Achieving Clarity

From a talk at Pepperdine University

I was recently invited by the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University to deliver their annual Augustus and Patricia Tagliaferri Dean's Distinguished Lecture. In it, I addressed the power of narratives to shape racial politics in the US. At the end of the lecture, I took some questions from Pete Peterson, the Dean of Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy, which gave me a chance to consider how my own life and position have shaped the questions my talk addresses.

Of course, I believe my positions on matters of politics and social policy are driven by reasoned analysis. But the development of those positions has also been shaped by the particular course my life and my career have taken. I would bet the same is true for even the most objective-seeming, brass tacks social scientist. It’s inevitable. I delve into this in my memoir—now titled The Enemy Within—which comes out next year. You can consider this a little preview of what’s to come.

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PETE PETERSON: Some other questions are coming in regarding the question of faculty. You've written, I remember last spring or summer, there were some missives that came out from the president at your university that you responded to. The question asked specifically that, with faculty having at least some protections related to tenure, how come there aren't more Glenn Lourys out there?

GLENN LOURY: That's an invitation to self-aggrandizement I'm going to decline. Let me just tell people who might not know what I actually did to earn that accolade. Which was, George Floyd got killed. And we all know how the country was agitated in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing. A moment of racial reckoning, it was said.

And the president of my university issued a letter to the entire university community—that's all the students, that's all the faculty, that's all of the alumni, et cetera—in effect, declaring solidarity with the Black Lives Matter line on what was going on in the country. It was a racial incident. It was one in a string of such killings. It's open season on black people. It's the present day instantiation of an age-old American dilemma going back to lynching and so forth and so on. The letter was signed by every top administrator, from the person who manages the university's portfolio to the general counsel to the dean of the school of public health and so on and so forth, in lockstep behind a political letter issued on behalf of the university.

And my objection—I'm dodging the other question because it's embarrassing—my objection was twofold. One was, universities don't have political positions. We're a university. What we are here to do is critically assess and argue, evaluate evidence and reason. We are not here to be banner wavers. You're waving a banner. And to have the top of the administration do it in lock step had a chilling effect. It was like a party line document, “We believe the following …”

Well, no, we didn't all believe the following. There was much to be discussed there. What example were we setting for our students, my students. How do I stand up in a classroom and address my students about these matters when the word has come down from on high that this is how we're supposed to think about it? So I had a problem with the bandwagon jumping, which I thought debased the currency. And we were, after all, at the beginning of what proved to be a long summer of disruption and contention, where I thought the university could play a critical role in evaluating what was at stake through reason, not through emotion and so on. So I was very disappointed in that.

Why are they not more? Okay. I'm black. I've got a certain cover. They can write me off as a curmudgeon. They can just say, well, that's Glenn. He's a black conservative, we got six or eight of them in the country. You know, they're going to say what they're going to say. I'm not a threat to anybody, at least not yet. I'm of a certain age. I'm in my seventies, as you know. My dissertation is 1976. I'm distinguished—you read off all the accolades.

So there's a certain amount of deference. I mean, not everybody has the benefit of that kind of cover and that kind of protection to insulate themselves from both the social and the professional consequences of standing apart. I can piss off my dean, but that's not really going to have any impact on me. I'm kind of a free agent at this stage in the matter of things. I think that's part of it.

I think, too … I mean, many of my colleagues who are also distinguished and senior, who are of color or not, have drunk the Kool-Aid and believe it. They're not objecting because they actually think that the popular line, the narrative of the progressive vision about this situation, is correct. They have drunk the Kool-Aid. So I think it's a combination, both of conviction and of interest that has made it difficult for people to speak up. But my inbox is not overflowing with letters from colleagues saying, "We're with you. Go ahead. We can't stand up." I'm not exactly awash in those communications.

I have a personal question about what this last year has been like for you. And by that, I mean the last 12 months. So much has changed. And your podcast and the growth of interest in the work that you're doing, the conversations that you're leading. You've mentioned before some of the emails that you do get from people that you don't know. I think you're one of the more courageous public figures we have in the country right now, albeit with the protections that you've just outlined. But that's not to say that you're not taking slings and arrows for that. And I just wondered, to whatever degree you feel like you're open to talking about, just what it's like to be you in this time. I mean, you're writing a memoir.

I am. I am.

I know from being a Patreon subscriber to your Glenn Show that you sometimes reference the fact that you've, in writing that, you've had occasion to go back over your life. But here we are today and at a point where we seem to be grinding over some of these same questions as you said we've been grinding over for decades. What is it like?

Pete, this could be Oprah, right?

I really don't mean it to be, but I am just …

No, no, let me say this. So I am writing the memoir, and I've been thinking really hard about a lot of stuff. I'm not new to this public intellectual game, as I mentioned. I mean, my sort of coming out was in the mid-1980s, when I was writing for the New Republic and Commentary and the Public Interest. I was a notorious black conservative at that time.

And, as I said, in the ‘90s, I reevaluated my politics and I shifted. It's a long story, and I'm not going to try to tell it here about why all of that happened. But I lost friends. The late Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom, these are distinguished scholars who really were my close friends at Harvard during my conservative days. And I broke with them about their book America in Black and White, which I very critically reviewed in the Atlantic Monthly. The liberal editors at the Atlantic were delighted to have me. It was like I was trying to re-earn entry back into the negro cognoscenti, into the Harvard establishment. I wanted to go home.

I attacked Charles Murray's book with Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve, which had its problems in my view, but which I think has stood the test of time as a very important work of social science that has to be reckoned with. Charles Murray is not a white supremacist, the Southern Poverty Law Center to the contrary notwithstanding. I broke with James Q. Wilson of Pepperdine fame. I wrote a caustic intellectual obituary of James Q. Wilson, which I wish I could take back. All of this vacillating. The book was going to be called Changing My Mind for a long time. But I've settled on a new title now, The Enemy Within.

All this vacillating, all this changing my mind, the lack of constancy, the lack of conviction. I mean, the lack of the courage of one's own convictions. The appeal to the crowd, to some degree ashamed of the extent to which I let the quest for that kind of co-racialist affirmation ... I wanted to be black, I wanted people to see me as black, I wanted to be accepted as black.

I can still remember this meeting. It was it was shortly after 9/11, 2001, when a group of intellectuals at Harvard—Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West and others—had a convocation, of kind of, "How do we think about the new world that we live in after 9/11?" And Jesse Jackson was an outside speaker who was invited. This is 20 years ago. I was in the audience. I was still in the doghouse with these guys, and Jesse allowed from the platform that I was okay. He said, "I see you out there, Glenn Loury. That brother, yeah, yeah, yeah. But he okay." And I just felt so good. The warm embrace of my folk. It's not funny, man. Being in the doghouse is not funny.

I have come in the fullness of time—and it has affected my behavior in the last year—to regret some of the moves that I made, and to realize, I mean, how many shots are you going to get? I'm 72. To realize, it's time to call it the way you see it. Let the chips fall where they may. It's time to call it. You don't want to go to your grave regretting that you didn't actually stand up for what you believed in. So this last year, quite serendipitously, has afforded me an opportunity to be clear. Clarity. So not without nuance, not without subtlety, not without qualification, not without a depth of learning on which I—forgive me for self-aggrandizement—can rest so that I can see the whole picture. But clarity. I'm on a mission, man.