My Life in Sociology
Following on an article in Bennett Berger (1990), Authors of Their Own Lives, titled “From Socialism to Sociology,” in which I and other sociologists describe how we came to sociology, I continue with my academic and public career as a sociologist at the University of California–Berkeley (1963–1969) and at Harvard subsequently, in the Graduate School of Education and the Sociology Department. I describe my involvement in the formulation of urban policy in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and beyond, and my attempt to understand the student revolt at Berkeley, which spread throughout the United States and indeed much of the world. I further discuss my long involvement in the issue of affirmative action, on which I in time changed my views, originally based on a distinctive conception of the course of ethnicity and ethnic and racial groups in the United States, from critical opposition to acceptance, and my similar involvement in the debates over social policy in the United States, in which a complex...