Why Did Harvard University Go After One of Its Best Black Professors?
Quillette | Rob Montz
Filmmaker Rob Montz writes about his new documentary on the attempted derailment of Harvard Professor Roland Fryer’s career. Montz goes into Fryer’s upbringing, rise as a hailed academic, and his inconvenient scholarship challenging narratives on race (and thus the scholarship of colleagues whose existence relies on promulgating certain racial narratives). Montz summarizes the sexual harassment allegations made against Fryer including in “poor taste” jokes and flirtatious messages to two subordinates, followed by the cancelation of Fryer by a clandestine tribunal of administrators who ignored the recommendations of Harvard’s own Title IX office.
“Harvard’s own investigators ultimately found that Prof. Fryer had never sexually propositioned or touched anyone, and their original recommendation for punishment was ‘training’ on setting boundaries…[but then] a small group of Harvard administrators overruled Harvard’s own Title IX office, suspended Professor Fryer without pay for two years, banned him from campus, and shut down his multi-million dollar education laboratory. He was a tenured professor, and they couldn’t get rid of him completely. But they could do their best to excommunicate him.”
FAS Dean Claudine Gay went so far as to recommend stripping Fryer of tenure—an extreme move for which there seems to be no precedent at Harvard in at least the last one hundred years.
Listen to the Quillette Podcast with Montz
See also:
When Harvard Canceled a Black Professor (Spectator World)
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.
