I am not a sociologist, and thus will not venture to comment on Peter Berger’s contributions to that discipline. What I can testify to is how he helped to change the orientation of my own thinking and of my work as a government official and policy consultant.

We met when I was in my mid-thirties and a figure of some notoriety in the Boston area as the state official responsible for educational equity, including bilingual education, sex equity, and other controversial agendas. Most visibly, I was responsible for pushing forward the lagging desegregation of the Boston and other public schools; by 1974, as school buses rolled to implement a plan of which I was the principal author, I was widely known and resented as “Mr. Busing.” The Boston Globe called me “the state’s lightning rod for the stormy protests against the racial imbalance law and the plans for Boston and Springfield schools,” while Anthony Lucas, in Common Ground, described me as having “a passionate zeal on racial issues.”

In education policy circles 50 years later, by contrast, I’m often considered a conservative, in particular as a strong supporter of parental choice in its many forms: charter schools, vouchers, homeschooling. I have served as expert witness supporting public funding of faith-based schools in a number of cases. I’m also very critical of much that is done or proposed in the name of racial justice, and of the current obsession with racial and other identities.

What happened? Is this an illustration of Robert Frost’s quip, “I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old”? Have I abandoned my youthful convictions and become complacent about racial and other injustices? Not at all; I believe I am as passionate as ever about these continuing and evolving problems, but I learned from experience and from my own mistakes, and from Peter Berger, to advocate for more effective remedies.

Peter Berger played a key role in this rethinking—really a broadening—of my understanding of what justice requires and how to pursue it.