What Nathan Glazer Can Teach Joe Biden
Can the new president remember the answers?
One day in the autumn of 1967, the Berkeley sociologist Nathan Glazer visited Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. He was there to debate the community activist Saul Alinsky. The subject was the New Left. Glazer was a well-known critic of the radical politics then making its way through American social, cultural, and educational institutions. But he was no stranger to radicalism itself.
A 1944 graduate of the City College of New York, Glazer belonged to the coterie that had lunched in the campus dining hall’s Alcove No. 1, where non-Stalinist Marxists and other members of the left opposition argued over history, reform, class, and war. Many members of this circle, which included Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Seymour Melman, and Philip Selznick, went on to perform distinguished work in the social sciences.
‘I refuse to allow myself to be silenced for nonexistent crimes’
During a recent event hosted by a Yale free speech group, a highly decorated Princeton professor of 23 years defended his use of the word “terrorist” to describe a former campus activism group called the Black Justice League.
The Zoom conference on Dec. 2 was hosted by Yale University’s William F. Buckley Jr. Program and titled “How to Lose Friends and Influence People.”
During the event, Princeton classics Professor Joshua Katz defended his “Declaration of Independence,” a piece he wrote questioning some racial justice demands lodged over the summer by his fellow faculty members that accused the Ivy League institution of systemic racism.