Bob Lerner, In Memoriam

Robert Lerner, who passed away on Friday, was an NAS original. Original in the sense that he was one of our very first members, joining along with his father Monroe and wife Althea, just as the National Association of Scholars, in expanding beyond its home base in New York, was setting up an initial branch chapter in Baltimore. To be sure, Bob and Althea were living in Northampton, Massachusetts at the time, working with Stanley Rothman on those path-finding studies of elite opinion that mapped out the contours of the cultural divide that now troubles so much of our nation’s politics. But the Lerner family was of a single mind about the liberal ideals and institutions that were being threatened and rallied to the NAS’s colors as one.

Bob was an original in yet another sense. He was one of America’s grand masters of survey research and data analysis, a deep miner of the statistically significant, and a fearless detector of the methodological fool’s gold passed off by some others. And like a good many of our members, but with unusually potent effect, he used these abilities to puncture the pretenses of the apologists for meretricious policies, inside and outside academe, undeterred by the damage to his professional prospects likely to ensue. Alas, that damage did ensue, depriving him of the academic recognition and position that should otherwise have been his.

Bob’s work in dissecting the harmful results of racial and ethnic preferences was of landmark consequence. Most of this was done in collaboration with the Center for Equal Opportunity, but he was also of great help to our organization, among other things, in shaping its responses to the Gratz and Grutter cases. This, and additional politically incorrect research, put him on various blacklists. Thus, when President George W. Bush nominated him to be the Department of Education’s Commissioner of Education Statistics, Senator Kennedy blocked his permanent appointment. Needless to say, he was never offered the distinguished faculty position that he deserved.

I always enjoyed talking with Bob. He had a philosophic good humor about his plight, and the larger predicament it represented, which never failed to boost my spirits. I, with a great many others, will miss him and his work dearly.