Daily Inspiration Quote by Catharine MacKinnon

MacKinnon’s line reads like a self-deprecating shrug, but it’s really a scalpel aimed at elite credentialing. By framing “not having an appointment at Harvard” as a kind of honor roll, she flips the usual prestige economy: exclusion becomes evidence, not of personal failure, but of an institution’s patterned blind spots. The joke lands because Harvard is shorthand for the legal-academic establishment that helped canonize MacKinnon’s own field of feminist jurisprudence, yet has historically been selective about which feminism it validates and which bodies it welcomes.

The subtext is doing double duty. On one level, it’s a quiet rebuke of gatekeeping: the absence of a Harvard title is not an individual anomaly, it’s a shared condition, disproportionately borne by “women of color.” On another, it’s an ethical move from “I” to “we.” MacKinnon, a white feminist often criticized for the limits of second-wave feminism, uses institutional exclusion to redirect attention toward people whose brilliance has been structurally under-credentialed. That’s not just allyship branding; it’s an attempt to reframe authority itself, away from endowed chairs and toward work that survives without them.

Context matters: MacKinnon has spent decades challenging how law naturalizes hierarchy, especially around sex, power, and speech. Here she’s applying the same lens to academia’s soft power. The sentence is compact, but it carries a pointed thesis: if the best work keeps getting produced outside the most celebrated rooms, maybe the rooms are the problem.