Stephan Thernstrom, Leading Critic of Affirmative Action, Dies at 90

Stephan Thernstrom, a Harvard history professor and author who, with his wife, the political scientist Abigail Thernstrom, vaulted to national prominence during the 1990s as a leading critic of affirmative action, died on Thursday in Arlington, Va. He was 90.

His daughter, the author Melanie Thernstrom, said his death, at a care facility, was from complications of dementia.

Professor Thernstrom and his wife were among the earliest, most vociferous and most prolific critics of affirmative action in the 1980s and ’90s, when the policy came under sustained attack from the right. In a stream of opinion essays, magazine articles and books, they argued that the left had embraced a form of racial pessimism that sought to right imbalances through quotas and preferences, rather than do the harder work of education reform.

“If you need double standards in admission, should we also have double standards in grades, graduation requirements, even professional accreditation tests such as the bar exam?” Professor Thernstrom asked in an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1998. “Our point is that racial preferences are a Band-Aid over a cancer.”

He was already a highly regarded historian of social mobility in 1988 when he found himself at the center of one of the first battles of the so-called political correctness wars of the late 1980s and early ’90s.

An article in The Harvard Crimson reported that a group of students from one of his courses said he had made “racially insensitive” comments in class, including reading from white plantation owners’ journals. Scandal swirled as outside commentators picked up the story, using it as an example of political correctness run amok.

Professor Thernstrom stopped teaching the course and criticized the university for not doing enough to support him. He repeated those allegations to the conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza for his book “Illiberal Education” (1991).

The affair made him a darling of the anti-P.C. right. He and his wife began writing for conservative publications like Commentary and The Public Interest, as well as skeptically liberal outlets like The New Republic.

The Thernstroms’ 1997 book, “America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible,” was a touchstone of the conservative critique of race relations and higher education in the late 1990s.

They followed that book with “No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning” (2003), which pointed the finger at teachers’ unions, education bureaucracies and, again, racial preferences. They advocated ideas like using vouchers and raising teaching standards to improve educational performance among racial minorities.

Many of their arguments became intellectual fuel for the social and education reforms pushed by the George W. Bush administration, including the No Child Left Behind Act.

“The structure of American urban education is a fortress against fundamental reform,” the Thernstroms wrote in The Boston Globe in 2003. “The alternative to a radical overhaul is too many Black and Hispanic youngsters continuing to leave high school without the skills and knowledge to do well in life.”

Professor Thernstrom’s early work took issue with the notion of the American dream as a rags-to-riches story. His meticulous research showed that moving up the economic ladder was much harder than most people believed — but that it did in fact happen, incrementally and unevenly, with some ethnic groups climbing faster than others.

Indeed, he saw himself as an avatar of that American dream.

Stephan Albert Thernstrom was born on Nov. 5, 1934, in Port Huron, Mich., and raised in Battle Creek, where his father, Albert, worked for a railroad. His mother, Bernadine (Robbins) Thernstrom, managed the home.

He excelled at school, especially in debate, winning a scholarship to study speech at Northwestern University. He graduated with top honors in 1956.

He then studied history at Harvard under Oscar Handlin, whose groundbreaking work on the impact of immigration on American history and emphasis on scholarship “from the ground up” greatly shaped Professor Thernstrom’s own work. He received his doctorate in 1964.

As a student, Professor Thernstrom identified firmly with the left; he met Abigail Mann at a talk by the progressive journalist I.F. Stone in 1959. They married two months later.

Abigail Thernstrom died in 2020 at 83. Along with their daughter, Professor Thernstrom is survived by their son, Samuel, and four grandchildren.

Professor Thernstrom’s dissertation, on social mobility in Newburyport, Mass., became his first book, “Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City” (1964). It won the Bancroft Prize, a top honor in history writing.

That book and his next, “The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970” (1973), drew on mountains of raw census data to chart changes among everyday Americans over time. That approach to history, which involved formatting stacks of IBM punch cards to run through a mainframe computer, was pioneering at the time.

“I wanted to test the Horatio Alger myth,” Professor Thernstrom told The Boston Globe in 1981, “but not on the basis of Andrew Carnegie.”

He taught at Harvard and then at Brandeis and the University of California, Los Angeles, before returning to Harvard in 1974. He remained there until taking emeritus status in 2008. He also served as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

Though he began his career on the left, by the 1980s Professor Thernstrom was describing himself as a neoconservative and, like his intellectual compatriots, criticizing many liberals for abandoning the principle of colorblind equality that he said underwrote the civil rights achievements of the 1950s and ’60s.

“That seemed to me then absolutely the ideal — you admit people without any reference to their race,” he told The New York Times in 1998. “And it still seems to be the ideal to me. What’s different is that it was a radical idea in 1963, and now it’s a so-called conservative idea.”