Word: thernstrom
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...After the Dunster House deaths, the news office could have adopted the line that every institution has troubled students and Harvard is, alas, no exception, instead they chose to propagate the idea that the student didn't appear to have any troubles and the tragedy had, therefore, no explanation, " Thernstrom says in the book, which is an expansion of an earlier article she published in The New Yorker last June...
...Thernstrom further alleges that the University tightly controlled information and interviews through its news office to ensure this position went unchallenged...
Into this fray comes America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible (Simon & Schuster; $32.50) by noted Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom and his scholar wife Abigail. The couple are the latest in a string of former liberals come round to denounce affirmative action. But unlike more polemical authors, the Thernstroms pin their arguments to seven years of research, modeling their approach on Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 benchmark racial survey, An American Dilemma. Their prose is cool, not overheated, and their 704-page book is stuffed with tables, charts and graphs tracking black progress over the past 60 years...
...almost unrelenting lack of sympathy to the other point of view that is most vexing about the Thernstroms' book," writes Edley. "The authors seem focused on readers who already agree with them. What contribution does this make? Doesn't it simply equip partisans with juicy quotations to score points?" And the book begs the question: If progress really is so great, why don't blacks believe it? Even those blacks who are high achievers are bitter about the racism they face (as witnesses another compelling book, Ellis Cose's The Rage of a Privileged Class, published in 1994). A recent...
This connection is lost on Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, who choose to magnify gains blacks have made and minimize the sizable gaps that remain. Black progress has been neglected, they tell us, while poverty, unemployment, welfare dependency and crime have been exaggerated in order to feed "the mix of black anger and white shame and guilt that sustains the race-based social policies implemented since the late 1960s...