Here's your tax dollars, hard at work.
Wormy apples from the groves of Academe
By Ron Grossman
Tribune staff reporter
Published January 23, 2002
This is a tale of two professors.
It is a cautionary tale, for in the heady days before their respective pedestals in the ivory tower crumbled, their careers were on superstar trajectory.
The University of Texas recently lured the more junior of the two, Karen Ruggiero, away from Harvard, part of the bait being $100,000 to set up her own psychology lab. The other, Michael Bellesiles, won the coveted Bancroft Prize, the most prestigious honor in the field of American history. His employer, Emory University, was anticipating a bidding war to keep him on its Atlanta campus.
Both belonged to a rare professorial species, scholars whose work promised relevance beyond the groves of Academe.
For those committed to making America a more just society, Ruggiero's research seemed to solve a thorny puzzle: Why, when women and minorities are asked if they've been discriminated against, do they consistently answer "yes" in numbers that fall far short of the victimization level claimed by their advocates? Such underreporting, Ruggiero's research seemed to say, reflects the fact that women of lower status and minority women tend to blame themselves for failure, not to attribute it to discrimination, as women of higher status do. |
