If he is, I had one of these #&*(!%@# in grad school. All he proved was that he could do calculus and other math calculations on the board (applause) and that he was very imaginative.
At a Communist symposium thirty years ago (when dialectical materialism was still vibrant), the keynote speaker told a joke to begin his speech. He said, "A doctor and an economist were arguing about which science was the first to be created by God.
"The doctor asserted, 'God first created medicine, because he surgically removed a rib from Adam to make Eve.'
"The economist said, 'But economics existed long before that, because, if you recall...before God made anything, there was Chaos!'"
Naturally, the opening joke led to the point that through central control and with application of principles of dialectical materialism, chaos can be removed from economic systems. We now know, through the miracle of applied truth, that Communism was all doo-doo and that economics is not, as you stated, empirical.
All theoretical science loses exactness in application, due mainly, I think, to uncompensated variables. Social sciences are the worst, probably because they involve pesky, hypervariable humans. Yet this man seems willing to question the wisdom of the domain of ragingly fashionable black studies, and that is certainly a good thing.