When Harvard canceled a black professor – The Spectator World
Or rather, it would have been good news to anyone who wants the racial disparity to disappear through interventions that are known to work. But it was terrible news to activists who are invested in the idea that systemic racism explains everything. Socioeconomic standing and household reading, after all, can be improved.
I have borrowed from Freyer s 2006 article Falling Behind: New evidence on the black-white achievement gap for my summary. Freyer, however, was just warming up to further provocations against racial orthodoxy. He also decided to take a look at the data about police stops and shootings. He confirmed that that blacks were more than 50 percent more likely than whites to experience some form of force in interactions with police, something that Fryer said was the most surprising result of [his] career.
But when it came to shootings, he could find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. This flat-out contradicts the Black Lives Matter assertion that has been uncritically embraced by the academy, the press, and numerous politicians who hold that police readily resort to deadly violence in dealing with blacks. Fryer s paper on this, An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force, was written in 2016 and published in final form in 2019 in the Journal of Political Economy, well before George Floyd s death ignited riots and a frenzied affirmation in academe that police are the agents of brutal, racially motivated oppression.
From this, one might conclude that Professor Fryer had learned how successfully to kick over the traces of the liberal academic establishment. He was by no definition a conservative, but a kind of independent contrarian who was willing to go wherever the evidence took him. And for a while it appeared to have taken him to the heights of academic achievement. His work received a lot of criticism in places like the New York Times, but he also won substantial funding for his Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard.
Then the bottom fell out.
I have no shortage of bottom-falling-out stories for academics. They are sometimes caught doing atrocious things, sometimes punished for speaking up against academic policies they disagree with and sometimes disciplined because administrators seem entranced with bizarre ideas. We are in academia, after all, where egos are fragile and reputational destruction is the favorite sport. Reputational destruction, of course, comes in two popular flavors: race and sex. Since Professor Fryer is black, you might expect the line of attack will involve sex, and you d be right.
According to the New York Times, Professor Fryer was accused in 2018 of engaging in unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature toward four women who worked in the Harvard-affiliated research lab he created. I have no access to the details of the allegations, but Harvard did its work and came back with a report that amounted to a finding that he had flirted with a graduate student years ago, and that a woman he had fired found some of his language annoying. Naturally, these claims were stretched to their outer boundaries, but the initial faculty committee saw nothing of great moment.
In the #MeToo era, rules of double jeopardy don t apply. Harvard decided to put the case before another tribunal a secret one, but one that happened to include two black faculty members whose work had received some shade from Fryer s academic
I don’t think I would recommend an academic career to any student I cared in the least about these days. I’m not sure what career I would recommend. Perhaps not working at all. Just live off your capital — there’s a thought. For one thing, the academic atmosphere has gone from unappealing to most people to downright poisonous, or so it seems to me, at least if you believe things are obviously true and occasionally say them out loud. Even a Supreme Court nominee cannot allow that there are women and men, boys and girls, and that accounts for nearly absolutely everybody. She’d be in hot water if she allowed that. That’s crazy, I tell you, crazy! You can just ignore it all, and I tend to, but then why be at a university? Some are better than others I suppose. Harvard does not sound that great, and Yale of course, well, they seem to have lost their collective mind in New Haven. The less consequential the university, the worse it seems to be. Some departments too are better than others. I would rate law as not that great. But as dearime has remarked, it was fun while it lasted, and it seems not to be lasting much longer. But old white guys are notoriously fragile, we’re told, and that other sorts of people will probably do better for themselves.