Free Speaking Truth to Power by Anita Hill

Ivy really
did
cover the walls of the Gothic-style structures so unlike the red brick buildings of Oklahoma State. And these differences seemed to have everything to do with tradition and expectation. And I feared that my early education at rural schools in Oklahoma and later in college was hardly adequate preparation for the top law school in the country.
    I had decided to go to Yale rather than Harvard after visiting both. Yale, the smaller of the two, gave me the feeling of protection and security I needed for two major transitions—undergraduate to law school, public to Ivy League school. But once I got there I discovered that the small size only compensated so much for the inevitable feeling of being an outsider. However much those who direct the educational process perceive it as race and gender neutral, Yale cannot escape its history. (In many respects it does not want to.) It was designed for young white men of privilege and only began to admit women in 1969. From its secret societies to its Whiffenpoofs, men dominated the culture of theinstitution in the 1970s, just as they had historically. And if we never spoke of class, status, or distinctions in background, it was because they were so clearly taken for granted.
    My class at Yale was 165 students from all over the country. I was attracted to students who were making transitions similar to my own, though few, if any, seemed to be bridging barriers of race, gender, class, geography, and education. I recognized my inexperience and naiveté, but was committed to learning all I could at Yale. The summer before, I had vowed to be like a sponge, soaking up everything that the experience had to offer. I valued what I brought to Yale, but I wanted to absorb what it had as well.
    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 beinghurt. 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