Michael S. Joyce, 1942-2006.(Notes & Comments: April 2006)(Obituary)

It is with great sadness that we note the passing of our friend Michael S. Joyce, who died February 24 at sixty-three. Most readers of The New Criterion will have glimpsed one or more of the many obituaries that appeared in the weeks following Mike's death. The New York Times managed to scramble some important facts, but even our Paper of Record could not obscure the definitive contribution that Mike Joyce made to American social policy and intellectual life. As head of the John M. Olin Foundation from 1979 to the mid-1980s, and then as head of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation until his retirement in 2000, Mike did an enormous amount to change the terms of debate on an extraordinarily wide range of cultural mad social issues.

At Bradley, one of Mike's many initiatives was supporting the nascent school choice movement. As Peter Collier noted in an obituary, for FrontPage.com, Mike's support

 
   made Milwaukee the seedbed of the school 
   choice movement and gave black kids the opportunity 
   to escape failing mad violent public 
   schools. Bradley's emancipation proclamation 
   put a finger in the eye of the left-wing racists 
   whose policies are designed to keep blacks on 
   the liberal plantation. Mike understood very 
   well that the school choice movement had 
   taken aim at the unholy alliance between the 
   Democrats and the National Education Association, 
   America's most disgraceful union 
   since Dave Beck's Teamsters, and black 
   hustlers like Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, all of 
   whom collaborated for their own cynical 
   reasons to keep black kids in bondage. 

The recent consolidation of the school choice program in Milwaukee--a model for the nation--is in large part the fruit of Mike's prescient interventions in the 1980S and 1990S.

At the center of Mike's genius was understanding the power of ideas. Many men of the world--especially, perhaps, those of a conservative disposition--are wont to underestimate the transformative power of ideas. They are interested in action, not ideas. But Mike understood that the economic and political decisions that shape our world are not made in a vacuum. They are informed by a vision of the ...