A Duke University political science professor has drawn controversy and an official rebuke for racial generalizations he made comparing African-Americans and Asian-Americans in response to a recent New York Times editorial.
Prof. Jerry Hough, 80, whose staff profile says he has served as a professor since 1973 at the private institution in Durham, North Carolina, posted a six-paragraph comment on May 10 on the Times website underneath an opinion piece from the previous day about Baltimore’s history of housing discrimination.
“This editorial is what is wrong,” wrote Hough. “The blacks get awful editorials like this that tell them to feel sorry for themselves.”
The holder of three degrees from Harvard University and author of 14 books, largely on Soviet politics, then said that Asian-Americans “worked doubly hard” even though they “were discriminated against as [sic] least as badly as blacks.”
He added, “I am a professor at Duke University. Every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration.
“The amount of Asian-white dating is enormous and so surely will be the intermarriage. Black-white dating is almost non-existemt [SIC] because of the ostracism by blacks of anyone who dates a white.”
Students, fellow professors and administrators immediately responded to Hough’s sentiments after local media outlets reported them on Friday. The professor has been on administrative leave for this entire year in the first year of a four-year retirement plan that will see him teach his last classes next fall and step down permanently in June 2018, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported.
Duke officials declined to comment on personnel matters at the school and noted that Hough was on planned leave well before the fracas over the comments. But they said they strongly disapproved of Hough’s views.
“The comments were noxious, offensive and have no place in civil discourse,” Michael Schoenfeld, Duke’s vice president for public affairs and government relations, said in a statement. “Duke University has a deeply-held commitment to inclusiveness grounded in respect for all, and we encourage our community to speak out when they feel that those ideals are challenged or undermined, as they were in this case.”
Duke University
Duke University political science professor Jerry Hough, 80, has served at the school since 1973, his staff profile says.
The school’s faculty policy does prevent administrative officials from censoring professors or disciplining them for their views as citizens, Schoenfeld added.
Public policy professor Don Taylor later repudiated Hough’s words in a blog post, referencing the April incident in which university officials said an undergraduate student now no longer enrolled there hung a noose from a campus tree, according to the student newspaper, The Chronicle.
“The students deserve better,” Taylor wrote. “And coming on the heels of the noose incident at Duke this [S]pring, and subsequent adjudication that concluded the act was caused by ‘a lack of cultural awareness’ this has been a very hard year at Duke for many black students.
“I just want to say to our black students that I am sorry, and that I am glad that you are at Duke.”
GERRY BROOME/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A file photo shows Duke University, where a professor’s online racial comments provoked an outraged response.
The student who brought attention to Hough’s comments by posting an image of them on a student Facebook group on Thursday night, Nelson Winrow, told the student publication that the views belied Hough’s stature among an elite group of tenured faculty at the university.
“Seeing a James B. Duke Professor of Political Science use his position at this institution as clout to make sweeping generalizations about a full 31 percent of the undergraduate population is painful,” Winrow wrote to the Chronicle in an email. “What Professor Hough said was ignorant to the experiences of the students he teaches, and his conduct shows a blatant lack of respect to large swaths of the Duke student body.”
Hough told the Daily News that he wished he could retract the words “every” and “nearly every” when referring to his students and replace them with the word “many,” but he didn’t express any larger regrets about posting the comments. He forwarded a detailed email he says he sent to one prospective student’s mother after she said she might not send her daughter to the school because of his comments, along with two chapters on racial politics and electoral demographics from his 2006 book, “Changing Party Coalitions: The Strange Red-Blue State Alignment.”
“I have been at Duke for 40 years and was a disciple of Martin Luther King in the 1950s,” Hough wrote to the mother. “I am very disappointed in the lack of progress that I have seen. So I think would Dr. King.”
DUKE POC CAUCUS
Officials at Duke University said an undergraduate who is no longer enrolled at the school hung this noose from a tree at the Bryan Center plaza last month.
Hough went on to say that Duke men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski’s experience fighting Polish stereotypes and raising a daughter who married an Italian-American also provides a helpful example for African-Americans. He cast blame for racial conflicts in part on a “lack of freedom of speech” and on the Times’ upper class and left-leaning audiences in places like Westchester in the New York City area and Marin County in California.
“I think the worst problem for blacks is the Westchester wing of the party, not the white middle and lower income who vote red,” he wrote. “I know there are blacks in the 20% of the population who own significant stocks, but for most of the black population I think the time has to focus more on the Asian experience and its lessons for them.”
“That is a debate we need, and I must write a book that opens it up.”
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