Dang Gummit! Law Prof Uses 'Machine Gun' Student Grilling Method on Wall Street
In her quest for a new consumer financial protection agency, Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren speaks with the twang of her native Oklahoma and the zeal of a hard-nosed crusader.
“Dang gummit, somebody has got to stand up on behalf of middle-class families!” she told the New York Times in a recent interview.
Warren’s official role is as the congressional overseer for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, but she is making the rounds on TV to spin a story of how deregulation caused abusive lending practices and the financial meltdown that followed. Her own family background was one of financial struggles, and now she is so frugal that she eats shriveled grapes rather than toss them out, her daughter told the newspaper.
One former law student described Warren’s teaching style as “Socratic with a machine gun”; the Times observes that Warren is just as relentless in her grilling of Wall Street bankers.
“Among all the dramatis personae of post-financial crisis Washington, there is no one remotely like Ms. Warren, 60, who has divided the town between those who admire her and those who roll their eyes at her,” the Times says.
“She is an Oklahoma native, a janitor’s daughter, a bankruptcy expert at Harvard Law School and a former Sunday School teacher who cites John Wesley—the co-founder of Methodism and a public health crusader—as an inspiration. She brims with cheer, yet she is she is such a fearsome interrogator that Bruce Mann, her husband, describes her as a grandmother who can make grown men cry.”
