Word: subjectively
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Free and open discussion of controversial issues is vital to the future of our university community. Yet continued reliance on the Committee on Race Relations as a political tribunal will inevitably discourage teachers from raising precisely those issues that most insistently demand to be the subject of sustained and vigorous classroom debate. The Committee has a valuable and important role to play in improving race relations at Harvard. It would be a shame if it became transformed into a vehicle for character assassination and thinly veiled assaults upon the First Amendment. Richard John '81 GSAS...
...ways slaves adjusted to their conditions, such as the development of a distinctive slave community and the growing importance of slave families. These seem more like statements of fact than insensitivity. Thernstrom never said that slavery was good; he merely spoke about different approaches scholars have taken to the subject. One may not agree with those viewpoints, but there is no reason why students should not be exposed to them...
...time did Thernstrom downplay racism in American history. He described the Jim Crow system in plain terms that any new-comer to the subject could have understood. He stated clearly that is was an unfair and unequal system that failed to provide a solution to the problem of race relations...
...been thoughtless, careless, or foolish; he was not racially insensitive. Any treatment of racial or ethnic groups is difficult and awkward by nature because by setting a group apart one takes on the role of observer and judge. This role is not assumed by choice but prescribed by the subject matter. Ethnicity is a difficult subject to treat because people are afraid to confront the basic fact that people are different. Some of them are more advantaged than others by whatever accidents of circumstance place their ethnic group in their socioeconomic context. Any class on immigration and ethnicity must examine...
Students' extreme reaction to Thernstrom's statements is disheartening. As a scholar and a teacher, Professor Thernstrom's job is not to restate worn generalizations about the evils of slavery, racism, and discrimination. His objective should be to bring a fresh viewpoint to the subject through his own interpretation of the facts. This is an objective that Thernstrom fulfilled in Historical Studies...