by Cory Franklin

May 15, 2024

The economist, social commentator and podcaster Glenn Loury has published his autobiography, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. It is a book for everyone, regardless of your politics: the tale of a brilliant, intellectual, young man from Chicago’s South Side. With one of the best minds of our generation, his talent brought him extraordinary academic success at a young age. But in a classic case of “too much, too soon”, an outsized appetite for women and drugs temporarily derailed his career and nearly ruined his life before he found redemption.

Loury grew up in Park Manor, a Black working-class neighborhood, during the postwar era. Relatives, neighbors, and friends had steady employment and he was imbued with middle-class values. Valedictorian at Harlan High, having an exceptional gift for numbers and theory, he matriculated at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT).

Segregation still hung heavily over Chicago – when Loury was 18, Martin Luther King visited the city and said, “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen – even in Mississippi and Alabama -mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen here in Chicago.”

(editor’s note: In 2021Professor Loury talked with John Kass about growing up in Chicago and how woke policies are driving violent urban crime.)

But race affected Loury less than did teenage pressures, which almost sabotaged his life. On a whim to impress a girl, he stole a car and was apprehended by the police. This being Chicago, his family “knew someone who knew someone” and charges were dropped.  Married at 17, he fathered two children and a third out of wedlock, while working full-time at the lakefront R.R. Donnelly Printing Plant. All this, plus numerous nocturnal forays into South Side pool halls and everything that entailed, did not presage a successful academic career at IIT.

Talent will out, especially when accompanied by good fortune. In a Dickensian plot twist, an IIT teacher noticed his aptitude and recommended him to Northwestern, at a time the university sought talented Black students – it was the break that changed his life.

Loury’s formidable intellect was evident immediately in Evanston. With an uncanny grasp of economics and its relationship to the real world, he quickly learned to communicate complex ideas to academic and lay audiences, both as a writer and speaker.

Moving to MIT and then Harvard, he became the youngest tenured Black professor of economics in the school’s history. Colleagues called him “the Black Paul Samuelson” (after the esteemed Nobel laureate) and a “once-in- a-decade talent.”

Then he diverted his attention to public policy, particularly the problems of the African-American community. He transferred from Harvard’s economic department to its Kennedy School of Government and began espousing conservative views on major policy issues including welfare and affirmative action. He believed these policies, while necessary during the 1960s civil rights struggles, were now less beneficial than their costs to Black Americans.

In his mind, welfare discouraged necessary Black self-help, while affirmative action, by lowering standards for minority students, could provide students a disincentive to excel and thereby justify the disparagement of their qualifications (“If I can be admitted with lower grades and lower scores why should I study so hard?”)

These heterodox views, especially coming from a Black man, made Loury attractive to key figures in the Republican Party during the Reagan revolution of the 1980s, while alienating him from many fellow Black academics, most of whom were Democrats.

His writings and speeches may have brought him to the attention of important conservatives, but one touching vignette has him describe his pain watching Coretta Scott King’s disappointment after hearing him speak.

Still under age 40, he attended a White House dinner, seated one person away from President Reagan – then the zenith of Loury’s career. Shortly afterward, he was tabbed for an influential and powerful position as William Bennett’s second-in-command at the U.S. Department of Education.

Ultimately, Loury was undone by his womanizing (his second wife, Linda, is a hero in the book for how she dealt with her husband’s infidelities.)

His rise in Washington ended with a very public fight with a girlfriend, after which he was arrested. Charges were dropped, but the attendant publicity made him a pariah in his intellectual circles.

A subsequent bout with crack cocaine and another arrest brought him to a career nadir. With a stay in rehab, the help of his wife and a return to religion, he eventually recovered and returned to the Republican think tanks where he originally found success.

However, he returned to a different world. The conservatives he once dazzled had become more strident and, to his mind, insensitive to the Black community.

He was openly critical of this and summarily ostracized. He returned to the Left but was turned off by their turn toward progressive politics; liberals cast him adrift as well.  Rare is the public intellectual who can alienate both sides of the political spectrum. But that was one of Loury’s gifts.

Much of the final section of the book chronicles Loury reconnecting with his family. Tribune columnist Laura Washington was instrumental in the poignant story of how he was reunited with his out-of-wedlock son.

Loury is currently a professor at Brown University and co-host, with Columbia University professor and New York Times columnist John McWhorter, of arguably America’s best podcast (sorry about that, J.K.). Though Loury’s travels have taken him to distant worlds, like any good Chicagoan, he speaks proudly of his roots here. As the saying goes, he is “a true Chicago original, flawed, but one of our best and brightest.”

(Posted with permission of the author. A different, longer version of this column ran on Spiked)

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Cory Franklin was director of medical intensive care at Cook County Hospital in Chicago for more than 25 years. An editorial board contributor to the Chicago Tribune op-ed page, he writes freelance medical and non-medical articles. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times, New York Post, Guardian, Washington Post and has been excerpted in the New York Review of Books. Cory was also Harrison Ford’s technical adviser and one of the role models for the character Ford played in the 1993 movie, “The Fugitive.” His YouTube podcast “Rememberingthepassed” has received 900,000 hits to date. He published “Chicago Flashbulbs” in 2013, “Cook County ICU: 30 Years of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases” in 2015, and most recently coauthored,  A Guide to Writing College Admission Essays: Practical Advice for Students and Parents in 2021. Dr. Franklin is the author of the forthcoming book, “The COVID Diaries 2020-2024: Anatomy of a Contagion As It Happened.”