Nathan Glazer died last week at his home in Cambridge, Mass. at the age of 95.
In the obituary that ran in the Washington Post, Harrison Smith described him as,
an urban sociologist and scholar of ethnicity, race and education whose intellectual odyssey took him from the socialist left to the neoconservative right to a label-defying position near the political center.
He continues:
Dr. Glazer was one of the last surviving members of the New York Intellectuals, a group of sharp-elbowed writers and critics who helped drive the country’s intellectual discourse in the middle of the 20th century, writing articles in the pages of small magazines such as Commentary, Partisan Review and eventually the Public Interest.
At Education Next we were extremely lucky to have worked with Nathan Glazer for fifteen years.
Glazer contributed an article on school choice and our common culture to the third issue of Education Next, which was published in 2001. Then in 2004 he became Education Next’s regular book reviewer.
The first review he wrote for us was of Sam Huntington’s Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. The last review he wrote for us, of The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood, was published in 2015. In between he reviewed over 35 books. Some reviews were of books about the education topic of the day, but he returned again and again to review books on citizenship, immigration, race, and integration.
In 2010, when EdNext dipped its toe into the world of video, Nathan Glazer joined Paul E. Peterson in front of a camera to discuss books by E.D. Hirsch and others.
— Education Next
