Interesting interview with Glenn Loury, economist best known for being a black conservative and for his spectacular mid-career crack-up involving drugs and affairs, from which he seems to have recovered. I appreciated this:
There's too much focus on race and sex and sexuality as identities in the context of the university environment, where our main goal is to acquaint our students with the cultural inheritance of civilization. Their narrow focus on being this particular thing and chopping up the curriculum to make sure that it gets representative treatment feels stifling to me, especially if you let that spill over into what can be said.
The therapeutic sentiment. The kids have these sensibilities. We have to be mindful of them. We don't want to offend. We don't want anyone to be uncomfortable. No, the whole point is to make you uncomfortable. You came thinking something that was really a very superficial and undeveloped framework for thinking; I'm going to expose you to some ideas that run against that grain, and you're going to have to learn how to grapple with them. And in your maturity, you may well return to some of these, but you will do so with a much firmer sense of exactly what it is that you're affirming. I want to educate you. I don't want to placate you. I'm not here to make you feel better.
Oh boy! An economist waxing philosophical about education!
ReplyDeleteLecturing young people about maturity, when the single most notable achievement in his entire life was publicly melting down in one of the most juvenile ways possible!
Who cares ever so deeply about educating young people, but is completely against the idea of helping young people feel better, which is a common prerequisite to them actually being fit to learn anything!
Gee, I wonder what his OWN college years early adulthood were like? Let's see...
A poor young black man from the South Side of Chicago, with two children of his own born out of wedlock and into broken families before he even enrolls in college. He opts to be an absent father who merely pays child support while pursuing his own interests. Gets a B.A. in mathematics from Northwestern University in 1972; then gets a Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1976.
Builds his subsequent career on connections he forged via wealthy white elites he befriended at school, going from an assistant professor of economics at Northwestern; to being a full professor at University of Michigan; to becoming the first black tenured professor of economics at Harvard, all within six years of finishing school. At Harvard, makes friends with major conservative figures with ties to Reagan, through whom he receives consideration to be Undersecretary of Education.
He doesn't accept the position when offered, because a mere decade out from graduation, his life is detonating spectacularly. Presumably 'the cultural inheritance of civilization' which he was acquainted with in university didn't require him to 'grapple with' such challenging concepts as "don't cheat on your partner", "don't engage in violent domestic abuse", and "don't snort a mountain of cocaine, even if it IS the 1980s and all your rich friends work for Reagan".
Of course, with his powerful connections (and with a public "finding Jesus" demonstration) his gross misconduct and outright criminal offenses are easily forgiven, and he continues at Harvard with no issue. A few years later, he opted to take a position at Boston University - ironically serving as the head of the Institute on Race and Social Division.
He would go on to oppose the presidency of fellow black Harvard alumnus Barrack Obama. One would think Loury - who describes himself as a "black progressive"- would be supportive of a civil rights attorney who formerly taught constitutional law in his hometown of Chicago.
(Ironically, it was Obama who had to grapple with the staggering global financial crisis of 2008 - a crisis wholly created by economists precisely like Loury, who preached the fiscal word of Reagan.)