Historian Stephan Thernstrom Remembered as Humble Pioneer, Leading Opponent of Affirmative Action

Stephan Thernstrom, a social historian and strong opponent of affirmative action who taught at Harvard for over thirty years, died Jan. 23 in Arlington, Virginia. He was 90.

As a scholar of social mobility in the United States, he was “particularly fascinated by the Horatio Alger myth of rags to riches,” said Melanie Thernstrom ’86, Thernstrom’s daughter.

“He wanted to know, ‘Is that true? How often does that actually happen?’”

Thernstrom thought that American history “should be as much the history of poor people as rich people,” Melanie Thernstrom said. He was known for pioneering quantitative approaches to examine social mobility, first focusing on laborers in Boston before broadening his research to explore the racial gap in the U.S.

Thernstrom and his wife, political scientist Abigail Thernstrom, rose to prominence for their criticism of affirmative action. Thernstrom argued that affirmative action was ineffective at promoting social mobility and instead promoted color-blind fixes, which prioritized test scores and grades.

He is survived by his two children, Melanie and Samuel Thernstrom ’90, and four grandchildren.

‘The American Dream’

Thernstrom’s interest in social mobility was born from his experience growing up in a working class family, his daughter said.

“He felt he himself was an example of the American dream,” Melanie Thernstrom said.

Thernstrom was born in Port Huron, Michigan to a working class family. Both his father and his grandfather, who immigrated from Sweden, did not receive a high school diploma and worked as railroad laborers.

Samuel Thernstrom described him as a “very humble man from a humble background” who “never forgot that his dad worked on a railroad for 50 years.”

A fellowship to study speech at Northwestern University changed his life’s trajectory.

Thernstrom’s longtime friend Richard R. John ’81, a professor at Columbia University, recalled a conversation where Thernstrom said that “if he had not gotten that fellowship, he never would have gone to a top college.”

Thernstrom graduated summa cum laude from Northwestern University in 1956 and pursued a Ph.D. at Harvard, completing his dissertation in 1962.

He then became an assistant professor in Harvard’s history department, later followed by positions at Brandeis University and the University of California Los Angeles. In 1973, he returned to Harvard as a professor.

While working on his dissertation under Oscar Handlin — a historian on social and ethnic history — Thernstrom became interested in using statistics to examine inequality.

He channeled his quantitative mind to apply “quantitative methods to traditional problems in historiography,” John said.

Jeffrey S. Adler, a history professor at the University of Florida and one of Thernstrom’s former doctoral students, said that Therstrom was seen as a scholar “biting off really fundamental issues in ways that were empirically manageable.”

“He was a superstar in the field, but he was that rare superstar that didn’t get caught up in his own press clippings and ego, and that was apparent in his work,” Adler said.

In 1973, Thernstrom applied his methodology to his book The Other Bostonians — where he used quantitative methods to explore the impacts of prejudice and discrimination in determining upward mobility in Boston. Thernstrom’s book, which examined the experiences of Irish immigrant laborers, raised questions about the accuracy of Newbury Port’s census data on social class and empirically demonstrated the economic struggles of racial and ethnic minorities.

He won the Bancroft Prize, a prestigious award in American history, for the book — which launched his rise to prominence.

In 1980, Thernstrom worked as an editor for the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, which served as a comprehensive account of ethnic groups within the U.S.

“If you look at the contributors, you’ll see that he amassed a real army of scholars to do this,” Donald L. Horowitz, a professor at Duke University and friend of Thernstrom, said.

“He got all the best social historians of his generation to write essays,” John said.

A Critic of Affirmative Action

Thernstom later decided to explore the racial gap alongside his wife. The couple co-authored America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible in 1997 and No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning in 2003.

Through this work, he became critical of affirmative action — often comparing it to “putting a band-aid on cancer,” Melanie Thernstrom said.

Instead, he “believed that the colorblind norms should be enforced, and that those colorblind norms would create opportunity” John said.

“He did not see himself at that time as a conservative,” John added. “But as the political issue over affirmative action heated up, he, and especially Abby, began to look for allies.

“Their allies were increasingly in circles, policy circles, that were identified with Republicans,” he added.

In the 1990s, Thernstrom, who had previously identified as liberal, became disillusioned with what he saw as the left’s over-emphasis on race in addressing systemic inequality. He began to identify more and more with conservative politics.

In 1996, he was a key expert witness for the conservative litigation group Center for Individual Rights in Hopwood v. State of Texas — the case that overturned affirmative action in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. In 2002, he was appointed to the National Council on the Humanities by President Bush.

“He had something of a role in public life, and enjoyed that in some respects, but that was never as important to him as the teaching,” Samuel Thernstrom said.

“It was really in the classroom that he was happiest more than anything,” Samuel Thernstrom said.

But Thernstrom also faced controversy when students accused him of making racially insensitive remarks in 1988. Harvard’s Committee on Race Relations, which heard the students’ complaints, found no wrongdoing.

In response to the accusations, Thernstrom penned a letter to the editors of The Crimson.

“I fervently hope my colleagues at this great bastion of academic freedom will not conclude from this incident that they should duck controversial issues to avoid being smeared in this fashion,” Thernstrom wrote.

John described Thernstrom as “unwilling to shift with the winds when political sensibilities changed.”

But he was still regarded as a “very careful scholar,” Horowitz said.

John recalled that the Thernstroms — ‘Steve and Abby’ — often hosted graduate students at their home in Lexington, Massachusetts.

They created “a kind of wonderful salon where a lot of different ideas, people from different parts of the world, people from different fields, different perspectives, could get together and engage in civil and stimulating discussion,” John said.

—Staff writer Victoria D. Rengel can be reached at victoria.rengel@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Rauf Nawaz can be reached at rauf.nawaz@thecrimson.com.