Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Star Harvard Economics Professor Under Investigation


Economics Professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. is being investigated separately by Harvard and the state of Massachusetts and has been barred by University officials from setting foot in the research lab he heads, reports The Crimson.

The Harvard investigation—led by the University’s Office for Dispute Resolution, which investigates allegations of sexual and gender-based harassment—is based on at least one Title IX complaint filed with the office. Fryer is the subject of at least two Title IX complaints, reports the University newspaper.

One of the complaints specifically alleges
Fryer committed “egregious” acts of verbal sexual harassment, according to Monica R. Shah and Naomi R. Shatz, lawyers at Boston-based firm Zalkind, Duncan, and Bernstein who are representing the woman who filed that complaint.

In an interview with The Crimson last week attended by Fryer’s lawyer and a court stenographer, four current and former EdLabs employees—Cyr, Rucha P. Vankudre ’07, Meghan Howard Noveck, and Tanaya Devi—said the professor and lab staff at times participated in “banter” that included discussion of employees’ dating lives. Vankudre said that, had the conversation made anyone feel “uncomfortable,” EdLabs staffers and Fryer would have “stopped immediately.”

In a separate interview last week also attended by his lawyer and the stenographer, Fryer admitted participating in these conversations but said he never spoke about the physical act of sex. Fryer said he has “zero recollection” of commenting on individuals’ sex lives publicly in EdLabs.

Cyr, Vankudre, Howard Noveck, and Devi said they do not remember Fryer ever making remarks about individuals’ sex lives in the workplace.

“To the best of my knowledge, none of the banter has ever been sexist or misogynistic,” Vankudre said.

It should be noted that the social justice warrior crowd is not a fan of Fryer.

Justin Feldman, a social epidemiologist at NYU who "examines the ways in which structural racism and economic inequality influence population health," wrote in July 2016:
Roland Fryer, an economics professor at Harvard University, recently published a working paper at NBER on the topic of racial bias in police use of force and police shootings. The paper gained substantial media attention – a write-up of it became the top viewed article on the New York Times website. The most notable part of the study was its finding that there was no evidence of racial bias in police shootings, which Fryer called “the most surprising result of [his] career”. In his analysis of shootings in Houston, Texas, black and Hispanic people were no more likely (and perhaps even less likely) to be shot relative to whites.
Fryer’s analysis is highly flawed, however. It suffers from major theoretical and methodological errors, and he has communicated the results to news media in a way that is misleading. While there have long been problems with the quality of police shootings data, there is still plenty of evidence to support a pattern of systematic, racially discriminatory use of force against black people in the United States
-RW  



1 comment:

  1. All it takes to ruin the life of a heterosexual man is an allegation; even an anonymous one. Due Process is misogynist, don't you know.

    ReplyDelete