Fredrik deBoer

Fredrik deBoer is an American author and cultural critic.

Education
DeBoer earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in English at Central Connecticut State University, Master of Arts degree in writing and rhetoric at the University of Rhode Island, and Doctor of Philosophy degree in English at Purdue University. His dissertation was titled The CLA+ and the Two Cultures: Writing Assessment and Educational Testing.

Views and career
DeBoer identifies himself as a "Marxist of an old-school variety".

DeBoer has written for magazines, newspapers and websites. Topics include American education policy, cancel culture, and police reform. He was the communications editor for Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy until 2017.

DeBoer's book, The Cult of Smart, was published in 2020 by All Points Books. Gideon Lewis-Kraus, writing for The New Yorker, says the book "argues that the education-reform movement has been trammelled by its willful ignorance of genetic variation." Lewis-Kraus groups deBoer with "hereditarian left" authors such as Kathryn Paige Harden and Eric Turkheimer in their shared emphasis on the importance of recognizing the heritability of intelligence when formulating social policy. Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of Current Affairs, strongly disputed the accuracy of deBoer's position, saying "the central argument of the book is not just wrong, but wrong in the strongest possible sense of that term. It is based on fallacious reasoning." His next book critical to individuals and institutions taking advantage of Black Lives Matter, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement (his preferred title being No Justice, No Peace, No Progress), was published in 2023.

DeBoer has been a teacher at both high school and college level.