Nathan Glazer, who died Jan. 19 at age 95, was for more than a half-century a leading scholar on race and ethnicity, immigration, the challenges of urban schools, and the erosion of community. Yet for all the obvious relevance of such work to the world today, outside a stray sociology course, if there, it’s doubtful most readers under age 50 have run into his work, despite its generous combination of rigor, clarity, civility, and low-jargon writing style.
Glazer’s books are getting hard to find outside big libraries. Even Beyond the Melting Pot, the canonical 1963 text on immigration he wrote with future Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., has a mere five reviews on Amazon. (Affirmative Discrimination, to my mind the best book ever written about racial preferences, has none.) The Public Interest, the phenomenally successful policy journal he co-edited for many years, ended its run in 2005.
I feel a personal stake in spreading the word about Glazer, since he was one of my heroes. Because of his long association with the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, at which I was a fellow, I got to spend time with him on many occasions and he formed my model of the character of a public intellectual: benevolent, wise, curious, kind, and unassuming, his mind well-stocked with knowledge of all sorts, always taking the long view.
This benign personality had emerged from the famously argumentative circle of left-wing intellectuals associated with the City College cafeteria in New York. Glazer’s later choice of subjects drew special flavor from its close connection to his boyhood as the son of Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents in New York. It was a world of ethnic rivalries, family expectations and traditions, fraternal and labor associations of every kind, and school as a ladder to advancement.
All this he patiently explicated in his life’s work. Why did one family prosper while its cousins stayed poor? Was America fundamentally stacked against immigrants, entrapping them in permanent subordination, or did it largely make good on its promise of opportunity for all? When the ties of old-country connections began to loosen, what would take their place? Why did the experience of blacks, a group that unlike the others had not come to America by choice, so often diverge?
If it happened in the old neighborhood, from juvenile delinquency to funeral customs, Glazer probably wrote about it. Almost in his spare time he penned a major book on Judaism, as well as an influential work on Catholic urban schools. As a writer on city planning, his critiques of impersonal, utopian design and its dysfunctional results deserve a place alongside Jane Jacobs’. (A little-known gem: The Public Face of Architecture: Civic Culture and Public Spaces, a 1987 collection he edited with Mark Lilla.)
At the center of much of Glazer’s mature work was a mastery of the genre of analysis known as program evaluation. As Charles Murray, with whom he has much in common, has observed, groups that spend money with beneficent intentions, be they private foundations or governments, want to know whether new programs have worked as intended and hire smart persons to carry out evaluations after the fact. Very often, the intervention turns out to show no benefit or to have done harm. Sometimes the failed intervention is abandoned and other times not — in government especially it can be hard to end a program once started — but either way the comparison of intended with actual outcomes will often gather dust in library stacks.
What if this body of material were instead brought to the notice of a general, educated readership? The patterns of failure and occasional partial success might have much to teach us. By studying decades of programs, Glazer made himself the authority on what he called, in the title of an essay and subsequent 1988 volume, The Limits of Social Policy. He wrote:
“Against the view that to every problem there is a solution, I came to believe that we can have only partial and less than wholly satisfying answers to the social problems in question. Whereas the prevailing wisdom was that social policies would make steady progress in nibbling away at the agenda of problems set by the forces of industrialization and urbanization, I came to believe that although social policy had ameliorated some of the problems we had inherited, it had also given rise to other problems no less grave in their effect on human happiness.”
As Commentary editor John Podhoretz writes, “The key to understanding his work was his skepticism that ‘social policy’ could somehow correct for human nature in all its complexity without doing damage to already existing institutions that might more precisely reflect that nature.”
Rather than bicker about theory with his former progressive colleagues, Glazer simply showed again and again that their prescriptions had failed to work on behalf of the intended beneficiaries. James Traub, in his 1998 profile of Glazer for the New York Times Magazine, put it this way: It’s “possible to read in the 50-year arc of Glazer’s career a terrible dashing of the hopes that liberalism itself once rested upon.” Just so.
Glazer vindicated sociology by championing its distinctive ways of grasping the world, rather than go all interdisciplinary. He refrained from practicing economics, even as his analyses of human behavior and incentives often came to a similar conclusion as might be reached had the discussion been of margins and opportunity costs. Nor did he adopt the methods of the law reviews, although his work abounds with insights into how litigation, compliance, and consent decrees shaped and misshaped school administration, civil service exams, and other urban institutions.
Evidence of program failure was not the only force moving Glazer to the right. Another, grounded in his experiences at the University of California, Berkeley, was the rapid transformation of the 1960s student movement. He could sympathize with its early aims, such as a wider scope for dissent and scrutiny of the campus effects of military research. Not quite so much with its later demands that the university enlist itself directly in social justice battles, backed up by building sit-ins, shout-downs of wrong-thinking professors, and other illiberal tactics.
Such has been the cycle’s return that reading his 1970 Commentary essay “On Being Deradicalized,” one is struck by how many superb paragraphs might have been written today with scarcely a changed word. Glazer recoiled from the student revolt because he recognized it as threatening the university’s mission, its commitment to detached inquiry and objective truth. It was thus necessary to oppose “the doctrine that there could be no neutrality, no objectivity, not even partial neutrality or objectivity: in the famous words of Eldridge Cleaver, ‘If you are not part of the solution [that is, if you are not actively with us], you are part of the problem [that is, you are against us].’ If this doctrine were to become widely accepted, or acted upon, there would be no function for the universities and they would be as good as dead.”
All of which established Glazer as a founder of the emergent movement that critics dubbed neoconservatism. The original neocons, it is often forgotten, very much resembled the liberal intellectuals and social scientists with whom they quarreled and were concerned with domestic as opposed to foreign policy. Glazer himself was and remained something of a dove and foreign policy liberal. What made them “neo” was simply that they had moved rightward after getting a close look at the results of the programs for which the Left had campaigned.
Independent-minded throughout, Glazer chafed at expectations from either side to behave like a movement guy. “I refused to participate in the labeling. I wrote what I wrote and that was it,” he later said. There was scant danger that anyone would mistake him for a libertarian — he supported Obamacare, for example, although on classic policy-intellectual grounds (he worried that the current Medicaid structure kept recipients in a poverty trap by discouraging work).
In the late 1990s, Glazer caused a flap on the Right by seeming to recant some of his earlier views on multiculturalism in public schools and on racial preferences. By now, with leading conservatives abandoning principles six times before breakfast, it seems quaint to think of there being a big flap about it happening once. Even great minds fall into errors. But it is worth noting that Glazer’s recantations, such as they were, fell far short of bringing him into anything the Left then or now would deem allyship.
On the multicultural curriculum in the New York schools, he thought, rightly or not, that minority parents were strongly in favor of that approach and deserved in the end to have their voices heard in the political process. And while continuing to reject most forms of preference in most situations, he decided it would make sense to let private universities pursue their mission through affirmative action if they saw fit, while recognizing that state institutions come under more exacting requirements to accord equal treatment. That part sounds almost … libertarian.
A party of one, this fine man has been called. And a thinker of enduring relevance.
Walter Olson is senior fellow at the Cato Institute. His most recent book is Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America.
