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Wikipedia Bio for Page “Charles L. Glenn, Jr.” by Peter Glenn 11/24/2022 draft

Radical in his early career, Charles Leslie Glenn Jr. (“Charlie” as he is known) has exercised his particular brand of productive rebellion, in jobs clerical, bureaucratic, and academic. A widely respected expert on American and European educational systems, he has traveled professionally to Europe forty-plus times, attending and speaking at conferences (Charlie has some expertise in a good half-dozen or more languages). While at these conferences, he speaks on parent-centered “school choice”, later in his career on religious schools and vouchers for all students to attend the school, public or private, of their choice. He was an early supporter of charter schools in Massachusetts, and maintains a courageous brand of compromise with supporters of religion in schools, and supporters of those early associations: Black, Latino, Indigenous, and other students, with wide socioeconomic reach, that enriches and makes genuine the preparation of secondary students for being productive members of society in our world today.

The early association with the Freedom Movement of the late fifties and early sixties (as a white man, he was active as early as the late 1950s in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, at a largely Black inner city Episcopal parish where he volunteered while an undergraduate at Harvard College, and later served as rector) has come down to the present time through the loving stories, of courage amidst defeat, of radical centrism, of color-blind but not patronizing affinity with all classes and races of people, passed on to his seven kids and many grandkids, to say nothing of his many students at Boston University’s School of Education, and in that university’s University Professors Program, an elite forum for motivated and multi-disciplinary undergraduate students.

Charlie marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., and once shared a stage with him. There is, in Charlie’s retelling of these stories, a deep pastoral sense and a respect for a burden that all the marches in the world cannot alleviate; the stories come very close to his own, seminary-trained, understanding of Jesus’ role in the Christian’s heart. Charlie believes in personal conversion, for example, though also widely respected in less conversion-centric circles such as within the Roman Catholic church, having spoken to thousands at Catholic Lay movement Comunione e Liberazione.

Charlie gave his own children an education radically different from his own boarding school and elite New England prep school (St. Paul’s) upbringing. Both his parents were very socially active in some of the same concerns that drove his early work in Boston’s inner city. Father C. Leslie Glenn a prestigious Episcopal rector to college students in Cambridge, Mass., and later as rector of St. John’s Lafayette Square (the “Church of the Presidents”, across from the White House), who postponed this second, Washington, call in order to serve on a Navy ship as chaplain during World War II, was finally posted as subdean of Washington’s National Cathedral, never earning the rank of bishop though widely respected as a preeminent preacher to the common man, and a well-humored, socially ascendant, representative of that great institution, as it was viewed in his time, the Episcopal Church.

Charlie’s mother married the respectable and “uppity” class of her husband’s (later, divorced) ministry to liberal social causes, as an outspoken supporter of women, to single mothers, to urban kids, to her own brand of reaction to her privileged upper class upbringing; it is her family that gave to Charlie and his kids the lineage back to America’s first settlers, along of course with those of Charlie’s two wives: he was divorced from his first wife Lee amidst raising two sons in the Boston Public School system. In short, both of his parents were absolutely groundbreaking in their causes, the one overcoming poor immigrant upbringing to bring some brand of social sanity to the largely upper class Episcopal Church's pulpit, and the other simply supporting minority kids and women in unthinkable language and fashion.

These sons lived first-hand through the busing debacle and protests of the 1970s, a public policy move that was in Charlie’s name, while he served as Director of Equal Educational Opportunity for the Massachusetts Department of Education. He is respectfully, but critically, featured in George Lucas’s well-known book Common Ground, and in fonder light in other, more recent, treatments. These sons, Joshua and Patrick, both married, work in philosophy (semiotics) and law.

Charlie’s father, meanwhile, was son of an Irish immigrant to New York City; he attended Stevens Tech and worked in the engine room of Navy ships in World War I, later teaching alongside lifelong friend Thornton Wilder, at elite school Lawrenceville. His story, in summary, is that rare find of an American classic, an immigrant classic in any nation, and a clerical stalwart tale, of preaching to the common man and with “good sense”, “grand morals”, and a penchant for respect of parents and authority, alongside brave liberal cause. He, for example, spoke of the “gentle pleading” of the liberal.

While at the state, Charlie married Mary Tarbell Dunning, daughter of a Naval Captain Alan Lombard Dunning, an engineer with a long lineage of ancestors, aunts, and uncles all serving in missionary or pastoral work generally; and Isobel Goodloe of Nashville stock. His father-in-law’s family was New England congregationalist, directly descended from Congregationalists in America author Albert Elijah Dunning, and early settlers of America; his mother’s family was Southern, by some measures, and featured pastors (such as the Revd. James Laurie) and politicians, among other community luminaries.