Professor Glenn Loury. Photo by Vernon Doucette

Loury, a professor in the BU Department of Economics and the University Professors Program, is well-known for his influential—and frequently controversial—writings on race and social policy in the United States. A self-described public intellectual, he has published not only books and scholarly articles but also essays in popular political magazines such as the National Review and the New Republic and in the op-ed pages of national papers like the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. He received the 1996 American Book Award for One by One, From the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America (Free Press), a book praised for the complexity of its considerations of race and poverty in this country. It was also celebrated by political conservatives, who found in the book’s paean to black self-reliance a forceful argument against affirmative action policies. “Mr. Loury emerges in this collection of elegantly thought-out essays as too complex and subtle a thinker to dwell in anybody’s pigeonhole,” Richard Bernstein wrote for the New York Times in 1995. “If there is an underlying theme in these essays, it is that too much effort is wasted in symbolic posturing, in adopting positions mainly to avoid giving comfort to the political or racial enemy. What the country needs, he maintains, is a hard, unsparing look at the central, perplexing, and emotion-laden problem of race and poverty in America.”

In recent work, as in his 2002 book The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Harvard University Press), Loury has continued to explore the ways in which public policy reproduces and institutionalizes racism—to raise questions and to begin to seek solutions.

In March of this year, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation selected Loury for a $235,000 grant to pursue his study of the political economics of race. The grant will fund the research and writing of two books and a research paper exploring topics of affirmative action, identity, race, and inequality. With Harvard economist Roland Fryer, Loury is working on a book about the economics of affirmative action. What Price Diversity? The Economics and Ethics of Affirmative Action Policies, to be written for a lay audience, will present an overview of economic theory while exploring what Loury calls “the myths and realities” surrounding affirmative action. The second book project, tentatively titled Social Analytics: Race, Inequality, and the Promise of Economic Theory, will be a collection of essays and scientific papers spanning his career. But the book is about more than economics. To frame the theoretical and social scientific works that make up the body of Social Analytics, Loury plans an autobiographical prologue and epilogue tracing his path from promising young economist to politically conservative public figure and, as he writes, “back again” to being a scholar of economics and race and a political liberal.

As a public intellectual, Loury has publicized ideas and theories that have shaped Americans’ private views and the nation’s public policy. Yet he declines to call himself an advocate. Instead, he describes his motivation as a kind of “prophetic mission” to raise difficult questions and challenge society’s conventional wisdom on race. “I feel myself as having a calling to try to tell the truth about how the way things are happening in society affect the way people think,” he says.

—Tricia Brick