Search Results

This chapter examines the exclusion of black players from ACC basketball teams before 1965, and how it reflected the customs and attitudes of ACC schools, where racial integration had occurred gradually and grudgingly, though peacefully. With the exception of a single applicant admitted to the University of Maryland under threat of a court order in 1951, no conference member accepted black students as undergraduates until after the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which struck down the “separate but equal” approach to education that was standard practice in the South and some parts of the North. Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and NC State began to accept black undergraduates in small numbers in the mid-1950s; Duke, Wake Forest, Clemson, and South Carolina followed suit in the early 1960s.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of how the US government and European countries define and measure poverty. US and European researchers and policy makers face similar issues as they seek to improve their measurement of income, poverty, and material well-being. To learn more about European efforts, the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and the OECD convened more than 100 scholars and government officials from twenty-four countries in Paris, France, in March 2009. At the conference, eighteen papers were presented in five broad topics together with commentaries by US scholars on each area. A selection of twelve of those eighteen original papers that focus more narrowly on poverty measurement along with the American commentaries are contained in this volume. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

Chapter 5 chronicles my doctoral program at MIT, where I’m a token woman and an “honorary man” starved for female companionship. I discuss several of my professors: Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, and Evsey Domar. I review my decision to conceal my pregnancy when I go on the job market and its ultimate revelation several months later. I contrast my career and marriage to Alice’s (she also has a Ph.D. in economics), and try to understand why I never ask Sam to do any housework. I discuss my difficult experience giving birth at the Bethesda Naval Hospital and my subsequent post-partum depression, which lifts instantly when I find a caretaker for my very young son (by far the scariest thing I have ever done) and begin teaching at the University of Maryland. I describe my elation at completing my doctoral thesis and becoming an assistant professor at Maryland, and compare my ability to speak out and improve the situation during my second birth to my sense of powerlessness during my first. I discuss the mentorship provided to me by Barbara Bergmann.The chapter ends with moving to California and finding a job as a lecturer at Berkeley.