Roland Fryer on the Cost of Telling the Truth

Conversations with Coleman

In this episode of Conversations with Coleman, host Coleman Hughes sits down with economist Roland Fryer to discuss the importance of intellectual courage in academia. The conversation begins

Key takeaways

• The Jason Arday scandal at Cambridge serves as a case study for how institutions may overlook fraud when the narrative aligns with prevailing orthodoxies.
• Roland Fryer and Bill Ackman have established the Carob Trust Prize to provide financial incentives for scholars willing to publish research that bucks consensus.
• Fryer argues that if universities admit students based on potential rather than high-signal metrics, they must invest in developmental opportunities to ensure success.
• Research on eight-month-olds shows zero racial differences in cognitive tests early in life, suggesting gaps emerge through environmental factors and schooling.
• The 'chilling effect' in modern academia is evidenced by students using anonymous platforms like SideChat to debate sensitive topics due to fear of repercussions.

Main topics

• Academic Courage
• The Jason Arday Scandal
• Educational Incentives

Notable quotes

If you're going to take someone low mean, you should have high variance.

Conclusion

The episode highlights the vital need for protecting academic inquiry

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Roland Fryer. Roland is a professor of economics at Harvard University and an associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He's known for his groundbreaking empirical work on racial inequality, education, policing, and social policy. He received the 2015 John Bates Clark Medal and at age 30 became the youngest African American to receive tenure at Harvard. Roland is a fearless truth teller. His research on crime, policing, and racial inequality is fascinating and important, and I've cited him many times on this podcast. But his research is also out of step with progressive orthodoxies. And because of that, he's had to show a considerable amount of courage and sometimes had to suffer unpleasant consequences just to publish his research. Now, Roland, along with Bill Ackman, has created a $1 million prize for other fearless truth-tellers. It's called the Carib Prize. And in the second half of our discussion today, Roland explains why this prize is so necessary. In the first half of our talk, I ask Roland his thoughts about the Jason Arday scandal, about which Roland wrote a fantastic op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. So without further ado, Roland Fryer. Speaker 1 (1:31) Okay, Roland Fryer, thanks so much for coming back on my show. Speaker 2 (1:34) It's always good to be here, Coleman. Speaker 1 (1:35) So I had you on, I don't know, maybe a year or two ago. We went into your whole life story, how it is that you became a Harvard professor. You have one of those stories that in a different world would be a Hollywood hoop dreams turned Harvard econ professor biopic. Speaker 1 (2:00) You know, in the in the current environment, which elevates certain stories over others, it's it's lesser known than it should be. And I hope it becomes better known. You had a really good piece recently in The Wall Street Journal. You've been writing a lot for The Wall Street Journal, right? Are you a columnist there? Yes. Speaker 2 (2:16) Every two weeks. Every two Speaker 1 (2:18) weeks. Yeah. So it's a it's a must read every two weeks. And we're going to talk about some of the recent ones. And there's a lot to talk about. But let's start with Jason Arday. I think probably my whole audience will be familiar with the basic outline of the Arday story if you've been living under a rock. This man, the late deceased now, Jason Arday, he invented massive swaths of his life story, massive athletic feats, running 600 miles in six days. He didn't speak until he was 11. That was the story. People were told he didn't read until he was 18 and yet did PhD level work by 30. All of this was invented or greatly exaggerated at minimum. and presented to everyone from Cambridge to BBC journalists who took it down smooth without skepticism, at least not without skepticism that they said out loud, and allowed this guy to rise to the highest ranks one can in academia. He was the youngest ever black professor, professor of sociology, but youngest ever black professor, period, I believe, at Cambridge. And all of this set him up for a psychological crash when it came out that he was a fraud. Speaker 1 (3:45) And it's very sad to see that he, I think it's confirmed now that he took his own life. I don't know if that's 100%, but it's assumed. And this, you know, there's so many lessons to draw from this. And there's, to me, it should go without saying that I never celebrate that somebody died, even if they did bad things, you know. when they were alive or if they did dishonest things, but you know what occurred to me immediately was the skepticism that these Cambridge professors didn't show the BBC journalists when they see this black man that has a story about coming from very little and making it all the way to the top, it's clear they had such a hunger for this sort of story. They wanted to believe so bad that they didn't, they turned off their skeptical minds. And it occurred to me, how many brilliant black academics do we already have who have such stories that Speaker 1 (4:50) end up with the wrong conclusions or the wrong politics or not towing the line that a black intellectual is supposed to in progressive spaces so that all those same people say, well, not him, not him. We need to find someone else. And they end up scraping from the bottom of the barrel and really allowing and encouraging substandard scholarship to pass for brilliance. Or at least pretending. And so I was thinking of all the stories, all the people I know that meet this criteria. Thomas Sowell grew up in the Jim Crow South in a house without electricity or hot water and ends up, you know. Harvard, UChicago, teaching at Cornell and going on to have this very impressive academic career and trade publication career. Glenn Lowry grows up on the south side of Chicago working class, working in a factory with a kid as a very young man going, you know, taking night classes and ends up at MIT and Harvard Kennedy School. And you. You know, if people really want to dive into your life story, they should listen to our last podcast. We don't have to reiterate that. We'll put that in the notes. But you have a story as inspiring as anyone could hope to learn of. And it just occurred to me that the Jason Arday situation threw into sharp relief that That you aren't treated in those are day type circles the way that you should be in in my in my estimation So I'm curious. What did you make of the whole Jason our day? scandal Speaker 2 (6:39) Yeah, I mean, well, that's a lot to chew on. First, thank you for even mentioning me in the same paragraph as Thomas Sowell and Glenn Lowry, both of them. I know Glenn, I know very well, and they're both brilliant. So that's an honor. Speaker 1 (6:57) You know, as Speaker 2 (6:58) you were talking, I was kind of chuckling to myself because I thought, well, maybe the reason that our day got all that attention was because not a lot of... folks can run a marathon like that. No one would ever confuse me as someone who liked to run. Look, I'm really, really saddened by the whole R-Day stuff. And I don't know all the details like most do, but I know a couple of things that seem pretty obvious. One, Speaker 2 (7:30) I just don't think you get really, really tough feedback. Speaker 1 (7:32) And Speaker 2 (7:33) it's really hard to get tough feedback. I remember a distinct part of life in 2003 or so. and I was at the University of Chicago and I was given a seminar and I was about to pack up my U-Haul and drive to Cambridge. I was in the Harvard Society of Fellows. And I gave the seminar at Chicago and I mean, you know, I survived, but it was, you know, it was a full contact sport. Speaker 1 (8:02) And Speaker 2 (8:03) it just seemed like everything I said there, you know, I have this idea, that's not good. Oh, I have this idea, I'm not sure, you know. Then literally two weeks later, I'm Harvard's campus, and I say something similar. Oh, I'm thinking, oh, wow. Speaker 1 (8:16) And Speaker 2 (8:16) I thought to myself at the time, and mentioned it to my grandmother at the time, something has changed. I did not get this much smarter in the last two weeks. Something is really different, and I don't trust this process, I said to her. And I think that that is part of the issue, and that's what my focus has been. about the RDA case and many other cases like this, which is if you're going to give someone an opportunity, I'm all for that, perhaps more than most, because I've been given a lot of opportunities. But if you're going to do that, then the burden is on you to then develop them. And in some sense, one of the key ideas behind DEI is, hey, these 18-year-olds have really noisy signals. Speaker 1 (9:02) Or Speaker 2 (9:03) heck, even these 23-year-olds coming out of graduate school have really noisy signals. So can we really have an up-down decision based on something that isn't very predictive for the entire population and we're making fine distinctions based on people? I can understand that. But that means if you take a lower signal on someone because you think they have potential, the burden is on you to make sure you get clear signals before the next time you have to decide promote or not. Speaker 1 (9:30) And Speaker 2 (9:31) that's where I think things break down in the academy and elsewhere is that we get excited about the opportunities and then are worried or perhaps even scared. to hold people to a line. Let me give you one clear example. I was talking to an Ivy League admissions officer, the head of an Ivy League admissions school. And I said, look, I have this intuition. A 1200 SAT coming from the Atlanta Projects is more impressive than a 1300 coming from a private school. Speaker 1 (10:03) I said- I have the same intuition. Speaker 2 (10:05) That's my view. And I said, but can we test this? Speaker 1 (10:07) And Speaker 2 (10:08) the admissions officer said to me, Roland, let me get this straight. If we admitted 50 people, And 45 of them worked out and five got in fights in the common room, I was told. Would you think that's success or failure? I said, that is a resounding success in my view. Speaker 1 (10:25) He Speaker 2 (10:25) says, I view that as failure. And said, look, it's not about race. Sometimes we don't admit the Olympia gold medalists because we're worried that they're going to, a few years ago, someone couldn't figure out a proof and they trashed the common rooms or something like that. That is the issue, which is if you're going to have a different standard at the time of admission or what have you, then again, it is on you to figure out developmental opportunities for them to show that they were worth taking a bet on. And I think that's what went wrong in the Arday case and likely many others. Speaker 1 (11:04) That's very interesting. So in the case of... those 50 admitted students, we're going to admit 50 students on the intuition that their lower test scores represent more potential than meets the eye because of their background. In that hypothetical, 90 % of them were great successes and ended up by some later meritocratic benchmark proving that that was correct in the case of 90%. But 5 % had behavioral issues. And so this was viewed by this person as a failure. Does that mean that Ivy League admissions people are prioritizing? having no bad cases as opposed to having many good cases? And if so, how does that actually square with affirmative action as it's been practiced? Because it has been practiced at all these schools. Speaker 2 (11:58) Yes. Great, great question. Just one tiny thing, because I'm a nerd. It's 10%, so it would Speaker 1 (12:04) be Speaker 2 (12:04) 90 and 10%. Oh, sorry. Yeah, yeah. But I think it is minimizing. Speaker 2 (12:12) You know, it's downside risk protection. Speaker 1 (12:15) I Speaker 2 (12:15) think, and look, I don't know. This is one person I chatted with a few years ago, but since it's more widely applicable. I think, you know, the thing that the 1300 from the private school has, even if they're in the middle of the distribution, they understand the social parts of being in an Ivy League school in a ways that I certainly. did not when I showed up. I showed up wearing jerseys and people were like, what's wrong with you? And so I think that is part of the calculus. It's not just academics. It is can they fit in socially here? Are they going to? And so this part of it is a social club, not just an academic institution. And I believe if you're trying to say, look, how can we get a distinguished class but minimize the chance for, you know, Speaker 2 (13:08) true disruption, then I can imagine that this would be, if those were your preferences, they're not mine, but if they were your preferences, I can imagine that this would be a rational choice. Speaker 1 (13:16) That what would be a rational choice? Speaker 2 (13:18) To take someone who is less risky and, you know, kind of, I would call it low mean, low variance. My view is if you're going to take someone low mean, you should have high variance. Right? So if you're going to, that's our whole point about 1200 from the Atlanta Projects, which is if you're going to except someone who has a lower average test score than others you might admit, then they should have a large right tail of their distribution of possibilities, meaning with the right coaching, with the right mentoring, with the right development, this person could end up being the top of our class, and we should do some experiments like that. So I do believe that Again, I don't have these preferences, but I think that a lot of universities do, which is they're worried about taking a risk because they're worried about the downside. For them, five fights on campus because someone didn't get along socially is a big, big deal. Speaker 1 (14:14) It's a big story. It's Speaker 2 (14:15) a big story, yeah. Speaker 1 (14:16) Even if it's a very small number of students. Exactly. One suicide is a big story, for instance. So all of that would suggest that in your ideal world, college admissions would be... more willing to take risks with people from poor or chaotic backgrounds whereas what they do in fact