(2018-09-03) — Massachussetts’ Sen. Elizabeth Warren today said she’s “ashamed to admit” that Harvard University hired her, not on the basis of her professed Native American heritage, but on merit alone.

Warren’s confessed embarrassment at her own hard-earned competence rather than preferential treatment based on bloodlines, follows release of an exhaustive investigation by The Boston Globe, which examined hundreds of documents and interviewed dozens of former colleagues. The Globe determined that Harvard did not hire her based on her claim that she’s 1/32nd Native American.

Starting in 1986, Warren, then a law professor, began self-identifying as a Native American minority, and was sometimes listed in professional directories, and recipe books as such.

“What does it say to our nation’s minority persons that their mentor and leader actually achieved success through dint of hard-work, and skill,” Sen. Warren lamented in a Globe interview. “I’m petrified that this will close the doors of affirmative action opportunity in the faces of my fellow tribespersons…yes, petrified like those majestic forests in Navajo and Apache territory, on the land that the White man now calls ‘Arizona’.”