Terry H. Anderson

Terry Howard Anderson (born December 8, 1946) is a professor of recent United States history at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, and the author of The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action.^[1]

Background

Anderson is the son of Howard Everett Anderson (born ca. 1916) and the former Emily Kneip (born ca. 1918), formerly of Duluth and Silver Bay, Minnesota, who since have resided in Harlingen and Bryan, Texas.^[2] Terry Anderson served in the United States Navy during the Vietnam War, probably from 1965–1967, though biographical sketches about Anderson do not give the years of his military service. In 1971, he received his Bachelor of Arts in psychology from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and St. Paul. In 1973, he obtained the Master of Arts in history from the University of Missouri at Columbia, Missouri.^[3]

In 1978, Anderson procured his Ph.D. in history from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where he had also been the assistant oral historian. In 1979, he joined the TAMU history faculty. In the 2001-02 academic year, he taught in Dublin, Ireland, on a Fulbright Scholarship through the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, an institution named for the mother of George Washington. Similarly, from 1994–1995, Anderson was a Fulbright professor at the Institute of American Studies at Northeast Normal University in Changchu, China. In 1991, he taught in a TAMU program in Koriyama, Japan. In the 1978-1979 academic year, Anderson was an assistant professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg.^[3]

Affirmative action study

The term affirmative action was coined in 1965 by U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson to offer minorities special consideration and outreach in employment and education. Anderson, however, in his 2004 work The Pursuit of Fairness traces the concept of affirmative action back to the era of legal segregation, when African Americans rebelled at being compelled to pay taxes to support public facilities otherwise closed to their utilization. After being granted civil rights, many of the minorities found the hurdles so high to secure a foothold in education and employment that they favored an approach to compensate them for past discrimination. As time passed, those seeking affirmative action consideration were born long after segregation had been abolished and created what the critics of the program called "reverse discrimination." Anderson contends that he offers a balanced approach to the subject and avoids excessive legalese and statistics. In his preface, Anderson says that he, a blonde white male, has not been adversely impacted by affirmative action in his own education and employment. "I have no ax to grind, no agenda, just a fascination at how this contentious policy developed and changed over the years."^[1]

A reviewer, Timothy J. O'Neill of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, says that while the account "lacks the theoretical insights of other affirmative action treatments such as Peter H. Schuck’s 'Diversity in America', Anderson compensates for this by telling a quick and readable story to a popular audience who often knows little about the history of equal rights, the women’s movement, the Great Society, let alone the history of affirmative action."^[4]

Other Anderson works

In 2011, Oxford University Press will publish Anderson's forthcoming book, Bush's War: Iraq, referring to the war on terrorism waged by former U.S. President George W. Bush. Anderson is a longtime critic of the Bush administration and the Axis of Evil claim made against Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Himself a Democrat,^[5] Anderson voiced opposition to the appointment of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state in Bush's second term. In a public forum in November 2004, Anderson expressed pessimism about the ongoing war in Iraq: "Bush's war has devoured the army and American policy. The war has divided America and will drag on for years." he predicted.^[6]

Anderson's The Movement and the Sixties was released by Oxford in 1995 and in e-book form in 2001 under the shortened title, The Sixties. Anderson traces the 1960s protest movement from the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina to the Indian activists taking the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, hostage. Between those events, thirteen years apart, were the Freedom rides, the "free speech" protests at the University of California at Berkeley, the Selma to Montgomery march of 1965, the agitation against the Vietnam War, Black power, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the hippies, and feminist rebellions. Anderson examines why so many became activists and took to the streets to make themselves heard by the otherwise "silent generation".^[7]

With Charles R. Bond, Jr., a member of General Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers and thereafter a major general in the United States Air Force, Anderson in 1984 co-authored A Flying Tiger's Diary, published by the TAMU Press and in its eighth printing by 2001. The book, the first published diary of a Flying Tigers pilot, stems from Anderson's oral history project, "From Aggies to Generals."^[8] That same year, he wrote A Guide to the Oral History Collection of Texas A&M University, based on his tenure from 1979–1988 as the university's oral historian.^[3] The first project on his plate was "Aggies to Generals," in which he interviewed TAMU graduates who served in World War II and became officers.^[1] Another collection is The History of Engineering at Texas A&M University, written with student assistance and consisting of personal interviews with active and retired engineering professors.^[3]

Still another Anderson work is The United States, Great Britain, and the Cold War, 1944-1947, published in 1981 by the University of Missouri Press. Anderson has published two articles in South Central Review, including "The Strange Career of Affirmative Action" (2005) and "1968: The End and the Beginning in the United States and Western Europe" (1999–2000). In 1986, he published "American Popular Music and the War in Vietnam," in the journal Peace and Change in a special edition on American culture and the Vietnam War. He applied his knowledge of psychology and history in the 1978 article, "Becoming Sane with Psychohistory" in The Historian. Anderson has written more than fifty book reviews in scholarly and popular journals.^[3]

Anderson has appeared on national, state, and regional television and in many newspapers in interviews about the topics of his historical writing. In February 2002, for instance, he discussed the 1960s in the program "Power of Ideas" on Oklahoma Public Television. Earlier, in 2000, he appeared on "Evening Talk Show" on KERA-TV in Dallas to discuss the Vietnam War.^[3]

Anderson has won various faculty awards and is a 2010 Cornerstone Faculty Fellow at TAMU. He resides in Bryan.

References