Glenn Loury Comes Clean

Glenn C. Loury begins his new memoir, Late Admissions, with a promise: “I am going to tell you things about myself that no one would want anybody to think was true of them.” Over the next 400-odd pages, Loury, a professor of economics at Brown University, bluntly details a litany of public scandals and private misdeeds: a crack-cocaine addiction; abandoning a child; myriad extramarital liaisons; soliciting prostitutes; multiple arrests. And on and on.

“I haven’t read an autobiography this candid,” the political scientist Robert Putnam told me. “I thought I knew Glenn very well. I told him things I’ve only told my wife. Turns out I didn’t know him at all.” Ronald Ferguson, an economist at the Harvard Kennedy School who first met Loury when they were graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early ’70s, was taken aback. “I had to put the book down. I didn’t like the person I was reading about.”

Loury has spent decades in the thick of rancorous debates on race and inequality, affirmative action and identity politics, crime and punishment. Like many senior scholars, his life can be measured in a long list of journal articles, books, and awards. Words like “eminent” and “renowned” are often affixed to his name. Unlike most of his peers, however, his personal tribulations have been front-page fodder, his career held up as a microcosm of the “dilemmas, temptations, and betrayals of an era,” as Paul Krugman once put it.

Now in his mid-70s, Loury is intent on coming clean, or at least appearing to. “Autobiography,” George Orwell once wrote, “is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.” Loury seems to have taken Orwell’s dictum to heart.

Transgression and provocation have always been part of Loury’s appeal. His ideological shape-shifting — from neoconservative Reaganite to liberal critic of mass incarceration to Trump-curious conservative — has left both allies and enemies fascinated and bewildered. To some, he is a fickle contrarian with brittle convictions and an appetite for trolling. To others, he is a courageous iconoclast willing to voice what others think but dare not say. Call it the duality of Loury. On many issues “you can’t predict where he’ll come out, and maybe he can’t either,” says Thomas Chatterton Williams, a writer and friend.

That unpredictability is on vivid display on The Glenn Show, Loury’s weekly video podcast on which academics, intellectuals, and journalists chew over the issues of the day. (The show is supplemented by a Substack newsletter.) As a host, Loury is part genially skeptical discussant, part ruthless attack dog, part preacher. Every so often, he slips into “rant mode,” as he and his team call his viral stemwinders. Since the summer of 2020, what has most reliably set him off are the progressive proponents of America’s so-called racial reckoning. Loury has stood athwart the antiracist tide, contemptuous of what he describes as the “people with three names” — Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Ibram X. Kendi. As Loury put it in one rant: “I take umbrage at the lionization of lightweight, empty-suited, empty-headed motherfuckers like Ibram X. Kendi, who couldn’t carry my book bag, who hasn’t read a fucking thing.”

To its fans, The Glenn Show is an island of sanity in a world gone insane. (A typical YouTube comment: “Protect this man at all costs and broadcast his voice far and wide.”) The Glenn Show has amassed over 44,000 subscribers on Substack and millions of views on YouTube. The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank where Loury is a fellow, is the show’s sponsor. But the guest list is ideologically eclectic, encompassing both Cornel West and Amy Wax. The enterprise generates enough money to support two full-time staffers, occasional consultants, and a steady stream of revenue for Loury.

So why, at this moment of late-career renaissance, publish a memoir that digs up so much dirt? Late Admissions, which will be published next month by W.W. Norton, was originally titled “Changing My Mind.” Initial drafts were more political and less personal, Loury says, but dry and predictable. He circled the project for at least a decade, struggling to find an approach that felt right. He kept gravitating to deeper themes: the search for self-understanding, the struggle for dignity, the ways we deceive ourselves. He wanted the book to reflect the “pain of self-knowledge” rather than the “comfort of self-delusion,” as Loury puts it, even if that meant “exposing the ugly innards.”

The result is an unusually frank memoir. “This is a confessional,” says Randall Kennedy, a professor of law at Harvard. “Glenn is letting it all hang out.” Nikita Petrov, creative director for The Glenn Show, says of Loury, “He knows he’s running a risk.”

Not everyone thinks it’s a risk worth taking. In October, at the wedding of Loury’s youngest son, Ferguson pulled Loury aside. Don’t publish the memoir, he implored. “It’s telling stories that don’t need to be told,” Ferguson said. “For some people, it will sufficiently undermine the respect they had for you, and they won’t take your ideas seriously.” Loury insisted that he’s ready for the backlash.

Ferguson, sounding resigned, says, “He’s constitutionally driven to put it out there.”

Glenn Loury lives in a large home on a quiet street in an affluent neighborhood in Providence, R.I. When I visited him on a recent afternoon, workers in the basement were busy installing a spa. Upstairs, Loury — burly, goateed, and slightly stooped from spinal discomfort — described his unconventional path to prominence. At 19, he had two infant daughters, a high-school diploma, and a job at a printing plant. At 26, he had a Ph.D. in economics from MIT. At 33, he became the first tenured Black professor in Harvard’s economics department.

He was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago in a Black working-class milieu. His father, an accountant, was austere and disciplined. His mother — and her extended family, who helped raise Loury — was earthy and ambitious, ribald but dignified.

Loury’s aptitude for mathematics was spotted by a professor at Southeast Junior College, who recommended him to colleagues at Northwestern University, where Loury excelled. He had his pick of graduate programs, and settled on MIT, attracted to its reputation for rigor and to the man who led the economics department, Paul A. Samuelson. As a young economist, Samuelson had faced antisemitism at Harvard. In response, he moved to MIT, published groundbreaking research, and assembled around him a faculty of future Nobel laureates. (Samuelson himself won the prize in 1970.) He dealt with prejudice by “outworking, outmaneuvering, and outthinking everyone else,” Loury writes in Late Admissions. Maybe he could become the Black Paul Samuelson.

Loury arrived on MIT’s campus in 1972 carrying an olive-green briefcase with a black-and-orange sticker on each side declaring “Rise Above It!” He was part of a small cohort of Black graduate students, whose presence reflected an effort by MIT to diversify a program that had never minted a Black American economist. It would not be the last time that Loury would personally benefit from affirmative-action policies that he came to vigorously oppose.

The workload was intense — matrix algebra, multivariate calculus, probability theory, convex analysis — and the competition fierce. At an event in Loury’s honor at Brown a few years ago, Ferguson recalled a day when he and Loury got A’s on a monetary-economics exam. “He looked at me and, with an inflection in his voice that I still remember, said, ‘We can do this!’”

With his star rising, a more-senior scholar in the department pulled Loury aside. An elite Black economist would be expected to work on “Black issues,” he warned Loury, who remembers thinking how strange it was to have an older Jewish economist tell him what to expect as a Black academic. But he acknowledged the point: “I would either be the Black guy who works on Black issues or the Black guy who pointedly doesn’t work on Black issues,” Loury says, seated on a sofa and jabbing a finger into the air for emphasis. “But there was no way not to be the Black guy.”

In his dissertation, a mathematical analysis of inequality, Loury developed a novel theory of “social capital” — a concept that some credit him with coining. The basic idea is simple: Rich parents are able to invest more resources into the development of their children than poor parents. The children of rich parents grow up and put those skills and relationships to work to create their own wealth, while the children of poor parents tend to have fewer skills and relationships to draw on. Absent a targeted redistribution of wealth, Loury theorized, inequality will increase and persist across generations. Robert D. Putnam, who first learned about social capital from Loury, later developed and popularized the idea in his own work, including his 2000 bestseller, Bowling Alone.

In 1976, Loury became the first Black student in MIT’s economics department to complete his doctorate within the standard four-year window. Job offers poured in. He first joined the economics faculty at his undergraduate alma mater, Northwestern, and in 1980 moved to the University of Michigan to join his soon-to-be wife, the economist Linda Datcher.

More or less from the start, Loury was by all accounts a rarity: a brilliant theorist and an exceptional communicator. “Most theoretical economists are introverted, like me,” says Stephen Coate, a professor of economics at Cornell University who began collaborating with Loury in the late ’80s. “Glenn is really, really unusual.” Putnam puts an even-finer point on it: “Glenn is the best writer of nonfiction — not just social science — in America.”

It didn’t take long for Loury to come to the attention of a hiring committee in Cambridge, Mass. “Every American academic of distinction (and plenty of those without it) thinks about ‘the call,’” Loury writes in Late Admissions. The call — an invitation to join the faculty of Harvard — came in early 1982. He was offered a joint appointment to the economics and Afro-American studies departments.

In those days, the Harvard economics department sat on a long corridor of offices secluded behind two large, imposing oak doors. Loury found the people no less intimidating than the offices. He recalls going to the Harvard Faculty Club for the first time and being introduced to John Kenneth Galbraith. “He looked right through me,” Loury says. “I mean, you don’t want to know who I am? You’re not asking me what I work on? I experienced that as a real slight.” He shakes his head at the memory. “It was hurtful.”

Arrayed around the table at department meetings were economists who had won or would win a Nobel Prize. Loury, meanwhile, had about a half dozen respectable papers to his name. Did he really belong? Was he at that table because he’s a world-class economist or because he’s Black? Such doubts blossomed into a full-blown crisis of confidence. “It came to the point where I was almost afraid to go into my own office,” Loury told me a few years ago. “It was a psychological black hole.”

Thomas C. Schelling, a polymathic economist and game theorist who helped recruit Loury to Harvard and remained a mentor, threw him a lifeline: Resign from the Afro-American-studies and economics departments and move to the Kennedy School. It would be a downgrade in prestige, but it would be a fresh start and a reprieve from crippling self-doubt. “I had choked in the economics department,” Loury writes. “But there was no reason to keep choking.”

One hot day in the summer of 1984, Loury traveled to Washington, D.C., and gave a talk that made Coretta Scott King cry.

He had been invited to address an intimate gathering of Black leaders. It had been 20 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and Loury had a bracing message to deliver: Racism was no longer the most acute problem plaguing poor Black communities. It was single-parent families, Black-on-Black crime, low academic achievement, unemployment — none of which, he argued, could be blamed solely on white racism. Loury implored those present to do more than indulge the same old bromides about oppression. Such grievance mongering wouldn’t help impoverished Black people attain the skills they needed to improve their lives.

When he finished, King stared at Loury and said nothing, tears streaming down her cheeks.

A few months later, Loury published a version of his remarks in The New Republic. Titled “A New American Dilemma” — a nod to Gunnar Myrdal’s classic 1944 study of race relations, An American Dilemma — the essay put Loury on the map as a public intellectual. A companion piece soon appeared in The Public Interest. “Neither the guilt nor the pity of one’s oppressor is a sufficient basis upon which to construct a sense of self-worth,” Loury wrote. Given the tangle of social pathologies evident in inner-city neighborhoods, “it is simply insufficient to respond by saying ‘This is the fault of racist America. These problems will be solved when America finally does right by its Black folk.’” Rather, Black Americans must combat what Loury called the “enemy within.”

To many Black leaders and intellectuals, Loury’s apostasy from the civil-rights consensus was unforgivable. Benjamin Hooks, then president of the NAACP, called his arguments “treasonous.” Martin Kilson, Harvard’s first tenured Black professor and a friend of Loury’s, derided him as a “pathetic mascot of the right” and “a hustler, an intelligent hired hand.” Derrick Bell, the first tenured Black professor of law at Harvard, told The New Yorker, “Even given the fact that all Blacks have to engage in some hypocrisy just to survive in our racist society, Loury has gone beyond the call of duty.”

Loury interrogates his motives in Late Admissions. After his ego-bruising stint in Harvard’s economics department, he was hungry for affirmation, and his fellow conservatives were eager to bestow it. His essays began appearing in Commentary and The Wall Street Journal. The Public Interest asked him to join its publication committee alongside such social-science luminaries as Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and James Q. Wilson. He was becoming a bona fide academic celebrity.

His name now also carried weight in the halls of power. Loury was invited to the White House to discuss the state of Black America with President Ronald Reagan. At a state dinner to honor the prime minister of Pakistan, Loury was seated at Reagan’s table. TIME published his portrait; Esquire put him on a list of the most influential Americans under the age of 40. “I was a Master of the Universe,” Loury recalls.

He was also living a double life. By day: a happily married jacket-and-tie-wearing professor preaching an up-by-the-bootstraps gospel of self-discipline. By night: jeans and a baseball hat, night clubs, prostitutes, drugs. “I love that I have the respect not only of the elite intellectuals at the Kennedy School but the drug dealers, hustlers, and working men in the projects,” he writes. “Nobody else but me, I think, could do what I’m doing.”

In 1986, while attending a meeting of The Public Interest in Washington, Loury arranged to meet a young woman he had been corresponding with. Pamela Foster was 15 years Loury’s junior and a recent graduate of Smith College. They began an affair, and Loury set her up with a job and an apartment in Boston. There were other women. (Late Admissions can at times read like an exhausting catalog of infidelities.) One woman, a student at the Kennedy School, introduced Loury to cocaine, which they’d sometimes snort “off each other’s behinds.”

William Kristol, who had been a colleague at the Kennedy School and was then chief of staff to William J. Bennett, the secretary of education, had been sending signals for months that Loury’s services might be needed in Washington. In 1987, he offered Loury the No. 2 position in the department. As part of the preconfirmation vetting process, two FBI agents showed up at Foster’s apartment because Loury’s name was on the lease. Loury knew a high-level official with a secret mistress would not be condoned by the White House, and certainly not by Bennett, who Loury describes as a public moralist and private hedonist. He called Kristol and withdrew his nomination, offering only vague reasons.

Two days later, Loury’s double life became public.

In Loury’s telling, he had gone to Foster’s apartment to break things off and demand that she move out. She refused, and they got into a ferocious argument. “I then did something I knew, even then, I should not have done,” Loury recounts in Late Admissions. “I grabbed her by the shoulders and physically moved her toward the stairs.” He marched her through the door, hurled her belongings into the hallway, and slammed the door shut. A neighbor called the police.

At home with his wife the following day, Loury received a call from Harvard’s general counsel. Foster was alleging that he’d stomped her with a “shod foot,” considered a dangerous weapon. There was a warrant out for his arrest. The general counsel advised Loury to turn himself in rather than risk being arrested on campus in front of students and colleagues.

Loury’s arrest made national news. “Professor Accused of Assault Won’t Seek No. 2 Education Job,” read the headline in the Los Angeles Times. The Boston Herald ran photographs of Foster’s apartment, dubbing it Loury’s “love nest.” They also published an interview with Foster, who said that Loury had dragged her down four flights of stairs. (He denied the charge.) She showed up in court wearing a neck brace.

The charges were ultimately dropped when Foster stopped cooperating with prosecutors, but the reputational — and personal — damage was done. “I moved about in a state of nebulous uncertainty, always wondering if the person I was talking to — a colleague, a student, a convenience-store cashier —secretly regarded me as an abusive monster,” Loury writes.

It was around this time that a prostitute introduced him to crack. Soon his nighttime forays into Boston included visits to drug dens and rented motel rooms, where he cooked crack, got drunk, and watched porn. He smoked in the bathroom on a flight home after delivering a lecture at the University of California at Davis. He smoked in his Kennedy School office. He smoked in his car.

Driving around Boston one night in December 1987, “high and looking to get higher,” he was pulled over by police. A search of his Saab turned up a small amount of marijuana and cocaine, as well as a crack pipe. He was arrested for the second time in seven months. His name was again splashed across newspapers.

He kept smoking crack. After a particularly rough night that ended at dawn in a Burger King parking lot, he checked himself into an in-patient treatment program at McLean Hospital. He later moved into a group home for recovering addicts where his roommate was rumored to have served eight years for attempted murder. Five months later, Loury was back home just in time for the birth of his first child with Linda, a son named Glenn.

When Loury returned to Harvard in 1990, after a one-year sabbatical at MIT, he was sober, a newly devout Christian, and certain that he was regarded by colleagues as damaged and pitiable. His unease was exacerbated by uncertainty about the direction of his work. The press had portrayed him as a “feckless libertine who nevertheless prescribed Victorian morals for the ‘Black underclass,’” as Loury puts it. He’d preached respectability while behaving disreputably; he’d called for confronting the “enemy within” while succumbing to his own. Even if he didn’t exactly feel like a hypocrite, he knew he looked like one. He began to think it was time to get out of the race game and back to serious economics. He also began to think it was time to leave Harvard.

Robert Putnam, who had just started as dean of the Kennedy School, recalls spending hours with Loury trying to convince him to stay. “I don’t think he felt worthy of Harvard,” Putnam says about those long conversations.

Across the Charles River, John Silber, president of Boston University, was turning a sleepy commuter college into a major research institution. Armed with deep pockets and a grand vision, he was poaching high-profile faculty — Elie Wiesel, Derek Walcott, Saul Bellow. Silber offered to double Loury’s Harvard salary and tack on a housing subsidy. (Putnam says he would have beat any competing offer.) Loury jumped to BU, and he and Linda, then a professor of economics at Tufts University, purchased a large home in the suburbs.

“I was devastated when Glenn left,” Putnam says. “Even to this day, I’m still disappointed. I think he would have had a better career if he’d stayed.”

Loury’s move to BU kick-started one of his most productive periods. In 1993, he had three papers in the American Economic Review. In 1994, he placed two more papers in top journals. Several of his papers then were written with Stephen Coate, including an influential study that modeled how affirmative-action policies can perpetuate the negative stereotypes they’re meant to ameliorate. If employers lower standards to hire disadvantaged candidates, they also reduce the incentive of those candidates to match the skills of more-qualified candidates. In essence, the perception that minority candidates are less qualified becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Coate and Loury dubbed this the “patronizing equilibrium.”

While the paper itself studiously avoided taking a stance on affirmative action — “we let the model speak,” Coate says — it was received in some quarters as an elaborate effort to undermine the case for race-conscious policies. When Loury presented an early version of the paper at Stanford University in 1992, Donald Brown, a Black economist, “was pissed,” Loury recalls, “insinuating that I was betraying Black people, under the cover of technical analysis, in the name of some conservative political line.” Loury heard similar criticism from other Black scholars. “Clearly, I had gone against the tribe,” he writes in Late Admissions. “And this left me wondering how far I could push the envelope before I would find myself an outcast among my own people.”

In the mid-’90s, the publication of three books — The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein; Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism; and America in Black and White, by Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom — deepened Loury’s unease with the right.

Aghast at the speculative conclusions about race and IQ advanced in The Bell Curve, Loury was even more galled by Murray’s defenders — editors at magazines like Commentary and the leadership of the American Enterprise Institute, where Murray was a fellow and Loury a member of its Council of Academic Advisers — for dismissing what Loury regarded as substantial methodological criticisms of the book. Though Murray had been a friend, Loury spent the next few years relentlessly attacking him in print. (Herrnstein, a professor of psychology at Harvard, died just prior to The Bell Curve’s publication.)

Loury first met Dinesh D’Souza in the early ’90s when D’Souza had just published his excoriating critique of political correctness, Illiberal Education. Loury considered him a fledgling ally. In 1995, however, Loury was asked by The Weekly Standard to review D’Souza’s new book, The End of Racism. On page after page, Loury found mangled facts, tendentious conclusions, and contempt for Black Americans. Worse, D’Souza was being praised by other conservatives.

Like Murray, D’Souza was a fellow at AEI, a fact that Loury found intolerable. He and Robert Woodson, a Black activist affiliated with the think tank, called a press conference in Washington, D.C., to announce their resignations. The news made the front page of The Wall Street Journal.

The most searing break happened in 1997. Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom were close family friends. But as the Thernstroms’ analysis of race took on what Loury regarded as an excessively fatalistic tone, a rupture became evident. When Loury reviewed America in Black and White, the Thernstroms’ sweeping history of race relations, for The Atlantic, he took public a dispute that had previously been contained to backyard barbecues. The 7,000-word review was surgical and damning, at various junctures dismissing the Thernstroms’ argument as “more like a venting of spleen than a serious analysis,” “simplistic in the extreme,” and “ideological cant.” He sent them an advance copy of the review, which they responded to with a note calling it “morally reprehensible, intellectually dishonest, and indefensibly nasty.”

Loury’s views on affirmative action were also in flux. His “visceral skepticism” had ebbed and flowed over the years. In the late ’90s, he was tapped to write the introduction to a new edition of William G. Bowen and Derek Bok’s influential defense of affirmative action, The Shape of the River. As Loury told The Chronicle at the time, “I went from being an opponent of affirmative action to being an opponent of the abolition of affirmative action.” His politics remained idiosyncratic enough that they defied easy categorization, but mainstream Black intellectuals were increasingly ready to welcome him into the liberal camp with open arms.

After a lecture on “The Superficial Morality of Colorblindness” at the American Economic Association conference in 1999, an erstwhile critic, who was an economist at Howard University, shouted out “Welcome home, Glenn!” The following year, Henry Louis Gates Jr. invited Loury to deliver Harvard’s prestigious W.E.B. Du Bois lectures, published in 2002 as The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. Loury calls the book “pretty clearly a work of progressive thought.” Perhaps inevitably, it was reviewed favorably in The New York Times (“intellectually rigorous and deeply thoughtful”), and critically in The Wall Street Journal, which took the book as further proof that Loury had “regressed, pitifully, to the point of employing the same infantile logic and reasoning he so skillfully dismantled a decade ago.”

Around this time, Gates and Cornel West invited Loury to a meeting of Black academics. Jesse Jackson, a man Loury had eviscerated for years in print, delivered the keynote. “To say that Glenn Loury isn’t Black because he disagrees with me, well that’s just stupid,” Jackson said in his remarks. “We can’t afford to leave brilliant minds like that by the wayside.” At the time, Jackson’s words felt to Loury like a warm embrace. An unnamed scholar told The New York Times in 2002: “Glenn is finally able to walk into a room full of Black people who don’t all hate him.”

In 2005, Loury moved to Brown University, and the focus of his work shifted to mass incarceration. Specifically, the fact that America has 5 percent of the world’s population and more than 20 percent of its prisoners, a disproportionate number of whom are Black men. Loury came to regard that fact as a moral stain on the country, and he slid easily into a register of righteous indignation when speaking about it publicly.

Loury teamed up with the Columbia University sociologist Bruce Western, then at Harvard, and together they traveled the world inveighing against the evils of mass incarceration. “The lectern became my pulpit, and I transmuted the preacher’s fire-and-brimstone exhortations into sermons on the moral decrepitude of my country’s failures, dressed up in the respectable language of the social sciences.” Their appearances were electrifying, their audiences adoring. Loury relished the adulation.

Gradually, however, he began to distrust his motives. Yes, too many people were in prison. But was it intellectually honest to stand on stage denouncing the injustice of the punishment while saying nothing about the heinousness of the crime? Was he saying what other people wanted to hear, or was he saying what he really thought? Seeds of ambivalence grew into outright disillusion. “I had wanted to come home, to feel the embrace of my people,” Loury writes. “I felt it all right, and now it was beginning to suffocate me.”

His rift with the left was sped along by developments on the Brown campus. In 2013, the New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly was invited to give a lecture. He was controversial for enacting a policy known as “stop and frisk,” which critics regarded as giving cover to police to racially profile and harass Black people. Loury was a critic of the policy and wanted to hear Kelly defend himself. But before Kelly could begin his remarks, protesters erupted in chants: “No Justice! No Peace! No Racist Police!” Brown canceled the event, and an irked Kelly went back to New York.

Christina H. Paxson, Brown’s president, denounced the protesters and established a committee to investigate. Their report, which noted that Kelly’s presence “may be harmful to elements of our community,” outraged Loury, who saw the protest as a clear violation of the university’s commitment to free expression. “In essence, the university was apologizing for doing exactly what it was supposed to do: expose its students to ideas and teach them how to formulate ideas of their own in response!” he writes in Late Admissions. Over the next few years, Loury watched as similar protests broke out at other colleges. He faulted Brown’s leadership, and parts of its faculty, for setting a dangerous precedent. Those who interrupted Kelly’s talk received no real punishment. Indeed, Loury notes with disdain that one of the protest organizers was honored by the department of Africana studies for her role in the affair.

He clashed with Paxson again in the summer of 2020 when she and other campus leaders sent a letter to the Brown community expressing their “deep sadness, but also anger,” at the murder of George Floyd and other “racist incidents that continue to cut short the lives of Black people every day.” The message pledged to leverage the “tremendous resources” of Brown to “promote essential change in policy and practice in the name of equity and justice.”

Loury was disturbed by the message, and he composed a response that he first sent to a colleague and later published in City Journal. He decried the “pedantic language and sophomoric nostrums” of Brown administrators, including their decision to comment at all. “Who cares what some paper-pushing apparatchik thinks?” To Loury, it sounded like Brown’s leaders were reciting a catechism rather than rigorously analyzing a complicated reality. “Is it supposed to be self-evident that every death of an ‘unarmed Black man’ at the hands of a white person tells the same story?” he asked. “My bottom line,” Loury concluded, “I’m offended by the letter. It frightens, saddens, and angers me.”

His rift with Paxson reflected his dismay at how Black Lives Matter had become a litmus test: “As a correct-thinking Black person, I was expected to go along with the movement and praise them unthinkingly,” he writes in Late Admissions. But he had serious misgivings about the analytical validity of notions like “systemic racism” as well as disagreements over what the empirical record actually shows about encounters between Black men and police. Moreover, he wondered, if Black lives really mattered, why wasn’t the movement also talking about crime rates in Black neighborhoods and Black-on-Black violence? He poured his frustrations into The Glenn Show, which became required listening for those bristling at the “racial reckoning” zeitgeist.

Loury’s foray into online punditry had begun in the mid-2000s at the invitation of Joshua Cohen, a political philosopher at the University of California at Berkeley, and Robert Wright, a journalist who had the novel idea then to ask writers and scholars to record themselves in conversation and post that footage online. This being the blog era, Wright called the site Bloggingheads.tv. “Before there were podcast bros, Glenn was doing Bloggingheads,” says Thomas Chatterton Williams.

Wright describes Loury’s unique on-air charisma as a mix of “earthy eloquence” and “nearly compulsive candor” delivered in an “oratorical rhythm that I suspect he absorbed from Sunday sermons as a child.” Wright encouraged Loury to recruit his own conversation partners and, ultimately, start his own show. Before long, The Glenn Show was the biggest thing on Bloggingheads.

The show in some sense attempts to be a corrective to one of Loury’s longstanding frustrations. “There’s a shrouded quality to our public discourse on racial subjects,” he told The New York Times in 1990. “A lot of stuff doesn’t get said that people are really thinking. Whites don’t want to get called racists. Blacks don’t want to be called disloyal. As a result, a genuine critical discourse where a lot of different ideas get put on the table and bandied about never really happens.” One gets the sense Loury waited years for someone to hand him a microphone.

In 2007, Loury recorded an episode with John McWhorter, a linguist with similarly skeptical attitudes toward racial activism who had by then given up tenure at Berkeley to join the Manhattan Institute. (McWhorter is now a professor at Columbia and a columnist for The New York Times.) That 2007 discussion began a rolling conversation that’s still rolling 17 years later. McWhorter and Loury’s irreverent biweekly chats range widely; in recent months, they have discussed race and the SAT, the enduring consequences of the post-George Floyd rioting, race-based affirmative action and the 14th Amendment, and the Oscar-nominated film American Fiction. For many years Loury introduced the duo as the “Black guys at Bloggingheads.” More recently he settled on “Wokebusters” (think Ghostbusters).

As The Glenn Show’s audience swells, it’s become something of a lifeline for junior scholars with academically controversial views on race. “Glenn allowed me to breathe again,” says Michael Javen Fortner, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. In 2015, the Harvard University Press published Fortner’s first book, Black Silent Majority, a revisionist account of the origins of the tough-on-crime 1973 Rockefeller drug laws. Fortner documented how many Black residents of high-crime neighborhoods supported heightened policing and stiffer sentencing. That narrative was at odds with the ascendant view of mass incarceration as a project of reactionary whites intent on reimposing racial supremacy.

Fortner came in for a drubbing from senior colleagues, and few Black scholars came to his defense. But Loury invited Fortner on The Glenn Show, welcoming him into the loose network of ideological misfits that had gathered around Loury over the years. “There are no associations for people like us — heterodox thinkers on race,” says Fortner, who regards himself as a man of the left. “Glenn has created space for us to be weird and unusual.”

Loury will soon retire from Brown after nearly five decades in the classroom. But he has no intention of shuffling quietly into senescence. He’s still collecting honors; in 2022, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation awarded him its annual Bradley Prize, which comes with $250,000. Late Admissions won’t be his last book; a paper of his from the mid-’90s on self-censorship and political correctness will be republished as a short book by an editor who turned the philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit into a sensation. And Loury remains a fixture on the keynote circuit.

At this stage of his life, I ask, is he freer than ever to speak his mind? After all, he has his own platform of paying subscribers as well as a generous organizational sponsor in the Manhattan Institute. He’s long since reached the heights of his discipline, with little left to prove. There is no next position he’s jockeying for.

Loury answers my question with a story.

He recently returned from a gig in Florida — $20,000 for one speech and two dinners. Something was still rankling him. He’d been invited to speak at a prominent synagogue about what happened to the partnership between Blacks and Jews. He delivered what he describes as a tame set of remarks about how Black and Jewish intellectuals and activists have tended to differ in their views of American opportunity. And internationally, Israel is for many American Jews a beacon of hope and identification, whereas many Black Americans identify with the Global South and other people of color. What he didn’t mention: Gaza.

As he delivered his speech, Loury noticed his wife, LaJuan, in the crowd. (Linda died of cancer in 2011.) She was seething.

“I knew what she was thinking,” he says. “Babies are being bombed as you speak! And you don’t have a mumbling word to say about it?”

She was right, he adds. “I didn’t have a word to say.”

He tells the story to illustrate one of his maxims: There is no such thing as free speech. “You always pay the price that you’ve been heard to say what you said,” Loury explains. “Now, the gendarmerie aren’t coming to cart you away,” he continues, “but as John Stuart Mill and many others have understood for a long time, there are social-conformity pressures.”

But even if speech isn’t free, Loury has been unique in his willingness to pay any price, and zealous in his refusal to conform. He is the Ivy League professor who rubbed shoulders with the downtown hustlers, the Black scholar who ran with the Reaganites, the reformed Reaganite who broke ranks with former friends, the repentant progressive who stands in opposition to Black Lives Matter; and now, he is the eminent scholar dishing the sordid details of a complicated life. That guy is biting his tongue?!

He explains that on The Glenn Show he has editorial control but consults regularly with the Manhattan Institute. They make suggestions; he and his team at least listen. Gaza has become a point of tension. Loury has brought on critics of Israel, such as John Mearsheimer, Omer Bartov, and Norman Finkelstein. After the Bartov interview went out to paying subscribers, who receive episodes several days before they’re released to the masses, Loury got a memo from the Manhattan Institute asking him not to mention their sponsorship on the version released to the public. “That’s their prerogative,” he says. “But it wasn’t just that. It was like a shot across the bow; it was like think it through.”

I was reminded of something Randall Kennedy told me. “One thing that’s been true of Glenn over the years is that whatever position he’s pushing, he’s pushing that position passionately,” Kennedy said. He described Loury as an “all-in kind of person,” adding, “He definitely goes for it.”

If Loury is biting his tongue, he likely won’t be biting it for long.