Nathan Glazer - Government Service, Academia, and The Public Interest

Government Service, Academia, and The Public Interest

During Kennedy's presidency Glazer worked in the Housing and Home Finance Agency, predecessor to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and in Lyndon Johnson's administration he was a consultant with the Model Cities Program. By this time Glazer was becoming skeptical of the War on Poverty and of Washington-based reform efforts in general. As he would argue years later in his book The Limits of Social Policy, Great Society programs were not really the answer because "the breakdown of traditional modes of behavior is the chief cause of our social problems" and he did not think that breakdown could be addressed by government. Glazer's view was an example of the culture of poverty arguments that were gaining traction by the mid-1960s as explanations for social inequalities (Moynihan's influential, if controversial, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, was perhaps the most prominent work in this vein).

By 1964 Glazer was teaching at UC-Berkeley and he bore witness to the famous Free Speech Movement that year. Despite his earlier experience as a student radical, Glazer was one of many professors who viewed the student protesters as extremists. Even in the late 1990s Glazer continued to condemn the students' "enthusiastic and euphoric rejection of forms and norms," and in 2005 he pointed out that the revolts at Berkeley, Columbia University, and many other campuses constituted "a disorder that made no sense to those of us who had come from harder circumstances." One leader of the FSM, Jackie Goldberg, reflecting back on 1964 years later decried Glazer and his ilk for espousing "an armchair intellectual liberalism" and viewing "protesting" as nothing more than sending a letter to one's congressman.

As the Free Speech Movement raged in Berkeley, Glazer's friends from City College Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol were discussing founding a new journal, which would come to be called The Public Interest when it debuted in 1965. A conference essay by Glazer, "Paradoxes of American Poverty," would appear in the journal's first issue. In the summer of 1973 he succeeded Bell, becoming co-editor along with Kristol, a post which he held until 2003. When The Public Interest ceased publication in 2005, Glazer wrote a piece acknowledging the rightward drift on the part of the journal over the years and the tendency it had to publish far more conservative than liberal pieces, something which he saw "as a failing on our part."

In 1969 Glazer began a long teaching career at Harvard after being awarded one of five positions created to focus on the problems of the cities.