Harvard screwed Roland Fryer. That’s what happened to Roland Fryer. National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood’s Spectator column “When Harvard canceled a black professor” {UPDATE: published in accessible form by the New York Post here] applies Wood’s academic expertise to tell the story. As if we didn’t have enough to be indignant about, we now have the case — the rise and fall — of Professor Fryer to digest. Wood’s column includes a link to the excellent video by Rob Montz (below). The video is accompanied by the following account:
Roland Fryer was an unlikely Harvard superstar. Abandoned by his mom at birth and raised by an alcoholic dad, Fryer became the youngest black professor to ever secure tenure at Harvard and won the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, the prize for the best economist under 40 in the world.
Fryer’s research routinely upended the woke orthodoxies dominating academia. But not on purpose; Fryer isn’t partisan. He’s only interested in digging up truth, no matter what it is. Truth, he says, is the key tool for improving the lives of black boys and girls.
Then, in 2018, Fryer’s career was suddenly cut short. Harvard had an official line on why: he’d sexually harassed his staff. Fryer was banned from campus and his multi-million dollar lab was shut down. The few legacy media outlets that did cover the case, such as the New York Times, dutifully repeated the university’s narrative: this punishment was overdue MeToo justice.
No, it wasn’t. Drawing on previously unreported documents and interviews with dozens of Fryer’s friends and colleagues, we reveal his cancellation for what it was: an ideological purge.
Watch the whole gripping thing (about 25 minutes) and please pass it on.
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