Until recent times, it seemed evident that to study another culture successfully, one was obliged to understand it clearly and accurately, exactly as it understood itself, with all its inherent contradictions. Lately that paradigm has changed to an almost exclusive and unquestioning focus on the grievances of the other culture and the oppression…

In the 1950s, under the aegis of such leading sociologists as Talcott Parsons, anthropologists like Clyde Kluckhohn of Harvard and Alfred Kroeber of the University of California at Berkeley, as well as political scientists Gabriel Almond and Lucien Pye, of Yale and MIT, respectively, the analysis of societal and political culture came to play a…

Those who study and propose policy for dealing with the non-Western world are advised to balance their urge to modernize with an appreciation for indigenous social and cultural differences. Equilibrium is important, writes Stanley Kurd, yet the leftists who dominate social sciences have largely abandoned such an appreciation, as have…

Direct and honest speech has its place, and that place seems not to be at the University of Denver, at least when the speech concerns discrepancies in minority achievement. Richard Lamm's credentials as a scholar and former political leader carried little weight with the chancellor and other administrators at the U of D who adamantly refused to…