Name Jerry Hough Role Political Scientist | Education Harvard University | |
 | ||
Books The Long Process of Develop, Democratization and Revolutio, Changing party coalitions, The Soviet prefects, The Soviet Union and social sci | ||
Jerry Fincher Hough (born 1935) is the James B. Duke Professor of Political Science at Duke University. Hough has taught at Duke since 1973; he previously taught at the University of Toronto and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he has served as a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution. Hough received his A.B., A.M. and PhD from Harvard University. He plans to stop teaching in 2016 and retire in 2018. He is the ex-husband of the Australian-American historian of the Soviet Union Sheila Fitzpatrick.
Hough's research has focused on domestic American politics, the Soviet Union, the democratization of Russia and American efforts at nation-building. Hough is a part of the "revisionist" school on Soviet history, maintaining that the level of terror was much exaggerated and that the Soviet Union was institutionally weak under Stalin, among other things.
In 2015, he was the focus of a controversy around his online comment to The New York Times article "How Racism Doomed Baltimore", in which he compared Asians and Blacks and criticized the latter's "lack of desire for integration" and "instead of working hard, only feeling sorry for themselves". He later publicized a letter to further explain his opinions, in which he claimed himself to be a true follower of Martin Luther King Jr. He has been on an academic leave in 2015 that is not related to the controversy.