Outspoken hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Harvard economist Roland Fryer have teamed up to offer the Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage, to honor “social scientists who face unjustified attacks.”

Fryer would know about that. From the Wall Street Journal:

One of us (Mr. Fryer) released a study in 2016—later published in the Journal of Political Economy—finding that police aren’t more likely to shoot black Americans than white Americans, after accounting for the relevant context. Colleagues who read the draft warned him not to publish: “You’ll ruin your career.” The paper was denounced on social media within minutes of release, and Mr. Fryer needed armed protection for more than a month. Privately, scholars who read the study called it rigorous, honest work. Publicly, many of the same scholars said nothing. No single study settles a question this large—but silence isn’t how science advances…

Over the past decade, Mr. Fryer has met with hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students—careful, talented, serious scholars—who came not to discuss what they had found but to ask whether they were allowed to say it. “Can I publish this?” has become a common question. So has “Can I say this in public?”

These students had results. They had run the regressions, conducted the robustness checks, and done the work. What they lacked was confidence that those results would be received as anything other than a provocation, with their motives impugned. Some buried the findings. Some chose different dissertation topics entirely. We can’t calculate the discoveries that never happened. The papers that were never written. The policies that were never corrected because someone decided the cost of honesty was too high. Deciding which answers are acceptable before the investigation begins isn’t solidarity. It is sentimentality. And sentimentality has never closed an achievement gap, reduced an infant mortality rate, or lifted anyone out of poverty.

“An Award for Scholars Who Tell the Truth,” September 7, 2026 Open access (scroll down the text) as of this date.

Ackman and Fryer omit to say here that the current censorship regime in social science protects entitled mediocrities from being shown up by clever students. Once they have declared a topic off limits for political correctness reasons, they are safe.

But if that continues, there is no reason to continue calling their discipline a science.

They offer $1 million each to up to five social scientists whose career-limiting work is validated by evidence. Selection criteria and process here. Scholars who think they may qualify had better hurry: Due date for this year is November 1, with the announcement in the spring of 2027.

Note: Here are FIRE’s academic freedom rankings for the year.