[EDEQUITY] Atlantic Charges Disputed

From: PLearner@aol.com
Date: Tue May 23 2000 - 15:26:01 EDT

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    A recent piece in the Boston Globe (ATLANTIC PIECE TAKES SWIPE AT HARVARD
    PROF, 05/19/2000 by Alex Beam) speaks strongly to the lack of journalistic
    scholarship - and honesty - in Sommers's Atlantic article THE WAR AGAINST
    BOYS.

    Beam writes, "Sommers interrupts the narrative for an attempted drive-by
    character assassination of Gilligan. She calls Gilligan's research data
    ''tantalizingly inaccessible,'' and offers two examples of her assistants
    asking Gilligan's own assistant for the data. ''I made four attempts to
    reach
    Gilligan,'' Sommers told me. "But in fact she made none."

    It seems that there have been so many errors of fact in the Sommers article

    that it is difficult to correct them all. In closing Beam notes the
    Atlantic
    (having received numerous complaints about her journalistic integrity)
    attempts to excuse itself with story editor Michael Curtis remarking,
    ''...Sommers's article wasn't subjected to the usual fact-checking scrutiny

    because it was a book excerpt, not an assigned article."

    Amazing, all these assertions and nobody checked them!

    Christina Hoff Sommers is being funded (very well, by most accounts) by
    wealthy, ultra-conservative foundations to talk to white male privilege.
    Her
    tactics are not new - but they do show how threatening the idea of equality

    is to the far right. I wish she would avoid personal attacks, but she has
    been using this approach for decades. And now some younger "fans" not only
    accept her statements on face value, but they mimic her tactics as well.
    How
    sad.

    Like many of you I work with schools trying to level the educational arena

    for girls AND boys, so I regularly see the negative consequences of the
    victimization of males.

    Phyllis Lerner
    Bethesda, MD
    PLearner@aol.com



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