Loury’s ‘Late Admissions’ is Right on Time

In his self-searing memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, Glenn C. Loury tells all in only the way he can. Loury’s singular journey from precocious young boy in Chicago’s South Side to one of the nation’s sharpest social critics doesn’t fit with many of the success narratives remarkable thinkers tell about themselves. You see, Loury’s account is brutally honest. From engaging in multiple extramarital affairs to smoking crack cocaine in his Harvard office, Loury doesn’t withhold the kind of details one might have if he wanted to present a more sanitized account of his life and career. And as he luridly shows, the challenges and personal temptations that emerged from childhood have haunted him ever since.

Loury was born in Chicago in 1948. After his mother shuffled him and his sister to different homes and put her other children up for adoption, Glenn’s aunt, Eloise, vowed to unite the clan under her roof. Aunt Eloise’s house in Park Manor, where little Glenn and his sister lived in an attached apartment with their mother, typified the stylishness and respectability that many in Chicago’s South Side exuded. Despite the difficult circumstances, these outward appearances symbolized the hopes and ambitions of black Americans seeking to pave their way to prosperity.

Throughout his memoir, Loury presents the reader with two versions: the cover story and the real story. Referring to the house he grew up in, “It is true,” he writes, “that Eloise’s house was a monument to an ideal for living.” However, “it is also true that in that house, our friend Boo-Boo’s father, a man suffering from mental illness and alcoholism, shot himself in the head as my horrified, helpless mother looked on.” Such stories illustrated the stark contrasts that defined black America in the 1950s and 1960s, when personal ambition often clashed with deep-set traumas that were never easy to shake.  

While struggling to pass his classes at a high-performing academy, he discovered that his girlfriend, Charlene, was pregnant. Soon, he dropped out of school and began working as a timekeeper at a printing plant. Not long after, Charlene gave birth to their second child, and Loury found himself in a situation resembling many of his own family’s struggles.  

Loury eventually returned to school, where he excelled in mathematics, earning him a scholarship to Northwestern. At this time during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Northwestern boasted one of the nation’s leading economics departments, where new mathematical and econometric techniques were being pioneered. Soon, Loury was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thanks to his success at Northwestern and his special mathematical abilities. At MIT, the economics profession was being reinvented. Nobel laureates Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Franco Modigliani, and Peter Diamond, among others, were revolutionizing the field, and Loury would have a front row seat.

Loury’s dissertation quickly earned him a place as one of MIT’s budding stars. “Essays in the Theory of the Distribution of Income” employs innovative mathematical techniques to demonstrate the importance of social networks (family, friends, etc.) in building critical labor market skills and traits. As Loury explains, “My idea is that human development is not just transactional. It’s not just people buying stuff in the marketplace. It’s also relational. It’s people interacting with one another inside networks.” These insights catapulted him into the upper echelon of the economics profession, and placed him in the center of the debate over race and inequality in America.

After a brief stint at Northwestern following his PhD, Loury began teaching and researching at the University of Michigan, where he expanded on his cutting-edge work exploring the intersection between social capital and racial disparities. He soon began traveling across the country giving lectures and consulting with representatives from the natural gas industry. But as Loury’s career took flight, his inner demons manifested themselves in ever less subtle ways. He started to invite companions with him to his meetings, searching for clever ways to obscure his infidelity to his girlfriend Linda. The more he engaged in deceitful activities, the easier it became for him to surrender to his passions.

After much consideration, Loury accepted an offer to teach at Harvard, becoming the first black tenured economics professor in the school’s history. The pressure to perform, combined with an expectation to solidify a unique identity, pushed him away from the economics department and into Harvard’s Kennedy School, where he could pursue a wider range of topics without the competitive intensity that infamously pervaded Harvard’s economics faculty.  

A stark paradox emerged from Loury’s newfound role as a conservative pundit on race. He could, for example, skewer many in the black community for their lack of personal responsibility, as he surfed a dark alley for some late night action. Whether he realized it or not, Loury’s private actions began to reflect the very patterns he publicly scrutinized in America’s black communities.

In the mid-1980s, Loury’s personal issues only escalated. He was embroiled in scandal after one of his lovers accuses him of assault (the charges are later dropped). To make matters worse, an affair intensified with a new love: crack cocaine. Pretty soon, Loury was thinking about how to procure and smoke the drug, but oddly enough, his research was rarely affected. Eventually, he was arrested and booked for drug possession, putting his Harvard position on thin ice.

After hitting rock bottom, he finally admitted himself into rehab, and then a halfway house, where he not only addressed his addiction, but his fixation with an overinflated ego he slowly built by flaunting all the rules. Slowly, he supplemented the rigidities of AA with the spiritual nourishment of Christianity. It would take many years, but Loury’s lifelong search for his own identity would be tied up in the very people he neglected: his family and community.

Through all his trials and relapses, Loury’s wife, Linda, stood by his side. And in 2003, when she was first diagnosed with cancer, he would stay with her until the very end. Linda Datcher Loury, a respected social economist in her own right, was the anchor that Loury so desperately searched for, and finally found. Cleaning out her office, he stumbled upon one scribbled book, with highlighted sections that clearly applied to his own transgressions. “She made a study of forgiving me,” he reflects.

Late Admissions is not an intellectual autobiography. It’s much more. It’s an open book. A personal odyssey of an economist who battles the very challenges he studies. Economists often get lost in abstractions. The theories of human behavior prove so alluring that economists lose focus of the real world. By coming to terms with himself, Glenn Loury gains a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing the same communities in which he was raised.

Where many economists model the world, Loury’s revealing admissions animate it. He shows that what makes a good economist or intellectual is their willingness to appreciate the very human qualities that drive the social sciences.

Concluding the book, he writes:

I cannot defeat the enemy within, not entirely. To do so would be to defeat myself; to deny my true nature. For now, we hold an uneasy truce, one that requires long negotiations to maintain. I have my strategies. But the game never ends.

Loury’s acceptance of his limitations is his greatest strength. Late Admissions is more than an economist’s confession. It’s a reflection of the triumphs and challenges we all experience.