This kind of work, Brunstad says, flushes out much of the otherwise untested commercial theory favored by bankruptcy scholars. Often, the results are not what those scholars expected.
“There are some people who do it, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of resources. You never know exactly what you’re going to get when you strike out to do empirical work,” Brunstad says. For that reason most academics avoid empirical research.
With the help of Westbrook and others, Warren penned articles, textbooks, sourcebooks, and several popular self-help-style finance books. She became an expert on the middle class and the challenges facing its continued existence. Her approach to studying people was novel and her resulting work became the groundwork for legislative reform starting in the 1990s.
The work also planted the initial political seeds in Warren.
She saw a financial crisis coming for America’s middle class long before 2008. When that crisis came around, her background earned her a job with the Troubled Assets Relief Program and gave rise to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“She has spent so much time and effort trying to figure out what’s actually going on for the average person,” said Brunstad. “It’s the average guy that she’s the champion of, not any sort of elite group or something like that.”
A career identifying problems and injustices has led to a second career trying to fix them.
“She really understands commercial law. She really understands how it works. She really understands what the consequences of what legislation would be,” Brunstad says. “If you’re having Congress pass laws it would be incredibly useful to have someone in detail understand how they work.”
MAKING THE JUMP
Even for professors like Warren whose work lends itself to the political process, the jump from academia to election politics is not easy. Warren’s transition has not been perfect, political analysts say, prone to the same mistakes made by first-time candidates.
“I see in her campaign the same problems that I see in every first-time candidate,” Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman says. “Unlike when you are selling a book and you are out there with a single issue, there’s nothing fair about campaigns.”
Political analysts and former colleagues say Warren’s teaching background may give her a leg up in overcoming the first-time hurdles. Warren’s role as a teacher is the essential style of her campaign, they say.
“She is a terrific teacher, and politics, for all of its downside, is in many ways a teaching process, trying to persuade people how things work in the world,” Westbrook says.
“There’s a huge connection between teaching and politics just in terms of being fully present, connecting with people, engaging, listening,” Kennedy school lecturer M. Marty Linsky says.
Warren’s teaching style is highly Socratic, built to engage students. When teaching first-year contracts classes, she employs a teaching assistant whose sole job is to make sure she calls on every student in the class at least once. That style, analysts say, works well on the campaign trail, and by all accounts Warren is good at it. At nearly every school she has taught, Warren has won the top teaching award. At Harvard, she has won it twice, which is unprecedented.
“She is certainly a natural teacher....The skill of explaining things to people in a way they understand it and get it, that is what brings together her teaching and her candidacy,” Getman says. “Most academics imagine that all you have to do is state something and people will understand it. Liz does not have that.”
Warren is more practiced in translating her work into clear and simple language than most academics, Linsky says, but she has still operated within a relatively cloistered world, and in almost every situation she has been the authority figure in the room.
The struggle to move beyond that authority—the interplay between her two identities and the transition from one to the other—will likely define Warren’s campaign and her chances of unseating Republican Senator Scott Brown.
“This is the part about running for office that’s so amazing: Running for office is an act of optimism,” Warren says. “To do this, I have to believe that change is possible.”
—Staff writer Nicholas P. Fandos can be reached at nicholasfandos@college.harvard.edu.