Ann Baynes Coiro
Christopher Jencks, at far left, poses with Prospect founders Paul Starr, Robert Reich, and Robert Kuttner in 2000.
If anyone were to create a family tree for The American Prospect, it would show a little-known earlier magazine, Working Papers for a New Society, as the Prospect’s direct precursor. The intellectual leader of Working Papers was a journalist-turned-sociologist, Christopher Jencks, known to friends, colleagues, and students as Sandy.
As a writer and member of the Prospect’s founding board, Sandy became an important figure in this magazine. He co-authored the lead article in our very first issue, in 1990. The last published piece of Sandy’s long career appeared in the Prospect in 2021. He died last week at age 88.
Sandy was a model of intellectual courage and integrity. He took up hard questions, followed the evidence, and was open to ideas that others on the left might find uncomfortable. Some people were confused about his politics. He was a man of the left, but he enjoyed respect in other quarters because of his unflinching attention to facts, analytical insights, and disregard for liberal or left-wing orthodoxy.
Read Christopher Jencks’s articles in the Prospect
Sandy’s career was unorthodox. After working at The New Republic as an associate editor in the early 1960s, he turned to research on education and inequality, first at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., and then at Harvard, beginning in 1967. By 1973, he had published two major books (The Academic Revolution and Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America) and been appointed full professor of sociology at Harvard, without ever having received a Ph.D.
Sandy stood out among social scientists for his combination of high-level quantitative skills and accessible, lucid writing. Inequality created a furor because Sandy and his co-authors found that educational reforms on which so much hope had been placed did little to reduce inequality in pay. Greater economic equality would require more direct intervention.
Working Papers was an effort to rethink politics and policy alternatives after the wreckage of 1960s radicalism. Explaining “the reason for this magazine’s existence” in its first issue in Spring 1973, Sandy wrote: “The heady fantasies of the 1960s have proved evanescent, and most of those who believed in them have become politically demoralized.” Lacking any credible vision of the future, the left desperately needed a new positive agenda. That agenda, aimed at changing American institutions, depended on changing Americans’ “assumptions about what is possible, what is inevitable, and what is just.” The very name Working Papers suggested modest inquiry rather than dogma. “The reader who finds this unsettling should probably subscribe to Time or The Daily Worker,” Sandy wrote.
Although Working Papers published a wide range of articles by journalists and academics, Sandy’s articles focused on policy alternatives related to inequality. For example, in “The Poverty of Welfare” in Winter 1974, he argued that the most politically feasible strategy to improve the situation of the poor was not to try to reform welfare (Aid to Families with Dependent Children and related forms of assistance), as President Nixon had just tried to do. Instead, he made a case for a new program of supplements to the wages of low-paid workers. That is, in fact, what Congress did the next year when it introduced the Earned Income Tax Credit, the one major post-1960s policy innovation that, especially after its later expansion, did raise poor people’s incomes.
Working Papers lasted for nearly a decade from 1973 until 1982. I wrote for it during that time; Bob Kuttner took over as editor in the fall of 1979 but left for a job at The New Republic in 1982 after the publisher of Working Papers decided to try to turn it into a glossy magazine, an effort that quickly failed.
When we brought out the first issue of The American Prospect in Spring 1990, Sandy and Kathryn Edin were the authors of the lead article, “The Real Welfare Problem.” That article created a stir because it said welfare recipients were working and not reporting the income because it was the only way they could make ends meet. Years later, Kathy recalled how as a graduate student at Northwestern—Sandy moved there in 1979 before returning to Harvard in 1996—her research had begun:
I walked into Sandy’s office and he asked me what I was learning from my students in North Lawndale [where she was teaching welfare recipients]. I shrugged, and replied, “Not much. Only that everybody cheats. You have to cheat to survive.” His response—“Can you prove it?”—launched a six-year journey that would culminate in nearly 400 repeated interviews across four cities.
That field research helped launch Kathy’s lifelong work on the struggles of the poor, and the article that she and Sandy wrote for our first issue helped launch this magazine. It was a splendid case of taking on a sacred cow and finding a paradoxical inference. Yes, welfare recipients cheated—but because welfare does not pay enough to live on.
His very last piece for us, in 2021, a review of Richard Alba’s book The Great Demographic Illusion, challenged another piece of liberal conventional wisdom. The United States was not becoming a “majority-minority” society in a way that would build a reliable progressive coalition.
Sandy is survived by his wife, Jane Mansbridge, a distinguished political scientist, who also contributed to our first issue, an article on “Feminism and Democracy,” and by their son, Nathaniel.
At the time of Sandy’s retirement from Harvard a decade ago, I said that he had shown us how to wade into troubled waters and come out the stronger for it. He set an example for his students and for anyone committed to building a more just society. We will always be in his debt.
