Miers's Academic Record
After reading this Hit and Run post and the comments that followed, it's clear that a lot of people have absolutely no idea what Harriet Miers's graduation from Southern Methodist University and SMU Law School suggests about her brainpower or academic record.
It does not, first of all, imply that she "could not get into" a school with a national reputation. Until very, very recently, southerners--even incredibly smart southerners--almost never considered leaving the region to go to college. (The exceptions were a few legacies from prep-school-oriented families.) For a bright woman in the early 1960s, a good private school like SMU would have been plenty ambitious. In Dallas, people today are still impressed by an SMU degree and even more by an SMU Law School degree. And, aside from her White House stint, Miers has spent her life in Dallas.
In Miers's day, SMU was a predominantly female undergraduate institution with an almost entirely male law school. Then, as now, it was a rich kids' school, a lot like the University of Southern California until recently. You can get a fine education there, but too few students bother. (To upgrade its program, the university has in recent years aggressively recruited scholarship students.) Miers appears to have been an unusually serious SMU student and, as far as I can tell from the one yearbook from her undergrad days left in the SMU library, she did not join a sorority--which would make her quite unusual. Kids at SMU take partying much more seriously than they take academics. (I often joke that while the UCLA library has many more books, the great thing about SMU's library is that none of the books are ever checked out.) From her academic record alone, it's clear that Miers is a self-directed person who does not simply follow the crowd.
But I'm still not impressed. SMU, which provides most of the Postrel family income, is a decent school. But it is not a place that demands that a student stretch her mind. Miers has never been in a scholarly environment where she was surrounded by people who were smarter than she and just as hard working. She has had a demanding, successful career in a fairly parochial environment where she could easily impress people. And she appears to be a legal technician, not part of the cosmopolitan debate over legal ideas, a debate that emphatically includes conservative voices.
Maybe the Supreme Court needs parochial judges--though David Souter already fills that role--just as it arguably needs people who've practiced law. But I'm skeptical