Harvard economist Roland Fryer has an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, How to Make Up the Covid Learning Loss: Paying students for attendance, behavior and homework can boost achievement. I wasn’t excited about the op-ed specifically, as opposed to what you see at the bottom:
Mr. Fryer is the John A. Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and professor of economics at Harvard University, and founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures.
John Paulson is the conservative billionaire who made his fortune off the financial crisis of 2008. If he wants to back Fryer, he has the resources, and backing Fryer is a good thing.
Three years ago Fryer was defenestrated: Harvard Suspends Roland Fryer, Star Economist, After Sexual Harassment Claims – The move sidelines the researcher without pay for two years, and closes his lab, in a case that has roiled the profession. After he returned Fryer couldn’t be an adviser or supervisor, have graduate students, or teach graduate workshops at Harvard.
You can read about the allegations against him, but even before watching the video, Harvard Canceled its Best Black Professor. Why?, I concluded that there was something going on beyond sexual harassment.
But first, let’s understand what kind of scholar he is. Fryer won the John Bates Clark Medal. A friend who is a tenured professor at a top research university in social science asserted offhand that Fryer is as smart as he is (my friend is very smart), but works much harder and is more creative. Fryer’s scholarship is the product of a brilliant academic mind whose results have policy and cultural relevance. For many people, that was the problem. In a world of “moral clarity” and ideologically informed publications, Fryer’s work remained within a positivist tradition that went where the data led him and sometimes to unexpected and unwelcome results. This is very bad from the perspective of those who “know the truth,” and whose scholarship aims to justify it.
In relation to he said/she said aspect of the allegations against Fryer, the economist Karl Smith once suggested the big problem with Fryer was “cultural.” Fryer is not from the “Jack of Jill” class of African Americans. He grew up in the black underclass and working class. The implication is that his banter and repartee reflect his cultural background, and was sharply out of step with the more polished and Puritan norms of a place like Harvard. Additionally, though I haven’t ever spoken to Fryer, everyone who has tells me that he has no filter. This sort of personality used to be common among economists, but the cultural changes impacting the rest of academia have also started to creep into that discipline, and that was always going to cause problems.
Also, I have to admit I’ve heard Fryer does not suffer fools gladly and he was apparently unpopular among many black Harvard faculty. If they had gone to bat for Fryer, he would have come out of this relatively unscathed. In fact, several black faculty were instrumental in Fryer’s defenestration. Dean Claudine Gay, a professor of government, wanted to revoke Fryer’s tenure!
I’ll leave you with two things to mull over in relation to this:
– Compare Gay’s publication record with Fryer’s. Fryer is orders of magnitude more a scholar than she is. In a just world, we should admire excellence, but envy is often a more common response.
– It is an open secret in some fields that there are people (usually men) who engage in routine and egregious sexual harassment and even rape. For various reasons, they are not investigated by the university or institute. I always think about this when you see a scholar being targeted on pretty flimsy grounds.
Finally, let’s give it up to the Manhattan Institute, what they did here was a mitzvah that redressed an injustice. Fryer is 44 years old. He has decades of active scholarship ahead of him. He’s not the only person unfairly targeted (and there are many people who are skating by and will never be punished for what they’ve done to their subordinates)
Perhaps it’s more than just envy. Hell hath no fury like that of a black lady who sees an intelligent, accomplished brotha who marries… a blonde European lady professor?
And the 2019 counter-ideological study on police shootings was probably just icing on that layer cake.
“The Truth about Roland Fryer” by Glenn Loury:
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-roland-fryer
“Roland Fryer is the most gifted economist of his generation. Not the most gifted black economist of his generation, the most gifted economist of his generation. Period.”
Loury is a Professor of Economics at Brown U. and is Black.
also: “The Case of Roland Fryer | Glenn Loury & John McWhorter [The Glenn Show]”
The Ivy League is engaged in an orgy of self destruction in its efforts to destroy America. Fryer at Harvard, Katz at Princeton, rioting law students at Yale.
One of the organizing principles of any campaign against Wokeism should be bringing higher education to heel. Measures I would suggest would include:
Tax the endowments — heavily.
Revoke the tax deductiblity of contributions to the institutions.
Require institutional separation of education, research, and medical care.
Impose wage and price controls.
Require admissions be only by public and objective criteria.
Require free transferability of educational credits and acceptance of AP and IB credits.
Eliminate college degree requirements from professional licensing and corporate hiring.
I propose a better idea. A Dissolution of the Universities like Henry VIII did with monasteries. The whole system is rotten, it cannot be saved. Every university is dissolved, all the professors are fired, the students go home. We start from scratch, some of the staff can be rehired on an ad hoc basis but the assumption is guilty until proven innocent. Or more accurately, useless until proven useful.
Or just let it be. Better yet, cheer it along.
When your enemy makes a mistake, build him a golden bridge.
The Dissolution is kind of a hard one to compare; Henry gave the ex-monks high pensions and tried to pull them back into the Church and had a fund raising motive for dissolving their property. Its about trying to integrate them into a new structure, rather than casting people aside. He wanted to build a new church and get some money from the old one.
Seizure of private property like that and paying off their employees is impossible Western countries. Not without an economic downturn that makes past recessions look like a joke.
On top of that, casting aside the people in the universities… I think even if they’re a little crazy, they’re still “wicked smart, yo”. Probably a lot of activist movements and private industries would be happy with a big sudden influx of talent, though it would be talent that was pretty hostile to the dissolvers of the university. Even people in the academy who aren’t hostile would turn that way.
Regarding proposals to impose heavy restrictions on US universities around donations and funds, well, I guess the Max Planck and the big universities of Europe generally would be happy with that outcome…
“Regarding proposals to impose heavy restrictions on US universities around donations and funds, well, I guess the Max Planck and the big universities of Europe generally would be happy with that outcome…”
I say we buy them all one way tickets. I am sure that Europe will love being lectured about their racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia …
They might tame it, and keep the money and advantage.
(In fairness, that would probably be a better outcome for humanity, so maybe it is a good proposal.)
The part of the universities that has grown explosively in the past several decades isn’t the student body or the professoriate – it’s the administration. Those who staff it aren’t so “wicked smart,” and wouldn’t do so well in the private sector.
If you go with Dissolution proposal, you lose all of them.
@Walter Sobchak
“I say we buy them all one way tickets. I am sure that Europe will love being lectured about their racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia”
Honestly they probably would like that. There is a weird phenomenon where the client states believe in a ideology more than the metropole.
It seems to me that a lot upper class blacks have careers that rely on the poor performance of the black masses. A black Yale law graduate can say “Look at how blacks are doing at large, what they need is more representation in society, that is why I, a black Yale law schoold graduate should get a cushy seat on the board of your Fortune 500 company.” I think this attitude explains the otherwise mystifying failure of Black leadership to address the chaos that is currently going on in their community. Fryer who is not from the upper class and does not need a thumb on the scale actually cares about the masses. For this, the parasites tried to destroy him. Thank God it looks like they failed.
On a down note, I subscribe to the American Economic Review and it is definitely getting more woke. It worries me.
“If you go with Dissolution proposal, you lose all of them.”
My judgement is that the benefits far outweigh the costs.
I have a song for those people:
@Matt “Seizure of private property like that and paying off their employees is impossible Western countries. Not without an economic downturn that makes past recessions look like a joke.”
Uh-oh…