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 April 21, the New York Times reported. He was 96.
"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," the Times wrote. "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."
"I combine information, analysis and irritation, all intended to get readers thinking," wrote Hacker, whose work included more than a dozen books, as well as book reviews and essays for the New York Times and the New York Review of Books.
Among his books are The End of the American Era (1970), Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (1992), Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Women and Men (2003), and The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions (2016). Hacker's more recent writings concerned education. He collaborated with Claudia Dreifus, his partner (and later wife) and a writer for the Times, on Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids--And What We Can Do About It (2010).
In an interview for his Times obituary in 2018, Hacker attributed his career choices largely to the influence of a professor at Amherst College, whom he did not name: "He was more than a role model. He was a human model. There is a whole lot about him inside me, in terms of character and personality, a certain cynicism perhaps, an inflection in the voice. In some portion, I became that person. He's why I became a teacher."
A political science major, Hacker graduated from Amherst in 1951, from Oxford with a master's degree in 1953, and from Princeton with a doctorate in 1955. He then joined Cornell as a lecturer, rose to full professor in 1966, and moved to Queens College in 1971.
His last book was Downfall: The Demise of a President and His Party (2020), an analysis of what he predicted would be the mutual self-destruction of Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party, the Times wrote, adding that at his death, "he was at work on a project about Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and their conflicting ideas about America's future."