Glenn Loury’s Story Shows How Not to Help
The black conservative’s memoir is a cautionary tale of the unintended consequences of affirmative action.
By Jason L. Riley, WSJ
June 4, 2024 5:58 pm ET
The Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions a year ago this month, and for further evidence that the court made the right call, please treat yourself to Glenn Loury’s candid new autobiography, “Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative.”
Mr. Loury, a Brown University economics professor, is best known today as a right-leaning social critic and host of the popular podcast “The Glenn Show.” But he first distinguished himself as a theoretical economist who used sophisticated mathematical techniques—matrix algebra, multivariate calculus—to study how people interact with one another in society. His findings have been published in the discipline’s most prestigious academic journals.
Young Glenn’s math talent was discovered by a geometry teacher in high school on Chicago’s working-class South Side, where he was raised. He later took courses at a junior college while working full time to support his young family, then attended Northwestern University, where he was a dean’s list regular. “By the time I reach my final year at Northwestern, I’m enrolled in graduate-level lecture courses in both economics and mathematics,” he writes. “I’m one of only two undergraduates in either of these classes—everyone else is a PhD student. And still, I find that I’m able to keep up with the best of them.”
This is the early 1970s, and Mr. Loury isn’t the only black student at Northwestern, but he does notice differences between other blacks and himself. One is that “most of them are the children of doctors, lawyers, and professors, members of the black bourgeoisie whose lives growing up were not as different from those of their white peers as they would have me believe.” He also notices some posturing. “Black radicalism rolls off their tongues, but as far as I’m concerned, it dies in the air,” he writes. “How radical can you be, I’d ask myself, if you show up to campus in a Benz, as I saw more than one of them do?”
When the graduate-school acceptance letters start to arrive, his mentors at Northwestern steer him away from Milton Friedman’s University of Chicago because they “don’t want to see me become a free-market ideologue bent on dismantling government regulation.” He also turns down offers to attend Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. He settles on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where two of his three dissertation advisers, Robert Solow and Peter Diamond, will someday receive Nobel Prizes in economics.
Shortly before Mr. Loury arrived, the MIT economics department, which accepted only a couple of dozen graduate students each year, created three additional slots for black applicants. Mr. Loury received one of them, “though I suspect that my strong performance at Northwestern would have stood me in good stead in the admissions tournament, regardless.”
He suspects, but he’ll never know. Welcome to the age of affirmative action. It wouldn’t be the last time that Mr. Loury and others would doubt whether his accomplishments were due to merit or to his skin color. Later in his career, he would turn down teaching offers if he suspected that a school was lowering its normal standards to diversify the faculty. He didn’t want to be a charity case or a token, and what self-respecting person would?
At MIT, Mr. Loury once again noticed that most of the other black students came from middle-class backgrounds and that he’s one of the top students in his entire class. His experience with racial preferences isn’t unique. These policies have tended to benefit black people who were already better off. They cause self-doubt and taint black accomplishment. They reinforce negative stereotypes about black capabilities by leading others to assume that every black person at a selective school or in a high-ranking position is there due to affirmative action.
Racial preferences have tragically mismatched students with schools, funneling them into institutions where they were in over their heads, pooling at the bottom of the class academically, or dropping out. Privately, many of Mr. Loury’s fellow black graduate students began to complain of racism at the school, but he was skeptical. “I doubted very much that racial insensitivity could have accounted for the uncomfortable fact that many of my black peers were not performing that well,” he writes. “They were holding on by their fingernails.”
Reviews of “Late Admissions” have mainly focused on its frank discussions of Mr. Loury’s personal shortcomings—his past drug addiction, serial adultery and run-ins with the police. That’s all fair game. If the author didn’t want the salacious details discussed, they wouldn’t take up so many pages. But the book also has much to say about more than a half-century of public policies aimed at helping the black underclass advance. His story is in many ways a story of how not to help.
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