Is Harriet Miers a feminist radical in the mold of Gloria Steinem and Susan Faludi? I don’t know, but let’s take a closer look at the lecture series Miers helped found. (By the way, I’ve been criticized for dissing the likes of Faludi and Steinem, but as the founder of a feminist holiday, my own feminist credentials are impeccable. And if you want to read my kind of feminist theory, try “Can We Make Boys and Girls Alike?“)

Here’s the full list of Raggio Lecturers. It sure doesn’t look very diverse to me. Here’s the website of the Raggio Lecture Series. And here’s the original story from The Chronicle of Higher Education. See what you think.

To what extent can we hold Harriet Miers responsible for the choice of speakers in this lecture series? At one level, maybe not a lot. As I noted the other day conservatives naively fund college radicalism all the time. A Corner reader who is himself a college fundraiser writes to emphasize that lecture series of the type established and funded by Miers regularly require donors to surrender all control. (That’s how conservative donors get duped.) True, a donor can write a broad purpose into a fellowship or lecture series–say, to speak to the challenges facing women in the professions. But beyond that, the donation is legally classed as a gift precisely because the donor surrenders control to the college once the contribution is made.

This would seem to segregate Miers fairly well from the content of the lectures. Still, it’s certainly possible that Miers had some sense of who would run these lectures and what they would be like. And if you look at Miers’ CV, it lists her as an Executive Board Member of Southern Methodist University Law School. I haven’t been able to confirm it, but one e-mailer says that Miers was on SMU’s advisory board up until 2001. If Miers was really that closely involved with SMU, it’s hard to believe she didn’t have good knowledge of who was being invited to deliver the lectures that she herself had helped to create.

But this only tells us so much. We don’t know if Miers was pleased with the lectures or not. For all we know, Miers could have resigned in 2001 in protest of the political one-sidedness of the lecturer series. (Far more likely, of course, it was because of her new political role.) As a donor, Miers would have lost all power over the lectures. And even as an SMU Law School board member, Miers may have deemed it inappropriate to meddle in the details of the lecture’s administration. Having said all that, it’s not hard to see a scenario in which, as an SMU board member, Miers might have done more to balance the lecture series that she herself had helped create. So the matter is fuzzy, yet potentially revealing.

Finally, Louise Raggio, the woman after whom the lecture series was named (see the series website, linked above, for more on Raggio), was interviewed on the Miers appointment in the October 4 Dallas Morning News. These are Raggio’s comments on Miers:

Louise Raggio says there’s no reason to fret about President Bush’s pick to replace Sandra Day O’Connor. “I pushed her election as state bar president,” says the 85-year-old legal pioneer, who helped overhaul Texas marriage and family laws in 1967 and expanded the rights of women to do business here. Ms. Raggio has known the Supreme Court nominee since Ms. Miers was a student at Southern Methodist University’s law school. “I have a great deal of respect for her and her legal abilities,” Ms. Raggio says. “She is very conservative, but she’s fair and deliberate in her work.”