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)