It’s difficult to overstate how barren and lonely intellectual life at Brown University felt as a policy major circa mid-2005, at least if one was more interested in policy than politics. It’s not that there weren’t a bunch of very bright people around, just that most had reliably been informed that everything had fundamentally been figured out. We Ivy Leaguers already knew what worked — expansive redistributive social planning as overseen by experts like us — and building an equitable social democracy was simply a matter of securing enough funding and pushing selfish obstructionists out of our way. Thus, many of my peers tended to direct their formidable talents toward landing the right internships, shaking the right hands, crunching the right numbers the right ways to yield the right statistics, and getting into the right graduate programs for the glide path to the right careers.
Meanwhile, I was more interested in trying to reconcile the cold abstractions I kept finding in policy briefs with the real human beings I’d actually met. And then that autumn, I heard about an “it” professor doing incredible work on race and inequality, an iconoclastic black economist named Glenn Loury who’d just arrived in Providence, then and even more now an enormously influential public intellectual, today with a prominent Substack and podcast, The Glenn Show. At least a hundred students showed up to his class at the beginning of the next semester in hopes of landing one of a few dozen slots, spilling out into the hallway — enough that everybody had to submit an application. Somehow, I managed to luck my way in. A breath of fresh air doesn’t begin to describe it. The class changed my life.
Most social science courses at Brown always seemed to have right and wrong answers, foregone conclusions that, as a respectable educated person, you just knew. But in Loury’s classroom, everything was in flux. Almost everything contained ambiguity, practically nothing was self-evident, and a vast array of contending ideas needed to be attacked from a whole universe of perspectives. We didn’t stick to the syllabus much, constantly veering off on a thousand intriguing tangents, but every session was an exhilarating intellectual adventure that, by contrast, made most of the rest of my college experience seem boring and empty. I was sorry when each class ended and showed up to his office hours most weeks just to bounce ideas off the man.
There was a certain topic Loury had mentioned on the first day that I was always too timid to ask him about: that he’d led something of a checkered life, with multiple run-ins with the law, and, in the ’80s, had wrecked what seemed like promising prospects in Washington. And so it’s gratifying that in his new memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, my old professor brings that relentlessness, so familiar from his classroom, to scrutinizing his life, his times, and himself.
Numerous episodes in Loury’s extraordinarily candid new volume remind me of little so much as country icon Merle Haggard’s multiple picaresque memoirs but beginning on the South Side of Chicago instead of in Bakersfield. They describe an irrepressible genius from humble circumstances with more smarts than he knew what to do with, who keeps flying too close to the sun and getting into frequently hilarious trouble. Again and again, I found myself cackling or shouting at the page: C’mon Glenn, don’t steal that car! Don’t get her pregnant! Don’t rent that mistress a penthouse! Don’t smoke that crack! Yet it’s hard not to conclude that Loury’s countless misadventures pursuing his baser impulses haven’t been some part of the secret sauce making him so insightful as a scholar. Most MIT Ph.D.s, not to mention Ivy League faculty, have seen but a shred of the realities he’s lived.
The book isn’t all pool hall hustles and bacchanalian excess, of course. Glenn C. Loury is even more accomplished a Jekyll than a Hyde. He carefully details the complex webs of status and stigma that structured his working-class black neighborhood growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, the ever-shifting blend of cockiness and insecurity that contributed to his successes and failures both personally and professionally, and the passion for understanding the intricate manifestations of abstruse mathematics as embodied in human behavior that underlies so much of his work.
For me, many of the most moving passages in the memoir were Loury’s reminiscences of the intoxication of sheer intellectual discovery: at first, the hard-knock insights of his extended family, and then upon reaching Northwestern on a scholarship, and then from his graduate work to joining the faculties of several top schools still in their prime and stacked with scholarly giants. He captures precisely what taking his class felt like nearly 20 years ago.
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But those descriptions of bracing open-ended inquiry among brilliant minds evoke a long-faded, if not quite vanished, epoch, kind of like memories of old fin-de-siecle Vienna. Glenn Loury may have valiantly kept that zeitgeist going, his classroom an enduring oasis of curiosity, but by and large, the social sciences have abandoned those values for platitudes and dogma. It would be premature to call him the last of a dying breed — there are still some top-flight academics out there — but they’re ever fewer and further between.
As the onslaught of recent humiliations has belatedly helped demonstrate to the public, higher education is in a state of crisis at best, the institutions having long since incentivized silly sophistry that might as well be scrawled in crayon over actual truth-seeking. But hopefully, this important book, and The Glenn Show, will long provide a beacon of what grown-up discourse can really be.
Jesse Adams is the New York-based writer and consultant behind The Ivy Exile on Substack.
