"Goody Proctor, I Hereby Sentence You To Be Burned As A Witch!" Robert D. Putnam Witchhunts His Own Research

By Steve Sailer

08/19/2012

From the Chronicles of Higher Education:

Harvard Sociologist Says His Research Was ‘Twisted’ By Tom Bartlett

Robert D. Putnam’s research is being used to make the case that diversity is bad — and he’s not happy about it.

The Harvard sociologist, best known for his book Bowling Alone, filed a supporting brief in the lawsuit over race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas at Austin, which is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the brief, Putnam objects to how his research is characterized in another brief, by Abigail Thernstrom, an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Stephan Thernstrom, a Harvard historian, among others (the two Thernstroms, in case you were wondering, are married).

In the Thernstrom brief, a 2007 paper by Putnam, titled “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” is cited as evidence that diversity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

In that paper, Putnam finds that in more diverse neighborhoods, people trust one another less, are less altruistic, and have fewer friends. They keep to themselves, “hunker down,” in his words. Not only do people in diverse neighborhoods trust those who are ethnically different less; they also tend to be less trusting of people who are similar to them. They don’t spend as much time volunteering in their communities, and instead “huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

They hunker and huddle.

The Thernstrom brief summarizes those findings by Putnam, but doesn’t note Putnam’s multiple cautions against concluding that this means diversity is mostly bad.

We've been through this all before. Here’s my 2007 American Conservative article Fragmented Future on how Putnam shelved his research results for a half decade while he tried to figure out how to spin them. Putnam’s original findings make sense: in, say, the diverse San Fernando Valley, for instance, you don’t see much ethnic conflict, just a lot of folks going home, locking the door, and watching TV.

But what caught my eye was Putnam’s photo.

I don’t know how germane this is, but have you ever seen anybody who more resembles a 17th Century New England Puritan? He looks like he’s about to get into costume to play a judge in The Crucible. Amusingly, when I Google "Putnam Puritan," up comes the Wikipedia article on the Salem Witch Trials:

The accusation by Ann Putnam Jr. is seen by historians as evidence that a family feud may have been a major cause of the Witch Trials. Salem was the home of a vicious rivalry between the Putnam and Porter families.

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