KAVANAUGH AND THE TIGER MOM
AWAY from the he-says; she-says circus at the Senate hearings in Washington over Brett Kavanaugh’s fitness for the US Supreme Court, a sideshow is unravelling in his alma mater of Yale Law School, which threatens, if not to torpedo the reputations of one of the US’s most illustrious power couples, then certainly to remove some of the gloss off their glittering careers.
Amy Chua, aka Tiger Mom whose tongue-in-cheek guide to extreme parenting brought her to fame, may seem, on the face of it, an unlikely victim of the collateral damage arising from the affair.
But when Chua is not torturing her kids with day-long violin practice sessions or tearing up their homemade birthday cards on the grounds of poorly executed colouring, as she described in her bestselling Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother, she is an influential professor at Yale Law school and a towering figure in the critical business of matching graduates up with jobs and clerkships.
Powerful
Chua knows Kavanaugh well. She was one of his most ardent champions for the Supreme Court, describing him as a ‘mentor to women’ in the Wall Street Journal. As a powerful member of the judiciary with a role in vetting clerks for the US Supreme Court, Judge Kavanaugh’s chambers are the fast-track to advancement in the legal profession.
An internship with him is inevitably one of the most coveted destinations for the crème de la crème of Yale graduates and it’s hardly surprising that in true Tiger Mom fashion, Amy had even earmarked her own daughter for one.
But now Chua is facing allegations which she strenuously denies, of if not exactly grooming students for clerkships in Kavanaugh’s chambers, then certainly going too far with her advice.
According to the Guardian newspaper Chua privately told a group of law students last year that it was ‘not an accident’ that Kavanaugh’s female law clerks all ‘looked like models’ and she would provide advice to students about their physical appearance if they wanted to work for him.
Chua was known, it is claimed, for instructing female law students who were preparing for interviews with Kavanaugh on ways they could dress to exude a ‘model-like’ femininity in order to be hired by the learned judge.
But not all of Chua’s protégées were enamoured of her advice. Some viewed it as wildly inappropriate and brought it to the attention of the college authorities.
Chua’s husband Professor Jed Rubenfeld, another big fish in Yale Law school, has also been accused of offering inappropriate advice to law students, a charge which he again adamantly denies.
A student anonymously described to the Guardian the tenor of Professor Rubenfeld’s sage counsel: ‘He told me, “You should know that Judge Kavanaugh hires women with a certain look”.
‘He did not say what the look was and I didn’t ask.’
The student went on to describe how for her part Chua told her she should dress in an ‘outgoing’ way and not in a suit for her interview with Kavanaugh, and that the student should send Chua pictures of herself before going to the interview.
Chua, who is currently recuperating from a severe infection for which she has already spent three weeks in hospital, denies the allegations.
‘Everything that is being said about the advice I give to students applying to Brett Kavanaugh – or any judge – is outrageous, 100% false, and the exact opposite of everything I have stood for and said for the last 15 years,’ she wrote in a letter to Yale.
Storm
Separate to his advice about internships, Rubenfeld is the subject of an internal investigation at Yale into his conduct, particularly with female law students, and has not taken classes this term.
In June he released a strongly worded statement stating how ‘for some years I have contended with personal attacks and false allegations in reaction to my writing on difficult and controversial but important topics of law. I have reason to suspect I am now facing more of the same…’
The storm of allegations represent a setback for the golden couple who up to now have enjoyed an uninterrupted trajectory to the apex of American life.
But these are extraordinary times in America. The veil of secrecy that traditionally protected the elite from public scrutiny of their crimes and misdemeanours, both real or imagined, now rests in the febrile and polarised atmosphere of US politics where it is being frequently torn back to settle scores.
The Brett Kavanaugh hearing has not just put the behaviour of white middle class teenagers under the microscope, it has shone a light on the misogyny, double standards and drunken debauchery that was threaded through upper crust Catholic education in Maryland in the early 1980s.
The allegations swirling around Amy Chua raise questions about behaviour standards in the hothouse of Yale Law school, the blurring of boundaries between students and teachers and the concentration of power in too few hands.
Hopefully, although one wouldn’t count on it, the revelations will ultimately be to the benefit of American society and promote a long overdue shake-up of standards, improve gender relations and puncture the holier-than-thou hypocrisy of the ruling elite.
Underbelly
But for those like Chua who have clawed their way to the top, or Brett Kavanaugh who feel entitled by their birthright to live on the fat of the land, there must now be the ineluctable fear of how their putting a foot wrong could, deservedly or not become political capital and cause their career to go up in smoke.
It must be the first time some of the US one percenters have ever felt anything of the vulnerability which overwhelms millions of impoverished Americans every day of the week.
The shameful underbelly of the US elite and its dirty little secrets were never addressed in Amy Chua and husband Jed Rubenfeld’s recent controversial bestseller, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise And Fall Of Cultural Groups In America, which presents the US as a vast and an unblemished Land of Opportunity.
Trading on their own status as relative newcomers to the States – Chua’s Chinese parents emigrated from the Philippines while his were Jewish emigrants from Poland – they described essentially the cocktails of forces that can propel outsiders into heart of the American elite.
The insecurity of newcomers, they wrote, can act as a fierce driver in the race to educational distinction and explains why the Chinese often outstrip the more complacent patrician class at exams. Feeling superior to the dominant cultural identity is another factor while perhaps ironically ‘impulse control’ was the third factor that gave newcomers the edge.
But as Amy Chua examines the damning allegations of her protégées from her sickbed, she may bitterly question if with her country sunk in a quagmire of fear and loathing, the American Dream is really worth chasing. Or – perish the thought – wonder if driving her children so relentlessly to get ahead was an act of madness.