Student protests, free-speech controversies, and debates over diversity in academe are nothing new to Nathan Glazer. A professor at the University of California at Berkeley and then at Harvard, he co-authored the sociology classics The Lonely Crowd (1950) and Beyond the Melting Pot (1963). He was in the vanguard of what became known as neoconservatism, although he’s wary of political labels, and in the 1960s and ’70s he criticized affirmative action and the increasingly violent lurch of student demonstrations. Decades later, he came to reconsider his views on affirmative action.
John Kaag, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, sat down with the 94-year-old Glazer at his home in Cambridge to sound him out on the parallels and contrasts between an earlier era of political unrest and our own, the literary sphere, and how Glazer views his own career. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
We have witnessed protests at Middlebury, Berkeley, and Evergreen State. Tensions are running high, and campuses are politically polarized around the issue of race. Does this remind you of the activism that you saw on campuses in the 1960s and 1970s?
I’ve been thinking about the contrasts lately. What is interesting is that there was, back then, a larger and more significant range of national issues being addressed in the activism on campuses. In the 1960s major issues were involved — the civil-rights movement, the Vietnam War, the draft, university collaboration in war research. But today they seem to me minor irritations that one can and should live with: a conservative speaker, or a letter from a faculty member objecting to guidance on Halloween costumes, microaggressions.
My friend Jim Sleeper at Yale tries to argue that the upset is real — and of course, racism is always there, and there is always reason to be upset: microaggression and lack of understanding. But I do find it excessive. Students could be protesting really big things — like Trump or the environment. But for the most part, they aren’t.
You initially supported the student activism around civil rights in the late 1960s and 1970s. But at some point, you began to criticize the protest movement. Why? That wasn’t an issue of oversensitivity, was it?
No, the protesting tactics changed in the 1970s. That was it. It’s hard to figure out the stages. It took a long time before something like violence developed, and that was the case in which at the University of Wisconsin a bomb was set in laboratories and someone who was there at the wrong time of day was killed. There was an incident in New York where a townhouse was bombed. I remember at Stanford, when I was visiting there in 1971, already you would notice they couldn’t keep up with broken windows and so on. You could see elements of the sort of violence and destruction even on that campus. Specifically, my turn to opposition was based in part on the expectation of legislative backlash at tactics like the occupation of buildings.
On the issue of race on campus, in the late 1970s and early 1980s you voiced concerns about the growing push toward affirmative action, but by 1998, you had shifted your position. Could you articulate the reasons for that change?
I was initially concerned about what the focus on diversity was doing to the evaluation of merit in U.S. universities. I also felt that in time that situation of the very low representation of blacks on campus would change.
In fact, an awful lot has not changed. And this is what led me to shift my position in the late 1990s. And my vision was, and continues to be, that we have a real problem that blacks are 12 percent of the population and sometimes only a fraction of that percentage at top universities and colleges. That’s not a good national situation. It’s some sort of sickness in our national institutions because good colleges and universities are such gateways to prosperity. Recently I do think things are a bit better. Think of Princeton — they are on their way to representative numbers of minorities.
Let’s turn to American intellectual life more generally. You made a very long and very successful career of straddling disciplinary sociology and being a genuine public intellectual. Is that type of academic career still possible?
Something has changed. Do we have real intellectuals, real intellectual names, that everyone knows? Maybe: David Brooks, George Will, something like that. But do we have a John Kenneth Galbraith? His academic credentials in economics were indisputable, but everyone who read the papers also knew him.
What was your role in the neoconservative movement?
In the beginning, you have to remember, neoconservatism was about domestic social issues. Irving [Kristol] was a conservative Republican and wrote a regular column for The Wall Street Journal. Pat Moynihan was liberal because of a political career. Dan Bell described himself always as a socialist in economics, whatever that meant, a liberal in religion and politics, and a conservative in culture.
I refused to participate in the labeling. I wrote what I wrote and that was it. I guess I am a conservative when it comes to culture. I felt that what was happening in painting, in abstract expressionism, what was happening in the arts, was really very boring. Pointless, you know, Warhol and so on. Obviously, the public disagreed with me.
What do you like to read?
One of the effects of Trump is that I am reading more periodicals, like this one [Glazer picks up a copy of American Affairs]. In general, I find conservative intellectual thought more interesting today than I ever did before. And that’s Trump — he’s shaking things up. He’s forced conservatives to think: “Where do we stand on all this?”
One thing that interests me is philosophy, not in terms of the original writing, but the writing about it. I read Mark Greif’s book The Age of the Crisis of Man — I was really taken by it. I was talking to my friend Mark Lilla, you know, who writes often for The New York Review of Books. When [Robert] Silvers died, I said to Mark that I thought Greif would be a natural editor if he’d be willing to do it. But [Ian] Buruma was already slotted for that job.
When you think about your career, what are you most proud of?
Maybe I should leave this out, but I’ve been thinking of my past and not thinking about it as large and significant. I had some fortunate accidents, which gave me a prominence I probably don’t deserve. I worked on a book that became The Lonely Crowd, and it became the biggest best seller in American sociology. I was supposed to write the great book on American ethnicity, and eventually, I didn’t. I’d collect essays and think about it, but then I thought there were enough good people saying good things about the issue. Sometimes I think that I wasn’t self-directed enough, that I got diverted into too many different topics.
Of course American Judaism — that was really my first book. And it became a kind of semi-classic in this little field, so that commits you in a way to go to conferences and so on. And then there is the second edition, the third edition, and eventually you lose touch since so much keeps happening. Like I said, I got diverted.
I was interested in architecture always. And when I came to Harvard I was into art. I had a connection to the architecture school at Berkeley, and at Harvard they offered me a similar opportunity.
My interests were diverse, and I’m pleased that despite how diverse they were I was able to achieve a reputation in sociology. I certainly don’t regret not having made a fuller commitment to the discipline, because I had these interests. What could I do?
John Kaag is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. His book American Philosophy: A Love Story was published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His next will be about Nietzsche.
