Elite academic
economics is currently undergoing a sort of reckoning with its culture of
racism and, in a very basic sense, white supremacy: that the field and its most
decorated members are white people, that anyone who isn’t white either proved
their unusual superiority compared to others of their background by gaining
entry into such a world, or were imposed on “us” by outsiders thanks to
affirmative action programs, and that if they do make it in, they better not do
anything to upset the apple cart, such as out a tenured member of a top
department for repeatedly expressing himself in ways that show he
misunderstands race hierarchy (at the most generous possible interpretation)
and holds in contempt anyone who might try to educate him.
Race at the
University of Chicago Economics Department
I knew Harald Uhlig
slightly in graduate school. I had his portion of first-year econometrics on
Bayesian methods (barely), which was a terrible course as are most Econ PhD
metrics courses in which the instructor barely lifts a finger to take the
students’ understanding beyond wherever it began. I never personally witnessed
any of the behavior for which he came into question, but as I recalled these
past weeks with colleagues, in our year Uhlig’s portion of the course was in
the second half of the winter quarter, i.e. after the Martin Luther King
holiday. After the first year, I barely came into contact with him, though he
was the department chair in those years.
I’ve been shouting
about the economics profession’s poor record on race for years now, both as a
subject of scholarship and as it relates to the field’s own history and
perpetuation of the worst kind of academic elitism that codes “science” and
“scholarship” as white and eagerly casts those things when done by non-white
people as biased and motivated. It’s a quality the field has worn as a badge of
honor: ‘you can tell we’re the superior discipline due to the fact we’re all
white. We will make our departments and institutions all white and exclude
anyone who isn’t white from having influence over them exactly so that you know
we’re rigorous and will defer to us and our interests.”
Perhaps the most
disgusting aspect of this, to me, in retrospect is as follows: in my day, the
Chicago department had no Black faculty and only a tiny handful of Black PhD
students. The undergraduate classes I TA’ed and, later, lectured had almost no
Black students either (I believe there were a total of two over the four
sections I TA’ed or lectured, each with between 20 and 30 students), though the
undergraduate student body of the university had a significant share of Black
students. It was very clear that this was not a space Black people viewed as
available to them, and that the department preferred it that way. *And yet* the
one Black economist I ever heard anyone in that department praise, and openly
express the view that “I wish he were here/we tried very hard to recruit him
and would have paid him virtually anything but couldn’t pull it off” was Roland
Fryer, lately disgraced out of his position at Harvard due to a climate of
sexual harassment he fostered in the institute he ran there.
Fryer is known for
scholarship that questions the existence of racial discrimination as an
explanation for racial inequality. He coauthored an article with Steve Levitt
casting doubt (supposedly) on the significance of the Bertrand and Mullainathan
resume audit study of Black names. He espoused the now-discredited idea that racial
health disparities in the contemporary US have a genetic origin—they are the result
of an advantage for salt retention in the trans-Atlantic slave trade (which
would have made the disproportionate prevalence of hypertension among the
contemporary Black population the result of genetic selection, rather than
present-day disparities in access to healthcare or healthy living
environments). He’s a noted advocate of the idea that disparities in
educational performance are the result of the absence of male role models from
inner city Black communities, and also of a social stigma against “acting white,”
i.e., succeeding at school. And, most recently, he authored a notoriously
flawed study that claims that police use of force is no worse for Black
arrestees than white ones. All of this paints a picture of racial inequality
that is exactly the picture the received wisdom of the Chicago economics
department would want painted, which is to say, Fryer is the one Black scholar
they find acceptable, because he tells them what they want to hear. The profile
of him the New York Times published in 2005, authored by Stephen J. Dubner, is
tellingly entitled “Toward a Unified Theory of Black America.” Here are some quotes from that
profile:
To Fryer, the
language of economics, a field proud of its coldblooded rationalism, is ideally
suited for otherwise volatile conversations. "I want to have an honest
discussion about race in a time and a place where I don't think we can,"
he says. "Blacks and whites are both to blame. As soon as you say
something like, 'Well, could the black-white test-score gap be genetics?'
everybody gets tensed up. But why shouldn't that be on the table?"
[…]
Fryer well
appreciates that he can raise questions that most white scholars wouldn't dare.
His collaborators, most of whom are white, appreciate this, too.
"Absolutely, there's an insulation effect," says the Harvard
economist Edward L. Glaeser. "There's no question that working with Roland
is somewhat liberating."
Here you have a Black
scholar saying that economics is uniquely able to sort through the controversy
and ascertain What Matters, which is to say, the retrograde behavior and genes
of Black people in bringing about their own economic and social subordination.
No wonder this is the one Black guy that department wanted to hire.
Meanwhile, where
there weren’t many (or any) Black people in the department at Chicago, there
was plenty of scholarship about race. Gary Becker, James Heckman, Steve Levitt,
Derek Neal, and Robert Fogel (not to mention Stigler, Friedman, and others who
were gone by the time I got there) have all published highly-regarded, and in
some cases notorious theories and studies of racial inequality and its history.
What this says is
that the department has as its foremost concern an ideological project and that
it views Black scholars and Black students as a threat to that project, if only
because their presence threatens claims to intellectual superiority, unless
they prove themselves to be advantageous to it—useful and willing foot soldiers
in their war. This is why
part of my critique of Democracy in Chains was that MacLean’s harsh
presentation of Buchanan and his scholarship and intellectual progeny was too
narrow, that by putting the focus on one scholar and one relatively small
school of thought he engendered took the onus off a much more influential
one—the Chicago School—which could well be indicted in nearly the same terms.
Economics has,
genuinely, moved beyond the attitude that was popular in the field in the 2000s
and exemplified by Fryer, Steve Levitt, Dubner himself, and others: knowing
skepticism and irritating second-guessing of other disciplines, on the basis of
ostensibly superior “intuitions” and cutesy little well-actually type objections
to glaring findings of gross inequalities, racial or otherwise. It would be
unfair to say now, as was often said ten years ago, that the field is allergic
to Big Questions.
In fact, the
backlash to the intellectual climate ca. 2005, when that profile of Fryer was
written, is to some degree behind the outrage at Uhlig: the senior members of
his department now are the ones whose work was popular then, and that work hasn’t
aged well. There was always a big question as to who would be the intellectual
heirs to the grand Chicago School tradition. If it’s the people that very department
chose to tenure in the 1990s and 2000s, then the tradition has fallen a long
way. The exciting developments happening in economics now are well afield of
what that department and its most prominent living, senior members have to offer—as
evidenced by many of them having strayed to more lucrative pastures in
corporate consulting.
Academic Freedom
As of June 22, Uhlig
has been restored to his editorship of the Journal of Political Economy after an
‘investigation’ of his classroom conduct lasting approximately a week, resulting
in exoneration.
A number of
economists with significant popular followings expressed dismay at this—a seeming
opportunity to take a stand on a direct matter of public import, to show that economics
is morally validated by its progress and evolution, utterly crushed. That this
did not accord with their conception of the field as trying hard to become
better,and with their own self-image as advocating for that improvement ‘from
within,’ was quite evident in their public reactions.
But this result is
hardly surprising, even if it was, in the moment, jarring. The University of
Chicago’s policy on racial discrimination in the classroom is narrow, and Uhlig
is also protected by it under the principle of academic freedom:
Harassment based on the actual or perceived factors
listed above (i.e., race, in this case) is verbal or physical conduct or
conduct using technology that is so severe or pervasive that it has the purpose
or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work performance or
educational program participation, or that creates an intimidating, hostile, or
offensive work or educational environment.
A person’s subjective belief that behavior is
intimidating, hostile, or offensive does not make that behavior harassment. The
behavior must be objectively unreasonable. Expression occurring in an academic,
educational or research context is considered a special case and is broadly
protected by academic freedom. Such expression will not constitute harassment
unless (in addition to satisfying the above definition) it is targeted at a
specific person or persons, is abusive, and serves no bona fide academic
purpose.
It would take only a
brief investigation to ascertain that there’s no real allegation from anyone
that Uhlig violated this policy. His classroom conduct is alleged to have
called out a specific student or students, but if it did, it would be hard to
make the case that they interfered with the student’s participation in an educational
program. Notably, if the student “powered through” despite Uhlig’s conduct,
that would work against any claim he later has that the conduct was abusive. Therefore,
Uhlig is exonerated.
This outcome is a
slap in the face to the brave students and former students who blew the whistle
on Uhlig’s inappropriate conduct. BUT: the process was followed. That whatever
process was in place might be grossly inadequate to the task at hand (cleansing
the field of a legacy of white supremacy) places those who trust to an ‘inside
strategy’ in a bind. These institutions and these policies are not going to
consent to change themselves.
Moreover, there’s a
pernicious aspect to the Uhlig saga best exemplified by the
blog post John Cochrane wrote on the controversy, in which he expressly
called on alumni and financial supporters of the university to make their voices
heard on Uhlig’s behalf. Who knows whether they did or not—they probably didn’t
have to. But why would someone like Cochrane, the former AQR Capital Management
Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago’s Business School and now a
fellow at the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank affiliated with Stanford
University and situated on its campus, feel that they would? Most often when
donors make their views heard on the suitability of employing a faculty member,
it’s to get that person fired or at the very least, silenced—not to protect him
or her.
Indeed, there’s a
history of exactly that happening in the economics profession, but all of
that is many decades in the past. Several high-profile instances of donor
involvement in faculty dismissals for ideological reasons took place between
the 1880s and 1900 or so, including at the University of Chicago. Those
episodes were part
of the process that created the modern notion of academic freedom, which in
this instance served to protect Uhlig even as it has not protected faculty in
other disciplines from exactly the kind of donor ideologically-motivated retaliation
that once afflicted economics.
In my past writings
on the history of the economics profession, I’ve pointed out the ongoing plutocratization
of higher education as a reason to expect an erosion of academic freedom norms
in future, and warned economists that they themselves might be the victims of
it as they were in the past. But Cochrane points out what’s far more likely:
donors coming to the aid of economists viewed to be their proteges and
ideologically sympathetic, contributing to the very disciplinary inequality
that motivates many current critiques of economists’ history of academic imperialism
(including that practiced by Fryer). After all, subordinating our research and
public pronouncements to the whims of the donor class has been a highly lucrative
strategy on the part of the economics profession, paying dividends in all sorts
of ways, while the rest of academic totters on in its decreasingly funded,
precarious state.
So where does this
leave us? Again, the posture of Uhlig’s critics appears to be that economics can
and should jettison its history of white supremacy without surrendering any of
the disciplinary prestige that adorns contemporary practitioners at the most
elite departments. This outcome to the Uhlig brouhaha shows, starkly, that that
is impossible—it’s one or the other. And I fear that if given the choice, many
incumbent economists, especially the fanciest, will decide they can live with
the Uhligs of the world as their colleagues after all—or else their own status
may come into question.
