My friend and co-author Roland Fryer, an assistant professor at Harvard, has just been promoted. Usually, for an academic, that would mean getting tenure. For Roland, it is a little different. He’s been named a CEO — not Chief Executive Officer, but rather Chief Equality Officer for the New York Public Schools system. You can read about it in this New York Times column.
You have to admire Roland. Most academics at his stage in their career stay up at night worrying about what journals will publish their papers and what they will land if they get denied tenure. Roland, meanwhile, is trying to figure out what he can do to change the world for the better.
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I was hoping you’d send him off to long island to the Jewish neighborhoods there. With a questionaire in hand.
How does it feel to be rich, white, and educated.
1.very satisfying
— egretman2.satisfying
3.less than satisfying
4.stay right there until I realise the dogs on your black ass.
…oops that “release” for realise”.
The point is…why do brilliant black researchers have to only study black issues? I assume the Chief Equality Officer has something to do with race in schools, isn’t it?
When blacks can enter any field and go anywhere, wouldn’t that be better than pigeon holing them?
He should come down and study white southern attitudes and actions or yes…white Jewish attitudes and actions.
— egretmanIn response to egretman, I think it helps to be passionate (or at least really interested) in your field of study. When you are a member of a discrimated minority, I think issues in social inequality would be pretty compelling stuff.
I saw Roland Fryer at a conference on inequality in health care given at the University of Chicago about a year ago. He was presenting a method he had developed for quantifying the degree of segregation in urban centers. The way he did it was really elegant, and he peppered his presentation with jokes about race and expectations around race. He was incredibly charming (in a geeky sort of way) and and clearly passionate about his chosen field. I could have listened to him all day.
— jkasburyOk, but I cannot believe that in a position called Chief Equality Officer in the New York Public Schools that Mr. Fryer is not going to get chewed up by political correctness the first time he dares to suggest that just maybe poor parents make for poor students.
As opposed to it all being a race problem which most people in the NYC schools believe.
— egretman…in fact, I cannot see him lasting even 5 years in this position. He will be so disgusted by the box that people, especially superiors, will put him in and limit him to.
Just look at Texas. Texas uses No Child Left Behind to close school after school in inner city minority neighborhoods based on their failing “our” kids. And what do they do with these children? Send them off to other schools, of course, as if somehow a change of brick and mortar were all the kids need.
Now if a place like Texas, which prides itself on rejecting politically correct thinking, can’t bring itself to blame the parents instead of sheetrock and concrete boxes, then what hope is there for NYC?
Get out Mr. Fryer before the system eats you alive.
— egretman**Get out Mr. Fryer before the system eats you alive.**
Wow!
Maybe Mr. Fryer should be in the classroom teaching 3 days a week, or 5 if he could do it. They say school reform comes one kid at a time, one class at a time, one school at a time.
It seems very difficult to make top heavy changes, because teaching, like business, is all about relationships.
In sum, we need good teachers! Please send the ‘best and brightest’ right to the kids.
— Princess LeiaActually, according to the Economics Department’s website (http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/faculty/D/F), he has been promoted to full professor. I assume that means he has been granted tenure already. If true, that’s truly exceptional.
— maxwellIn response to egretman, perhaps Mr Fryer SHOULD devote himself to studying black issues. It is sad to say that we have arrived at a day when only black researchers have a free hand to study race-related issues.
— HavelFor a white researcher to suggest that black culture is responsible for black underachievement by stigmatizing academic achievement, as Fryer and McWhorter have both done, would be career suicide.
Is he single…he is absolutely fascinating, not to mention yummy!
— KAPJ