Today’s New York Times has an interesting article on how Elena Kagan used “relentless networking and a remarkable ability to navigate the treacherous waters of Harvard’s internal politics” to climb from visiting professor at Harvard Law School to law school dean to a finalist to become Harvard’s president.
Any individual’s path to a Supreme Court nomination is going to involve some serendipity, but Kagan’s would seem to involve more than most. From the article, it appears that a critical step in her elevation to dean was her being made head of a law school committee to study/counter a university plan to move the law school to a new campus: “The plan was soon dead, and Ms. Kagan gained folk hero status” among the law school’s faculty.