Why Did Harvard University Go After One of Its Best Black Professors?

Source: Quillette | April 15, 2022 | Rob Montz

Roland Fryer Jr.’s life is a movie script: A man abandoned by his mom and raised by an alcoholic dad became the youngest black professor to ever secure tenure at Harvard University.

And then, all of a sudden, his career was derailed by an opaque sexual-harassment investigation. And no one seemed to want to say anything about it. Until now.

 

Fryer was heavily recruited after his time at the University of Chicago, and ultimately accepted a tenure-track position at Harvard. He quickly established himself as a political outlier through his willingness to ask provocative questions and publish the results, even when they challenged liberal pieties. There’s no apparent partisan agenda, only a genuine search for truth.

Or take Fryer’s work with the Harlem Children’s Zone, a pioneering nonprofit in which poor, mostly black students often outperform their white peers at richer schools. Fryer wanted to figure out the reasons for the Zone’s success, so the same strategies could be applied to failing schools all over the country. The politically correct solutions to lagging black academic achievement—reduce class size, increase per-pupil spending, and upgrade teachers’ nominal credentials—had all provided disappointing results.

Fryer found that a central component of the Zone’s success was a culture of high expectations. The school is institutionally allergic to the condescension that’s become the fashionable response to black underachievement.

More recently, Professor Fryer made national news when he jumped into an issue lying at the core of modern American race politics: police shootings. … [one] major finding did create a stir: Black suspects were less likely to be shot by police than white suspects.

People hate his guts because of the finding in Houston, because it runs counter to the Black Lives Matter narrative,” says Brown University professor Glenn Loury, who mentored Fryer early in his career. And this challenge to politically correct dogmas seems to have earned Fryer some powerful enemies at Harvard.

Four years ago, Fryer’s critics got an opportunity to undermine him when a former administrative assistant accused him of sexual harassment.

Harvard investigators made an effort to dig up a second complainant, another former assistant who’d worked with him a decade prior. Fryer, who was not married at the time, had sent her a series of flirtatious messages. She’d formally complained to human resources, he’d stopped, and she ended up working with him for another eight months.

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. That finding was transformed into an effort to derail his entire career: 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.

 

Read the whole story at: https://quillette.com/2022/04/15/why-did-harvard-university-go-after-one-of-its-best-black-professors/

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    In the summer of 2020, at the height of America’s modern racial reckoning, Fryer released a detailed investigation into the “Ferguson effect.” His team examined data from about a dozen cities, stretching back decades, and found that if a police department is subjected to a federal “Pattern-or-Practice” investigation in the wake of a viral police killing, officers tended to withdraw from the community.

    Fryer found that that drawdown in police activity led to a surge in violent crime that predominantly victimized low-income black people. And he made a point of noting that the additional annual black deaths due to this withdrawal are roughly triple the number of black people killed per year at the height of lynching in America.

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