UPDATE FROM 9/21:

The Massachusetts Republican Party has written to Harvard, demanding that they refuse to pay Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren for teaching one class twice a week this fall on contract law. Nate Little, executive director of the state GOP, wrote in a letter to Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust:

By restoring her to the faculty, even though she has now formed a federal election committee and is actively campaigning, the university is establishing a bad precedent for academic appointments. Of equal concern is that Harvard runs the risk of jeopardizing its tax-exempt status. As a non-profit charitable institution, Harvard is prohibited from taking a position on behalf of or in opposition to a candidate. Your payment of a salary to Professor Warren causes reasonable-minded people to conclude that Harvard is supportive of her candidacy.

By this logic, anyone running for office who holds a job is being illegally financed by their employer. And the only way Harvard might conceivably jeopardize its tax-exempt status would be by doing the bidding of the Republican Party and punishing a professor for seeking public office. If we allowed this kind of reasoning to prevail, only millionaires of the Mitt Romney variety would ever be able to run for public office. But maybe that’s the Massachusetts GOP’s model for public life.

original post on The AVE.

I am a big fan of the idea that university faculty can and should be  politically active.  One reason I voted for President Obama was his impressive academic record.

Less than a week ago. Harvard Law Profesor Elizabeth Warren launched her campaign for the democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts.  As leader of the effort of President Obama to reform the banks. Professor Warren became the target of political ravaging by the Know Nothing  Repricans in the US  Congress.  Now. an initial  poll shows her running neck-and-neck with incumbent Republican Scott Brown.

The results come as a surprise to some.  Academics are not supposed to make good candidates.   .. I call that the academic stereotype.   Earlier surveys showed the Republican truck riding tea part Ypopulist as a favorite of Mass voters.   ( Boston radio station WBUR and  Boston Globe/University of New Hampshire poll ).  That was before Warren’s speech about economic fairness had been heard in the Commonwealth as a Massachusetts issue.

What those spinnmeister yokels  do not understand is the power, the passion that comes of knowledge of facts.  Warren’s passion for her area … consumer economics, is the right passion at the right time.

Knowledge and passion, a hard combo to beat!