Jason Arday and What’s Wrong With DEI

Instead of appointing Ms Gay as Harvard's Presidents, those goofballs should have given the spot to Roland Fryer. Twice the intellect and a great roll model.

Jason Arday and What’s Wrong With DEI

Institutions should take chances on people but need to be honest with them as they develop.

By Roland Fryer, WSJ

Aug. 25, 2026 4:42 pm ET

I am saddened by the story of Jason Arday. There was the life, as he told it: autistic, unable to speak until 11 or to read and write until 18, and at 37 the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge. I was 30 when I became the youngest black professor to get tenure at Harvard.

There was the unraveling: a July report that passages of his thesis matched another scholar’s, an investigation, his resignation and, nine days later, his death. And there was the press’s unrelenting scrutiny, which I too know something about. I felt something similar watching the frenzy around Claudine Gay two years ago, despite my history with her, and around Jayson Blair two decades before that. I don’t know the whole truth of these cases, and for what economics has to say about how to avoid them, it doesn’t matter.

Each case raises the same question: Have elite institutions become so eager for diversity that they take chances on people whose credentials wouldn’t otherwise get them in the door?

I hope so.

Many people took chances on me. My grades weren’t impressive, my home life was a mess, and a vocational-education teacher had to talk me into finishing high school. At each step someone looked past the record and bet on what I might become. My quarrel with DEI has never been that it takes chances. It’s with what happens after the initial opportunity.

At the University of Chicago, where I finished graduate school, nobody confused potential with accomplishment. Gary Becker, Steven Levitt and Sherwin Rosen pushed me constantly. So did James Heckman, who, I’m fairly sure, never liked me. The message wasn’t that I was bad. It was that I wasn’t good yet. Rosen once told me that not only did he not practice affirmative action, he was trying not to hold my race against me. It sounded harsh, but it meant his opinion was worth having. For years, before I submitted a paper I would present it in a Chicago workshop; if it wasn’t completely destroyed, I figured it might be ready.

The Chicago approach did two things at once: It built my skills and tested whether I had any. While I was there, Mr. Heckman was developing a theory of skill-building, published in 2007 with Flavio Cunha as “The Technology of Skill Formation.” Skills at each stage of life, in their model, are produced from the skills one already has and the investment made at that stage. Skills persist and feed on one another, and skill already in place raises the return on new investment, so by the same logic early investment fades unless it is followed up. Their canonical example was early childhood education, but the logic applies just as well to faculty development.

Finding out whether one has skills is less obvious. Investing in someone builds capacity and reveals how much capacity there is to build. Philipp Harms and I modeled this as a two-armed bandit. Picture two slot machines: One pays a known amount; what the other pays you can learn only by playing it. In our version, playing the unknown machine—investing in the person—both raises its payout and reveals what it is worth. That second job, finding out, is the one DEI forgets.

Taking a chance on someone is a bet that the initial signals—test scores, transcripts, a résumé—understated the candidate. Rational. But an institution that overrides a noisy signal has taken on an obligation to produce better ones. A school, business or organization that makes the bet and won’t read the results has paid for the option and thrown it away. The perverse achievement of much of DEI is that it begins by declaring the initial signals unreliable and ends by making every subsequent signal unreliable too.

Both obligations—to keep investing in the person, and to provide honest signals about how it’s going—can be met. Development is the easier one. In a randomized trial of the City University of New York’s ASAP program—which entails intensive advising and tutoring—three-year graduation rates for low-income students were 40%, vs. 22% in the control group. The harder obligation is telling people the truth about their work.

The psychologist Kent Harber has spent a quarter-century showing that white evaluators give gentler comments on the same essay when they believe the writer is black or Hispanic rather than white. They presumably think they are being kind; they are withholding the one thing the writer needs. When David Yeager and Geoffrey Cohen had teachers’ marked-up essays returned to seventh-graders with one sentence attached—“I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations, and I know that you can reach them”—the share of black students who chose to revise rose to 71% from 17%.

Often the experiment fails, and it must, or there would be nothing to learn. A healthy society needs to be able to say: We saw potential, we took a chance, we invested seriously, the evidence came in, and we were wrong. But imagine a university that took 100 chances on minority faculty and denied tenure to 95. That would be a scandal too, so the pressure runs toward parity in outcomes and toward promoting rather than developing. Stephen Morris, an economic theorist, explained why in a 2001 paper titled “Political Correctness”: An adviser who fears being thought a bigot shades what he says until it carries no information at all.

Opportunity alone didn’t produce these scandals. Refusing to hold anyone to a real standard afterward did. By 2002 Mr. Blair had so many corrections at the New York Times that his editor, Jonathan Landman, wrote colleagues: “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.” The paper moved him to the national desk anyway. Howell Raines, the Times’s executive editor, told his newsroom he believed in hiring minorities aggressively, then conceded: “You have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many.”

Ms. Gay went from professor to dean to president of Harvard on 11 published articles. The question isn’t what she did with the job but what the people promoting her were reading.

Cambridge answered detailed complaints about Mr. Arday’s work in 2023 with his department’s “full support,” according to Retraction Watch. The scandal was only the last chapter; the failure was in every earlier one, when someone could have been harder on the work and wasn’t.

As I was leaving Chicago in 2003, a professor told me, “Be careful of the liberals.” I thought it was about politics. It wasn’t. He wasn’t worried that I would be ignored at Harvard, the usual concern of junior faculty. He was worried that I wouldn’t get feedback—that the people around me would want so badly for me to succeed, and for themselves not to be mistaken for bigots, that they would flinch from the uncomfortable things required to make me better. Mr. Raines was that person for Mr. Blair.

Every time I see a minority pilloried as “unqualified,” I wince. The trope is old—the black hire who couldn’t do the job—and durable, because the cases that fit it become news, and the ones that don’t become careers. Sadder than the stories themselves would be the lesson many will draw from them: Take fewer chances. It is exactly backward. If we believe in the people we bet on, the obligation starts at the door, and the remedy is to run these bets the way anyone runs a series of experiments: as a portfolio. Take 10 chances and expect most to fail; those who make it are people the market would never have found. Venture capitalists lose money on most of what they fund, and nobody calls a failed startup a scandal.

The people who took chances on me changed my life. The people who risked being called bigots to tell me I wasn’t good enough yet changed it even more.

Mr. Fryer, a Journal contributor, is a professor of economics at Harvard, a founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.