Michael Eric Dyson is currently the Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of "Is Bill Cosby Right (Or Has The Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind)?"

Princeton Alumni Weekly recently ran a rather flattering feature on Dyson and his crusade against Cosby titled "The Street Smart Professor." Much more interesting, however, is the letter in this week's issue from Princeton University lecturer in politics Russ Nieli responding to the article on Dyson:

Critics of Bill Cosby like Michael Eric Dyson see in Cosby’s self-help and “get-your-act-together” message little more than the smugness and self-congratulatory arrogance of the successful black middle class. The Coz and his well-heeled supporters, they say, fail to recognize the enormous obstacles faced by today’s black poor, who continue to suffer because of institutional racism, structural changes in the economy, heartless Republican presidents, and the like.

While there may be a grain of truth in what Dyson and others like him have to say in this matter, their own message, which downplays personal responsibility and tends to blame the plight of poor people on forces entirely outside their control, is surely more destructive to the aspirations of the poor than the facile “pull-yourself-up-by-your bootstraps” message of their opponents. The reason for this was well stated by economic theorist Friedrich Hayek almost 50 years ago. “It is often contended,” Hayek wrote, “that the belief that a person is solely responsible for his own fate is held only by the successful. Its underlying suggestion ... is that people hold this belief [only] because they have been successful. I, for one, am inclined to think that the connection is the other way around and that people often are successful because they hold this belief. ... And if the smug pride of the successful is often intolerable and offensive, the belief that success depends wholly on [individual effort] is probably the pragmatically most effective incentive to successful action, whereas the more a man indulges in the propensity to blame others or circumstances for his failures, the more disgruntled and ineffective he tends to become” (The Constitution of Liberty, University of Chicago Press, 1960).

What Hayek says here has been confirmed by more than 25 years of social psychology research into what is sometimes called “self-efficacy” or “internal locus of control.” People who have a strong belief that their success in life (however defined) is determined largely by forces internal to themselves — forces such as determination, perseverance, hard work, etc. — are much better at seizing the opportunities that life accords them than people who believe that outside forces over which they have little control — such as luck, circumstances, “the economy,” or the malevolent powers that be — are the ultimate determiners of what they will become in life. The implication of this research is quite clear: Cosby’s message for the poor is ultimately more liberating than Michael Dyson’s.