When Harvard Canceled a Black Professor
Spectator World | Peter W. Wood
Wood summarizes Harvard Professor Roland Fryer’s take-down as covered in a recent documentary. “I have heard several grapevine versions of what happened that run in the same direction: a tale of a vindictive former employee and others sharpening grievances for their own ends and a total denial of due process in favor of putting the man in the hands of his campus adversaries.”
“I have no access to the details of the [sexual harassment] 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…the initial faculty committee saw nothing of great moment.
[Then], 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 writings. Sure enough, the second tribunal decided that Fryer had crossed all sorts of invisible lines. As a tenured member of the Harvard faculty, Fryer couldn’t easily be fired, though administrators pushed to fire him, which would have been a first since the Civil War. But there are lots of other ways to ruin a faculty member. They suspended Fryer for two years, during which he was barred from teaching or using university resources. And they permanently closed his off-campus lab, the Education Innovation Laboratory.”
Related:
Why Did Harvard University Go After One of Its Best Black Professors? (Quillette) | Quillette Podcast with Montz
Also, see Glenn Loury’s March 13th Substack piece The Truth About Roland Fryer: “Those at Harvard responsible for this state of affairs should be utterly ashamed of themselves. They have unnecessarily, heedlessly tarnished the career of an historically great economist. Again, I can't help but suspect that they have effectively buried vital research not because it was poorly done but because they found the results to be politically inconvenient. ‘Veritas’ indeed.”
Back in August 2019, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter discussed the railroading of Fryer in The Case of Roland Fryer.
