Bridget Kevane

Woman Professor Arrested for Child Endangerment? Blame Palin, Says NYT Columnist

New York Times columnist Judith Warner's latest web column, "Dangerous Resentment," sees "archaic, phantasmagoric" hatred in the case of Montana State professor Bridget Kevane, arrested for child endangerment for leaving five pre-teen kids (three of them her own) at a mall so she could get some rest. In a piece for a parenting magazine, Kevane painted herself as a victim of the country's hatred of educated women, and Warner channeled Kevane's piece for her column, the original title of which was, judging by the URL: "Don't Hate Her Because She's Educated."

Actually, Kevane provided another reason to dislike her, though Warner took her side in the controversy:

Two years ago in June, Bridget Kevane, a professor of Latin American and Latino literature at Montana State University, drove her three kids and two of their friends -- two 12-year-old girls, and three younger kids, age 8, 7 and 3 -- to a mall near their home in Bozeman. She put the 12-year-olds in charge, and told them not to leave the younger kids alone. She ordered that the 3-year-old remain in her stroller. She told them to call her on their cell phone if they needed her.

And then she drove home for some rest.

About an hour later, she was summoned back to the mall by the police, who charged her with endangering the welfare of her children.

Warner is taking all her case facts from Kevane's first-person account in Brainchild -- the magazine for thinking mothers. (There's elitism worth hating right there. Does that imply most mothers are unthinking?)