned by students in the evenings. I had made friends with some of the workers who went on strike. Many of them were black and southern. And for a variety of reasons I identified with them much more easily than I did with my professors. They seemed to identify with the black students as well. To show support of the strike, the students agreed to avoid using the Sterling Law Building after classes. We did little else and perhaps there was little else we could do. It was a minor inconvenience for us compared to the workers, whose livelihood was being threatened. This was perhaps the first time that I felt the conflict of being a part of an entity charged with oppression based on class. I had never been so close to the inside before. Clearly, the people with whom I could most readily identify were being hurt. But being on the inside did not give me the power to stop that. Eventually, the strike ended, but for the most part, I never resolved my feelings.
Making friends came surprisingly easy for me in law school. I was so shy that I could hardly look people in the eye, but I still had the habit of smiling whenever I spoke to anyone. Perhaps this helped my classmates feel at ease with me. Despite that, the law school experience was difficult for me psychologically. Legal training, with its focus on “objective analysis,” created a dissonance in me that I did not resolve until I started teaching law myself. When I started teaching, I was able to fully explore the analysis rather than simply learn to identify and respond to it. It was then that I realized that what had been proposed as objective was in fact fraught with perspective—the perspective of those who made up the analysis—one that I did not often share. But in law school, rather than question the analysis, I questioned myself. I felt some insecurity, not because of my race or gender, but because my closest friends at the law school all had undergraduate degrees from Princeton, Brown, or Stanford while I had a degree from Oklahoma State University, an “aggie college.” And many had had the benefit of travel and culture that were well beyond my means. None of my friends at Yale ever encouraged these insecurities or pointed out the differences, but when it came to hiring for summer jobs, I knew that I was at a distinct disadvantage.
The famous New England fall foliage came early in my first semester. And just as quickly and unexpectedly followed my first bout of severe homesickness. Once again and far earlier than I was accustomed, it was bitter cold. I missed my family, and with the change in the weather, I even began to long for Oklahoma. I had cried when I said good-bye to my sister JoAnn, heaving sobs that lasted well into Kansas, driving north from Tulsa. I consoled myself by calling JoAnn or my mother. Of course I cried again when I got my telephone bill. My family in Oklahoma was experiencing severe stress. Shortly after I began the fall semester, two of my aunts, my mother’s sisters, died within hours of each other, one in Arkansas and one in Missouri. I could not afford to travel home to be with my family and attend the funerals. But I wrote to