Roland Fryer has recently been appointed as Henry Lee Professor of Economics on July 1, 2014. He was previously the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics.
Professor Fryer joins Professor Claudia Goldin in holding one of two Henry Lee chairs in Economics in the Department, as of this year.
The Henry Lee Professorship of Economics was established in 1901. Henry Lee’s widow, Elizabeth Perkins Cabot Lee and their three surviving children, Elliot Cabot Lee, Joseph Lee, and Elizabeth Perkins Shattuck contributed the initial endowment of $100,000 to fund the first chair in economics at Harvard. This followed shortly after the creation of the Department of Economics in 1897 under the division of History, Government, and Economics.
Joseph Lee described the intent of the initial donors to establish “a professorship of history of some other branch of social science, to be known as the Henry Lee Professorship, with such further designation as the President and Fellows may determine,” and he expressed the wish that “the person chosen to hold such professorship may have his duties as instructor made sufficiently moderate in amount to give him leisure to study and think and write and otherwise to become a master and leader in his subject.”
Henry Lee (1782-1867) was born in Beverly, Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard in 1836. Joining his father’s business, he went on to become a partner in the firm of Bullard and Lee, engaged in foreign trade as an “East India merchant, free-trade advocate, and widely reputed student of economics,” and also worked in banking through his cousin John C. Lee’s firm Lee, Higginson & Co. Henry Lee was an active and generous benefactor in his philanthropic support of and personal service to Harvard College, as an Overseer for 30 years, and also as a personal friend to Harvard President Charles Eliot.*
Others who have held the Henry Lee Professorship are:
Frank William Taussig 1901-1935
Edwin Francis Gay 1935-1936
John Donald Black 1936-1953
Wassily W. Leontief 1953-1975
Hendrik Samuel Houthakker 1976-1994
John Kain 1994-1997
Claudia Goldin 2000-present
Roland Fryer 2014-present
Roland G. Fryer, Jr. is Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, founder and faculty director of the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard, and a former junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows — one of academia’s most prestigious research posts.
Claudia Goldin is Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and director of the NBER’s Development of the American Economy program. Goldin is an economic historian and a labor economist. Her research has covered a wide array of topics, such as slavery, emancipation, the post-bellum south, women in the economy, the economic impact of war, immigration, New Deal policies, inequality, technological change, and education. Most of her research interprets the present through the lens of the past and explores the origins of current issues of concern. In the past several years her work has concerned the rise of mass education in the United States and its impact on economic growth and wage inequality. More recently she has focused her attention on college women’s achievement of career and family.
*William Bentinck-Smith and Elizabeth Stouffer. Harvard University History of Named Chairs: Sketches of Donors and Donations. Cambridge, MA: Office of the University Publisher, 1991.