Glenn Loury
speaker
197 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Glenn Loury’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I said, what has been proceeding there in Gaza is a collective punishment that I don't think is justified. And I got notified the next day the Manhattan Institute was discontinuing its relationship with me as a senior fellow.
Are we really going to go to war with Iran and turn the world economy upside down? Is it really Jim Crow 2.0 if they want to ask for a driver's license before you cast a ballot in Georgia?
Well, I graduated high school 60 years ago. Whoa. Where? John Marshall Harlan High School, public school in Chicago. How is it now? I don't know, to be honest with you. I know that the community that houses it has gone into decline and it's become a part of the South Side problematic, which is Chicago with the violence and so on.
It was a modest working upper, working lower middle class community. When I was at that school, it was integrated. There were 30 or 40 percent of the student body was white. I'm sure it's all black now and has been for some time. But I've lost touch with what's going on back there. But I'm just saying I've been around for a long time. Yeah, it's a long time.
So I remember as I did my undergraduate at Northwestern University, graduated in 1972, the intensity of the intellectual experience of coming to the university. Yeah. I remember encountering the German language. I remember studying mathematics and economics and philosophy and politics. And I remember books. And I remember there being a certain devotion to the life of the mind. Yes.
I don't know that we've lost that, but it's, I think, less intense for our students today than it was when I was in college. It was the shadow of the Second World War. It was still only 25 years after the end of the conflict. That had, I think, its effect. It was the Vietnam era, and that had its effect.
Even though it was the Vietnam era, it wasn't, in my experience, as political as I see the university has become today.
I got to campus in 1970 at Northwestern. I started out at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1965. I dropped out. I attended a community college for a couple of years, and then I re-enrolled at a major university as a scholarship student in 1970, graduated in 1972.
Yeah, frankly, I do. First of all, not everybody was a protester or enmeshed in the ethos of protest. Some of us were just trying to get to class. In my own case, I was a full-time employee at a printing plant and a young father with a wife and two children, even as I was taking classes at Northwestern. My case is very unusual. I didn't really have time to protest.
But it wasn't even for the other students. It wasn't all consuming. There were intense, engaged protest students, but there were also kids just going about their business.
I was a clerk. They called me a timekeeper and a bonus estimator. We had these decks of IBM punch cards, and I would write on each one the employee's name, the number of hours they spent on what task, and sometimes I'd have to estimate whether or not their productivity count entitled them to bonus payment.
and take at the end of the shift my deck of IBM punch cards to the offices where the young women would key punch them up, and then they would go into the process of the mainframe computer congestion. It was pretty antiquated, but that's how we kept track of the accounting. So I was a clerk.
Everything. This was R.R. Donnelly and Sons, a big concern. Lakeside Press is what they called the campus. A couple of miles, three miles south of the loop on the lakefront in Chicago, maybe a dozen or so factory-style buildings.
railroad tracks running alongside huge rolls of printing paper, these monstrous machines, which were the presses, craftsmen everywhere from the people who ran the presses to the people who engraved the plates to the people who They cultivated the photographs that had to be made into images. They printed Time magazine, Life magazine, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek. They printed telephone books.
They printed Sears catalogs. And it was a massive operation.
Yes, it was a dozen buildings or so spread out over a mile along the lakefront, maybe three quarters of a mile. Is it still there? I think it's condos now. Of course it is. And in fact, the guys that, you know, the union guys who I worked with, I wasn't in the union, I was a clerk. could see it coming. They could see the jobs going to South Carolina and then going to Southeast Asia.
They didn't see the technology revolution coming that made a lot of what they were doing obsolete, but they knew that their days were numbered.
Were they mad about it? Uh, yeah. Uh, and to a certain extent resigned, uh, but you know, the fight, the good fight, you know, resist, but the wheel was turning. Amazing.
Now, I talk about this in my memoir that came out last year, Late Admissions, Confessions of a Black Conservative. I review the bidding of my life. And yeah, I tell a story. So I'm at the community college before getting to Northwestern. The year is 1970, the spring of 1970, the strike, the incursion into Cambodia and the strike. Yes. And I'm taking calculus and I'm loving it.
And there's an exam coming. You loved calculus? Pardon? I loved calculus. Yeah, I was a math major and calculus and trigonometry and abstract algebra and differential equations.
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