[EDEQUITY] Atlantic Charges Disputed

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


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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