After 50 Years, Tamar Frankel Is “Retiring” from LAW Faculty
At 93, she plans to continue teaching and “shaking up Wall Street.”
Tamar Frankel served in a Jewish defense paramilitary unit before Israeli statehood, with assignments, she says, from an aborted bridge bombing to illicit radio broadcasts. Having survived such derring-do, the sexist blowback she got as the School of Law’s first woman professor 50 years ago seemed more pesky hot air to her than a confidence-rattling gale.
It was 1968, and LAW’s new professor was shuffled off to a basement office in the school library. Her reaction? “It was perfect,” she says. “I didn’t have to put the books back” after using them. The quiet also helped her complete her doctoral thesis on variable annuities for Harvard Law School. But despite her thick skin, it was irksome when one male colleague described women as average achievers with “no spark of insight or brilliance.” Another, she learned years later, deemed her hiring a mistake.
What a difference living to 93 makes. (Frankel’s birthday is tomorrow, when she’ll “retire” from the faculty, although retirement is relative with this human perpetual motion machine. She’ll continue researching, writing, and teaching as an adjunct in the fall.) During her nine decades-plus, she has seen not only the creation of the state of Israel that she’d hoped for, but the welcome mat rolled out for her gender at LAW: there are now a dozen tenured women on the faculty, plus two others on the tenure track. The current dean and the incoming dean are women.
As for that “mistake” of a hire, longevity has brought Frankel widespread recognition as a pioneering expert on financial regulation and fiduciary obligations.
“The 92-Year-Old Woman Who Is Still Shaking up Wall Street,” the Wall Street Journal called her last year. Said shaking involves Frankel’s four-decades-and-counting advocacy of the fiduciary rule, requiring retirement investment advisors to act in their clients’ best interests, which was finally codified by President Obama.
The Trump administration has put aspects of that seeming no-brainer on hold. But Frankel isn’t losing sleep over the possible undoing of her life’s work. “I don’t think it will go that far,” she says. “There is quite a bit of a backlash.”
Frankel commutes to BU by taxi or getting a lift; she stopped driving herself about five years ago, after another driver rear-ended her car. Married and with two children, she shies away from discussing her private life; having soldiered through sexist artillery early on to plant her flag as financial law expert, her passion (aside from her seven grandchildren, whose names she’ll proudly tell you) is her work.
“She is a giant in the field,” says Maureen O’Rourke, current LAW dean. “Tamar has for years been the go-to person on mutual fund regulation, securitization, and fiduciary law.” It was not always so, she notes: Frankel “had the audacity to enter the male-dominated field of corporate law and soon outstripped colleagues of all genders in terms of prominence.”
O’Rourke feels a personal debt to Frankel, who with other women pioneers “paved the way for people like me, for whom it has been so very much easier” to enter the law and legal education.
