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Thomas Sowell: the early years — 11 Comments

  1. Faculty members have to decide how much integrity they can afford. The answer is usually not much if you wish to stay employed or get promoted.

  2. Sowell is in a class by himself. Whenever he speaks about the state of education in America, he leaves you shaking your head wondering what has happened. I love listening to Walter Williams interview Sowell when he’s a guest host on Limbaugh.

  3. Mr. Frank:

    Sowell kept moving from university to university. He continued to be in demand, and for the most part—except at Brandeis—he continued to ruffle feathers.

    But his brilliance seems to have kept the offers coming. He kept moving back and forth between private industry and academia, and then was at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, where he found a more long-term home.

  4. Sometime in the 90s, I was in Palo Alto, and I picked up a copy of Race and Culture at a bookstore. I was astounded that someone would actually write about those things and give some perspective on the black experience in America. It was a few years later when I saw on the internet info about his new autobiography with a picture of him that I learned that Sowell was black. What a contrast to most of the naval-gazing blacks that one usually hears about. He is a treasure.

  5. Contumelious democracy taking a perfectly consonant democratic view probably won’t ever be happy with standards of excellence, since democratic mediocrity — kind of read as the rule of a medio-cracy or middling lot — won’t ever be inclined to accept an openly declared rule of the best or most excellent, i.e. an aristo-cracy. (Tocqueville knew this, even if to his sadness: Democracy had become providential.)

    Could be though that the democratic legitimacy required at the foundation of our one-time Democratic Republic wasn’t intended to maintain the upper hand as direct democracy in the function of that curious admixture of political modes that was our Constitutional architecture.

    But, we sigh, that achievement, that manner of rule, that political order is now long in our past, and how strange to say! What twists have we revealed!

    For the Progressives seem to have achieved a sort of aristocratic rule under a cover of darkness — and this despite their “democratic” protestations or pretensions — for defining progress can only be left to the “knowers”, the perfectly attuned scientists of politics among us, for surely too the rabble, the middling middlers won’t know how to distinguish this promised progress from deleterious regress.

    Yet we sigh again: if only the Progressives were [to be] the best or are the best, for at least then they would hold themselves to such standards. We see, however, they have no such intention. On the contrary, they seem to be quite happy to rule over a dissolution of such standards, as things utterly impossible to identify.

  6. neo neocon
    Thomas Sowell is the man. He is my kind of guy. I have always believed in teaching and training excellence into all of the people you come in contact with.

  7. I think Sowell’s ability to keep his academic career alive while generating as much friction as he claims to have generated would be fairly atypical today. He was lucky that his career began during the great expansion of the universities, when it was much easier for Ph.D.s to find jobs. I also suspect he must have had some strong supporters in the Econ Dept. at Chicago. Sowell was brilliant, and in retrospect it’s obvious that any school would be blessed to have him, but university hiring committees are amazingly adept at overlooking talent.

  8. Mead:

    One of the things that helped him was that he published a lot.

    He also wasn’t wedded to academia. He kept getting jobs in the private sector in between his academic jobs.

  9. Thomas Sowell is the man I want to be when I grow up. No, seriously.
    You say, “But he’s black, you can’t be like him.”

    And I say, “What the H*** does skin color have to do with anything? It seems to me I once heard a man say something about judging people by the content of their character. That’s what I mean when I say I want to be like Thomas Sowell.”

  10. We are fortunate in that we are able to stand on the shoulders of giants like Sowell.

  11. Ah thank you, Neo, for the next biography to tumble down to my Kindle. What a joy it will be – I just read the first two pages.

    In an interview he once said that there are 3 questions to ask any “progressive” about any idea:
    1. What difference will it make?
    2. At what cost?
    3. What is your evidence?

    Try it.

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