Friday, December 28, 2018

Hundreds of Students Call for Changes to University Econ Depts: 'Listen to Us. We are the Experts.'

More than 285 graduate students and research assistants from across the country signed a letter Thursday calling for changes within the field of economics in response to allegations of sexual harassment against Harvard Economics Professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr, reports The Harvard Crimson.

The letter was posted online at Medium by the organization "Advocates for Diversity in Economics."

The letter states in part:

Listen to us.
We are the experts on how your colleagues treat their advisees and research assistants...departments should create anonymous avenues for us to report incidents that have made us feel uncomfortable and unwelcome...Finally, involve graduate students in your department’s institutions. Incorporate our anonymized feedback in tenure and other promotional reviews, and reward faculty for work they have done to improve department climate. 
Signatories included students from Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, the University of Chicago and  Princeton.

As I previously pointed out, 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.
Anonymous reporting sounds like a very dangerous tool to put out there especially in the era of Social Justice Warriors.

 -RW 

1 comment:

  1. Could this issue just be solved by simply adding more video surveylance?

    ReplyDelete