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husband's experience was, if any other professors at Harvard were willing
to take his side or if there was silence on the part of the administration.
Did any colleagues speak up? How are we going to encourage an envi–
ronment where people are not fearful of being boycotted by students or
denounced by faculty?
Abigail Thernstrom:
True, the administration did nothing but quake
in its boots. It was silent. Derek Bok should have come out swinging for
the freedom of professors in a classroom setting, should have engaged in
a debate with students responding in the appropriate ways. But the ad–
ministration was very intimidated by the black students. And Stephen
couldn't look to the trustees . They're the problem, not the solution.
You can't look to them any more than you can look to the Republi–
cans to be anti-quota. Who brought us quotas? The Nixon administra–
tion. I'm delighted that Irving Horowitz is an anti-alarmist voice. Effort
isn't useless, but my feeling is that you've got a generational phe–
nomenon here that's got to play itself out. In the meantime , scholars
should get on with their own individual work. After all, Stephen Th–
ernstrom is still the Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard. That's a
very cushy job. No one is stopping him from doing his kind of scholar–
ship. He's working on a book with me now, and we haven 't had any
trouble selling it to one of the major publishers . So you've got to put
this in perspective.
The problem is that our opponents worship different gods. Debate is
very difficult. You can talk, as Al Shanker did, about appealing to the
self-interest of your opponents, saying we're all in this together and we
all have common interests. The people who disagree with us frame the
issues very differently. They really do believe that academic standards are
at odds with racial and social justice. It's like saying to Benjamin Hooks,
for instance on the busing question, well, it wasn't in the interest of
black kids for the white middle class to flee the public school systems.
That's a hopeless argument. And I go back to what Wilson Moses said,
the power grab was in the interest of urban whites. They've taken over
the public school system. I just don't think we're going to win these ar–
guments.
AI Shanker:
I wasn't trying to win them by winning over our oppo–
nents. A number of people have said that one side of the debate gets a
lot more time, at least on campuses if not in journals, or with profes–
sional organizations and publishers, because there's a fear on the part of
others that the only voice that's heard is on the other side. If that's true,
it can be taken care of easily: just have fairly frequent polls of people in
the academy, and I think this will show that the overwhelming majority
