Etan C. Harris remembers the smell of peppermint tea.
It was drifting off his former law professor’s desk the afternoon he walked into her office at Syracuse University College of Law to ask her to move a deadline. He’d smelled it before, two years earlier, when he’d sat in her class as a first-year student and said nothing at all.
That earlier silence is the part of the story Harris doesn’t always tell.
As a 1L, Harris had a writing assignment due that landed across two days of Passover. He didn’t ask for an extension. He didn’t mention it to the professor at all. He finished the work, on time, and moved on. Grades mattered too much that first year to risk complicating things with the person who assigned them.
By his third year, Harris was president of the Jewish Law Student Association, and a group of first-year students came to him with the identical problem: a paper due during Passover, in the same bell-curved class that grades students against each other, under the same professor. Afraid of the consequences, they asked him to raise the prospect of an extension with her.
“I almost said no,” recalls Harris. He had his own grades to think about, and job prospects were riding on the kind of record you don’t put at risk over a scheduling fight for students you barely knew. “But I thought about sitting in that same class two years earlier, just grinding through the shorter deadline without saying a word, and my duty as president of the Jewish Law Student Association. That last part finally pushed me to walk over.”
The door to her office looked more scratched than he remembered. He noticed it for no particular reason. Then he knocked.
The professor said no. She told him she was Jewish and worked on Passover; her students could do the same. When Harris said he’d take the matter to the dean, she told him, in essence, that she was the professor, he the student, and not to forget it.
The dean was sympathetic – and pointed. He may have appreciated Harris’ effort to fight for his lower classmates, or he may simply have been worried about Title VI and the kind of formal trouble a discrimination complaint could bring down on the school. Within days, the assignment’s deadline moved by two weeks. Religious Jewish students got the accommodation they’d asked for; every student in the class got three weeks instead of one.
The professor’s warmth toward Harris cooled after that. He noticed it in private conversations, and once, unmistakably, in a comment she made in front of classmates that he took as aimed squarely at him.
The reaction from the first-year students wasn’t uniform, either. Some — Jewish and not — found him in the cafeteria afterward to thank him. Others said nothing. One of the students who’d benefited from the extension later told Harris he worked on Passover anyway, making it seem as if Harris’ sacrifice was pointless.
From Student Advocate to Candidate
Sixteen years into a law career, Harris is now running for Civil Court judge, with an election set for November 3. He still brings the story up when fairness comes into the conversation. “It’s not proof that principle always wins. It’s more a reminder that you sometimes have to get past your own fear if you want anything around you to change.”
Paid for by Friends of Etan Harris.