-Caveat Lector- PROFILE IN COURAGE BY LINO A. GRAGLIA Thomas Sowell’s A Personal Odyssey tells the remarkable story of a remarkable man. He is the author of over a dozen influential books, but none more moving or inspiring or perhaps even important than his short autobiography. It helps us understand how he could make a career of asserting and defending unpopular truths regardless of personal cost. Having had to fight from the beginning, he became used to, and apparently even came to enjoy, fighting. His life and achievements can serve as Exhibit A for the claim that in our country anyone with enough talent and determination can rise from humble beginnings to the heights; not only can you get to be president, but even better, an adviser to presidents. Sowell’s father died before he was born and he never knew his mother, a maid who already had four children and could not on her own take on a fifth. He was adopted by a great aunt and raised by her and her two grown daughters. He considers himself fortunate in that whatever else he lacked, he did not, as the sole child in the household, lack adult attention. When he was nine, he and "Mom" moved from Charlotte, North Carolina, to New York City’s Harlem, where they joined the daughters who had moved there earlier. Although no one in the family had made it past the sixth grade, Sowell was academically successful enough, despite numerous conflicts with grade-school teachers, to be admitted to Stuyvesant High School, one of the city’s most selective schools. Unfortunately, money problems and various disagreements caused the situation at home to deteriorate so badly that he felt compelled to leave home and high school at 17, and from then on was on his own. Shortly thereafter, he was drafted into the Marines for two years during the Korean War, but thanks to a long-standing interest in photography, he was trained and served as a photographer and never saw Korea. Upon discharge from the Marines, Sowell obtained a civil service job in Washington and, despite the lack of a high-school diploma, took night courses at Howard University. High grades on the College Boards and strong references from two Howard professors were enough for him to gain admission to Harvard, from which, after a poor start, he graduated magna cum laude. After obtaining a master’s degree from Columbia and a Ph.D. in Economics from Chicago, he took a series of teaching jobs at several schools including Howard, Cornell during the height of the disturbances there in 1969, and UCLA. There can be no explanation for Sowell’s character and career other than that he was born feisty; no one could have had so many battles, physical and otherwise, without a taste for battle. As a small child, he tells us, he punched a young girl relative who picked him up and held him after he fell asleep in church, "outraged at the indignity of having a mere girl holding me like a baby." In junior high school, he delivered a kick to the belly—only because his aim was faulty—of a male teacher who was trying to discipline him (contrary to school policy) with corporal punishment. A dispute on the subway, where people can be found, he tells us, "walking around with chips on their shoulders," resulted in his returning home with his opponent’s "blood splattered on my clothes." Sowell’s successes in school and personal combat apparently gave him a degree of self-confidence and strength of commitment to his beliefs that few of us can enjoy. Even in grade school, he had an amazing willingness to confront and defy, and the ability to outwit, his teachers and other authorities. In one incident, a magazine was left on the floor near his desk after "some horseplay in our homeroom." The following exchange with the teacher took place: "Sowell, pick that magazine up." "I didn’t put it there...," I said. "Don’t argue with me! You do what I tell you." "Not necessarily." "Yes, you will!" "No, as a matter of fact, I won’t." She reached across her desk and snatched my report card off the top of my desk. With her grading pen poised over my report card, she said: "Now, either you bend down and pick up that magazine or I’ll lower every grade on this report card by ten points." The classroom was immediately very quiet. "Mrs. Bloom," I said, "you may do whatever you wish with that piece of cardboard in front of you. But I doubt seriously if you are going down to the school office and change the official records there—which are the only records that count." She threw the report card back onto my desk contemptuously and asked one of the "sensible" boys to "please" pick it up. His conduct did not improve in the Marines, where he regularly confronted superior officers when he felt he was right, often skirting court-martial, which he "regarded...as one of the normal hazards of the service." A weekly rifle inspection, for example, required a dismantling and cleaning that was a two-hour chore. Like the good economist he was to become, Sowell, realizing that not all the rifles could be inspected each week, calculated the odds of his being inspected, the likelihood of even a conscientious cleaning not passing inspection, and the possible penalty and decided that the effort involved in cleaning was not worthwhile. When after some months he was finally caught, the officer decided that his rifle was so far from clean that he must have just come off the firing range, and so let him off with just a warning. Sowell was willing, it seems, to challenge not only authority but also fate, engaging in "various peccadilloes" that "often involved skating on thin ice." For example, a Command General’s inspection was considered so important that it was not necessary to call the roll, "on the assumption that no one would dare to be absent." Sowell, however, "not one to go along with assumptions," decided instead to take the day off to visit the library and "take in a movie." When questioned by a first sergeant who noticed his absence, Sowell dodged his questions and admitted nothing, because he "knew that if [the sergeant] had any hard evidence, he would have started proceedings for a court-martial, instead of trying to trap me into some damaging admission." At Harvard, Sowell wrote his senior honors thesis on Marxism, in which he had long been interested. With a self-assurance that in most others would be recklessness, he decided "to ignore all interpreters of Marx, read straight through the three volumes of Capital and make up my own mind." He rejected an offer to meet the nation’s leading authority on Marxist economics because he wanted there to be no doubt that his ideas were all his own. Despite, or perhaps because of, this, the thesis he wrote as an undergraduate was good enough later to be published in scholarly journals. Thus, further toughened by the Marines, Sowell entered academia first as a student and then as a professor. It was not likely that department chairmen would prove to be more successful than Marine sergeants in bringing him into line. He resigned from his first teaching job, at Douglass College in New Jersey, as he was later to resign from others, because of his refusal to give grades that had not been earned, insisting that all of his students could do good work and should not be permitted to get by with less. At Howard, his next teaching post, his insistence on standards and opposition to the cheating on exams that was rife led to "massive failing grades on an exam" and "numerous complaints." Failing 30 percent of the students in one of his courses earned him an "instant and total dislike" by the dean, and another resignation followed. Sowell accepted a position at Cornell on the assurance that things would be different, but his insistence that even engineering students could be expected to learn economics—even if flunking them was not in the financial interest of the economics department—led to another confrontation and resignation. Sowell’s experience was better at Brandeis and UCLA, where he became a tenured faculty member, but he remained dissatisfied with academia. Pressure to raise grades continued, and "affirmative action" (racial preferences), which he early and strongly opposed, made every successful black an object of suspicion. In 1980, he left the academic world to become a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford campus, a position he still holds. In December 1970, Sowell published an article in the New York Times Magazine questioning the use of racial preferences in college admissions. This was followed in 1975 with the publication of Race and Economics, which solidly established his reputation as an iconoclast and the nation’s leading "black conservative." He was invited to conferences at the White House with President Ford, and in 1975 first refused and then agreed to be appointed a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. The Democrats, however, refused to hold hearings on the appointment, expecting, correctly, a Democratic victory in the next presidential election. The country suffered an even greater loss when Sowell declined to be considered for secretary of education in the first Reagan Administration. Friends and relatives advised him that he was no politician, which was undeniably true, but perhaps all the more reason to take the position. The result would have been an unwanted and much-needed element of candor and straight talk being injected into discussions of education. High blood pressure and other health problems, however, also played a part in his declining this and other positions. Most of Sowell’s books are not on race, but all challenge some orthodoxy. When his son was still not talking at the age of three, despite apparent and later demonstrated intellectual ability, Sowell was frustrated by a lack of reliable information on this frequently misdiagnosed problem. Traveling far afield, he researched and wrote a book on the subject, Late-Talking Children, which proved to be a godsend to other parents with similar problems. Sowell has become in effect a national symbol of honesty and courage in addressing controversial social problems, the person who can most surely be relied upon to say something insightful and useful, however politically incorrect. In this, he is our most valuable public intellectual. That this should be true of the black son of a maid, raised in Harlem by poor and uneducated people and forced into the world on his own at 17, is to have a new basis for faith in the human ability to overcome disadvantage. Sowell tells his story with such charm, verve, and humor as to make it also a source of delight. A Personal Odyssey by Thomas Sowell, Free Press/308 pages Lino A. Graglia is the A. Dalton Cross Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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