Andrew Hacker, a scholar of political science who wrote a host of provocative books on education, race relations and what he called a growing chasm between women and men, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 96. <\/p>\n
His wife, Claudia Dreifus, said the cause was complications of stomach cancer.<\/p>\n
To say that Professor Hacker, who taught at Queens College for over 50 years, was a contrarian hardly captured the audacity of his attacks on conventional ideas. He declared that colleges were failing to educate students and that high school math was a waste of time. He called men selfish, and said a war between the sexes was intensifying. He argued during the Vietnam War that the United States was falling apart or ungovernable, or both.<\/p>\n
He wrote more than a dozen books and scores of book reviews and essays for The New York Times and The New York Review of Books, touching on the Kennedy family, Ronald Reagan, the national census, journalistic controversies, advertising, poetry, the cultural influence of movies, the terrors of the Internal Revenue Service and the joys of Marx and Lenin for beginners.<\/p>\n
Whatever the subject, Professor Hacker\u2019s ideas were usually iconoclastic and, to some, annoying. As he told visitors to his (now defunct) book website, themathmyth.net, \u201cI combine information, analysis and irritation, all intended to get readers thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reviewers fell into two camps over his books. Detractors called his statistical evidence questionable, his methodology dubious and his writing didactic and hyperbolic. But admirers found his prose eloquent, even passionate, in defense of women and minority groups, and said that his analyses, especially on racial issues, were persuasive and inventive.<\/p>\n
\u201cAndrew Hacker is a political scientist known for doing with statistics what Fred Astaire did with hats, canes and chairs,\u201d Newsweek said of his book<\/a> \u201cTwo Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal\u201d (1992). \u201cHe doesn\u2019t crunch numbers; he makes them live and breathe. But who would have thought that even Hacker could turn up a dollar figure for what it\u2019s worth to be born white? If you\u2019re curious, it\u2019s $1 million. A year. For life.\u201d<\/p>\n Professor Hacker had a surprise best seller in 1992 with \u201cTwo Nations,\u201d his examination of American race relations.Credit…Ballantine Books<\/p>\n Professor Hacker had extracted that number with a Kafkaesque parable he presented to his students: A government official visits a white student and tells him that at midnight \u201cyou will become Black,\u201d with dark skin and African American features, \u201cunrecognizable to anyone you know,\u201d although \u201cinside you will be the person you always were.\u201d The official offers compensation, and asks how much the student wants.<\/p>\n Most students, Professor Hacker reported, asked for $1 million for each year that they presented as Black.<\/p>\n \u201cTo be white is to possess a gift whose value can be appreciated only after it is taken away,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe money would be used, as best it could, to buy protection from the discriminations and dangers white people know they would face once they were perceived to be Black.\u201d<\/p>\n Tom Wicker, in a review<\/a> for The Times, noted that Professor Hacker had devoted five years of study and statistical analysis to \u201cTwo Nations\u201d \u2014 a surprise best seller in the wake of the Rodney King riots<\/a> in Los Angeles \u2014 and hailed the author\u2019s thesis that the United States had never given Black Americans \u201ca chance to become full citizens.\u201d But the conservative columnist John Leo<\/a> was not so laudatory, writing in U.S. News and World Report that \u201cHacker\u2019s prose reflects the ossified thinking of an older white liberal elite.\u201d<\/p>\n Professor Hacker\u2019s \u201cMismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Women and Men\u201d (2003), argued that the gender gap had become an abyss.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a greater divide between the sexes than at any time in living memory,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe result will be a greater separation of women and men, with tensions and recriminations afflicting beings once thought to be naturally companionable.\u201d<\/p>\n In \u201cMismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Women and Men,\u201d from 2003, Professor Hacker foresaw \u201ca greater separation of women and men, with tensions and recriminations afflicting beings once thought to be naturally companionable.\u201dCredit…Scribner<\/p>\n Michiko Kakutani, in The Times, called it<\/a> \u201ca glib, didactic book that uses sometimes dubious methodology to ratify women\u2019s worst fears about dating and marriage and the opposite sex,\u201d adding that Professor Hacker \u201cfocuses almost exclusively on those statistics that back up his thesis, presents the familiar or obvious with an air of revelatory zeal and glosses everything with speculative hyperbole.\u201d<\/p>\n Professor Hacker\u2019s more recent writings examined education. He collaborated with Ms. Dreifus, his partner (and later his wife) and a writer for The Times, on \u201cHigher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids \u2014 And What We Can Do About It\u201d (2010), in which they argued that colleges were failing their teaching mission because of encroachments from research commitments, tenure, athletics and other interests.<\/p>\n With a 2012 guest essay in The Times<\/a> \u2014 under the headline \u201cIs Algebra Necessary?\u201d \u2014 Professor Hacker touched off another lively debate. While acknowledging that basic math is a significant part of education, he said that nearly all high schoolers would never need algebraic algorithms in later life, and that many would fail the required subject and drop out of school in frustration. He proposed its elimination.<\/p>\n