HIGHER EDUCATION, LOWER EXPECTATIONS
"The double standard of grades and degrees is an open secret on many campuses, and it is only a matter of time before it is an open secret among employers as well."
THE FIRST DECADE OF SOWELL'S ACADEMIC CAREER WAS THE 1960s, and he spent it mostly teaching, completing work on his PhD, and writing about economic theory. But the 1960s were also years of tremendous social unrest in America, marked by mass protests against racism, sexism, and the war in Vietnam as well as by rapidly evolving mores. Much of this turmoil played out on college campuses, where Sowell, then in his thirties, was trying to settle into the life of a professor. His preference was classroom teaching, as opposed to research, but his methods and sensibilities were on a collision course with the spirit of the times. By the late 1960s he was already having second thoughts about a career in academia. "The small college has always had a certain appeal to me, but the big question mark has always been whether the closer student-faculty relationship which is possible there is utilized for intellectual purposes" or for "artificially extending the students' adolescence," he wrote to a friend in 1968. "The idea of emphasizing teaching appeals to me, but too often 'teaching' means student public relations, and is judged by how happy you keep them rather than how much they learn."
These reservations developed during a period when Sowell had been thriving as a scholar. His first academic article, on Karl Marx's prediction of "increasing misery" for workers under capitalism, was published in 1960 in the American Economic Review, widely considered the top journal in the field. His first book, an introductory textbook for undergraduate college students titled Economics: Analysis and Issues, would come in 1971. In between, he wrote about Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and other influential economists for scholarly journals, including Oxford Economic Papers, Economica, and the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science. At the time, there was greater interest in Sowell's specialty, the history of economic thought, in England and Canada than in the United States, so most of his professional writing during this period was published in foreign journals. "Though I did not realize it at the time, this was a long-term blessing," he wrote many years later. "The economists who ran these journals in other countries had no way of knowing what color I was, so I was spared the doubts that became increasingly common over the years among black academics, as to whether their achievements were really their own or were due to tokenism or double standards applied by whites."
Although he is best known today for his views on culture and ethnicity, Sowell didn't set out in that direction and would write extensively on many nonracial issues over the decades. He would publish books on such diverse topics as late-talking children, choosing a college, and the housing boom that led to the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Without counting the ten bound collections of his writings and updated editions of earlier works, he produced thirty-six books between 1971 and 2018. The first one didn't appear until he was already forty years old, most are still in print, and nearly two-thirds of them center on topics other than race. His best-selling title is Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy, which has been translated into six other languages, and he's proudest of his books on social theory and the history of ideas.
When Sowell did eventually start weighing in publicly on racial controversies, it was out of frustration at the general direction of the public discussion, not because he craved notoriety. Nor was he compelled to do so because he couldn't make a living by working on other matters; he'd done precisely that in the 1960s. Rather, he saw his commentary on these issues as an act of public service, or even a duty. "One of the melancholy features of being over forty is that many things which seem new, unprecedented, and exciting to the young begin to look like tired reruns of an old movie on the late, late show," he wrote in Black Education: Myths and Tragedies, a book that reflects on his teaching career. "As one who specializes in the history of economic and social thought, I may be more prone to this reaction than some others. It is depressing to hear ideas trumpeted as New! when the underlying reasoning involved was common in the 1840s or the 1790s¡ªand discredited by the 1920s." And he was especially suspect of activists pushing agendas that didn't necessarily comport with the needs or desires of the people they claimed to represent, writing, for example, "The black community has long been plagued by spellbinding orators who know how to turn the hopes and fears of others into dollars and cents for themselves." Here, Sowell was speaking not only as a scholar but also from personal experience. "The current militant rhetoric, self-righteousness and lifestyle are painfully old to me," he continued. "I have seen the same intonations, the same cadence, the same crowd manipulation techniques, the same visions of mystical redemption, the same faith that certain costumes, gestures, phrases and group emotional release would somehow lead to the Promised Land. And I have seen the same hustling messiahs driving their Cadillacs and getting their pictures in the paper."
SOWELL HAD BEEN CURIOUS FROM A YOUNG AGE ABOUT THE causes of inequality. It's what motivated him to study economics and history in the first place. Initially, this pursuit was for his own personal benefit, an attempt to comprehend the world around him. From there, he set about sharing what he'd learned. The goal was not to berate or belittle others but to leave people better informed¡ª particularly those in a position to make important decisions for themselves or for society. As he once put it, "Most of my writings on public policy issues in general, and on racial issues in particular, were directed toward the public or toward policy-makers and tried to show where one policy would be better than another."
What distinguished Sowell to some extent was not so much what he believed but what he had the gumption to express publicly. Even other scholars who sympathized with his point of view about the so-called "Negro problem" were reluctant to say so for fear of being personally vilified and having it damage their careers. After Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then President Lyndon B. Johnson's assistant secretary of labor, noted, in a 1965 government study of the black family, that the growing number of black children born to single mothers was bound to hinder the future social and economic progress of blacks, civil rights leaders, politicians, commentators, and other critics denounced Moynihan as a bigot who was "blaming the victim." And when two well-regarded social scientists, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, published a frank and comprehensive critique of black colleges in a 1967 issue of the Harvard Educational Review, they received similar treatment.
But popularity wasn't a paramount concern of Sowell's, who knew he had a thick skin when it came to criticism and wasn't easily intimidated. He felt a personal obligation to weigh in with an alternative perspective on racial topics. He believed that the basic assumptions behind many of the policies aimed at minorities needed to be better scrutinized and felt that too few public intellectuals were interested in speaking out. "I had been subject to criticism for all kinds of other things long before I got into racial issues," he explained. "I can remember one of my roommates in college saying that something I did at Harvard really had rubbed people the wrong way. I said, 'You can't please all the people, all the time.' And he said, 'You're not pleasing any of the people, any of the time.'" Sowell also felt he was acting in the tradition of black intellectual forebears who followed the facts even when they led to unpopular conclusions. "E. Franklin Frazier caught this [flak] too," he said, in reference to a distinguished black sociologist who had taught at Howard University in the 1950s. Frazier had painted a devastating picture of black elites in his 1957 book, Black Bourgeoisie. "He was an empiricist. He was from the Chicago school of sociology," said Sowell. "He did not pull any punches. I'm told that there were places at Howard University where there would be a committee meeting, and when Frazier walked into a room, people would get up and walk out."
Black Bourgeoisie first appeared in France in 1955, and in the preface to the US edition, released two years later, Frazier responded to the negative reaction among some American blacks. "They did not challenge the truth of the picture that had been presented so much as they were shocked that a Negro would dare place on display their behavior and innermost thoughts," he wrote. "Following the initial shock of self-revelation was intense anger on the part of many leaders in the Negro community. This anger was based largely upon their feeling that I had betrayed Negroes by revealing their life to the white world. I was attacked by some Negroes as being bitter¡­ and by others as having been paid to defame the Negro."
Of course, the very same criticisms would be directed at Sowell throughout his career as a public intellectual. He was well aware that such attacks were nothing new, and, like Frazier, he believed they were worth enduring¡ªthat any scholar with any integrity had no other choice. Black intellectuals preoccupied with "protecting the image of blacks in the eyes of whites" were missing the boat, as Sowell saw things. Better to focus on "knowing what the facts were, as a basis for whatever was to be done to make things better."
Time and again throughout his career, Sowell was willing to take personal and professional risks to adhere to his principles. He took it upon himself to challenge orthodoxies, reject circumspection, and say straightforwardly what others would not. "It has not been a pleasure to write this book but a necessity," he said in the introduction to Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?, his 1984 book about the civil rights movement. And in the preface to Black Rednecks and White Liberals, a 2005 tome on the historical development of ghetto culture, he wrote, "Many of the facts cited here may be surprising or even startling to some readers, but they are not literally unknown to scholars; they have simply not been widely discussed in the media or even in academia." His job was to pursue the truth, and sugarcoating it, he thought, was no way to help black people advance. "Unfortunately, there are very few people who take positions similar to mine," he told C-SPAN interviewer Brian Lamb in 1990. "And if that viewpoint is to be heard at all, I'm going to have to be the one that does a lot of [the talking]."
Sowell has stressed that he began writing about racial controversies primarily "because there is something that needs to be said¡ªand because other people have better sense than to say it." He stayed the course even though colleagues suggested to him that, as he put it, "I would be better off to stop writing about race and to return to the things in which I did my best professional work¡ªbooks on economics like Knowledge and Decisions or books on ideas like A Conflict of Visions and The Quest for Cosmic Justice." His decision to ignore that advice and continue questioning conventional explanations for racial inequality is one of his most important legacies, and his extensive writings on race and culture will be discussed in greater detail in the chapters that follow. What's important to note here is the extent to which the racial controversies of the 1960s and 1970s, in academia in particular, served to thwart Sowell's teaching ambitions while also influencing key aspects of his scholarship for the rest of his career.