Robert Dentler

Education and career

In 1949, he received a bachelor's in political science from Northwestern University. Dentler began his career in 1949 as a crime reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. In 1950, he earned a master's in English literature from Northwestern. Dentler taught at the Pomfret School as an English teacher from 1950 to 1952, then served as an intelligence officer for the U.S. government from 1952 to 1954. In 1954, he received a master's in sociology from American University, then a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1960. Dentler taught at the U.S. Army War College and Dickinson College from 1955 to 1957. While a Ph.D. candidate, Dentler taught at the University of Chicago. He then taught at the University of Kansas (1959-1961), and Dartmouth College (1961-1962), and spent the following ten years at Columbia University, becoming Dean of the Teachers College. In 1972 he became Dean of Education and University Professor of Education and Sociology at Boston University. He ended his career at the University of Massachusetts Boston, starting in 1983.

Desegregation

As a staff director working for the New York Commission of Education in the early 1960s, Dentler began working on the problem of school desegregation in the northern United States. He advised on desegregation plans for New York City, Buffalo, Rochester and White Plains, New York; Bridgeport and Stamford, Connecticut; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Los Angeles and San Bernardino, California. From 1973 to 1985 Dentler was involved with the drafting and implementation of Boston's controversial desegregation plan. In 1979, he worked on desegregating the University of North Carolina system. In the 1980s he advised desegregation efforts in the southern school districts of St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri; Little Rock; Mobile, Alabama; and DeKalb County, Georgia. In 1994 he advised the desegregation plan of Rockford, Illinois.

Boston school desegregation

In 1973, Dentler was appointed to the Boston Mayor’s Commission on the Public School, as U.S. District Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. considered whether the Boston Public Schools were in violation of the Massachusetts Racial Imbalance Act. In 1975, Garrity selected Dentler and BU's associate dean, Marvin B. Scott, to draft the Boston school desegregation plan, which involved the busing of thousands of students to break up the high level of segregation in the Boston school system. The plan transformed the Boston schools over a decade marked by incidents of racial conflict and violence, often directed by working-class whites against black students.

Dentler was critical of Common Ground, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning book about the Boston busing crisis, saying "social and political demography as well as intergroup history get short shrift," saying the author wove a "complete fabric of exculpation out of the stuff of ... local legends."

Praise

"He had a deep and abiding desire for achieving justice. He would have nothing to do with a plan that wasn't designed to achieve justice. Justice as he saw it was justice for people of color as well as for white people. It was justice for people of limited income as well as for affluent people. That was something that stayed with him." — Charles Willie, one of the master's of Garrity's desegregation plan.

Personal life

Dentler was the son of Arnold and Jennie Munsen Dentler in Oak Park, Illinois. He married Helen Hosmer in 1950 and had one daughter, Deborah and two sons, Eric and Robin. He died of geriatric myelodysplasia.

Awards and honors

Dentler earned several awards in his career:

The American Sociological Association named the Robert Dentler Award for Outstanding Student Achievement in his honor. Northwestern University established the Robert Dentler Memorial Prize in poetry.