Harvard students want ban on future racial superiority research after Richwine scandal

[alp227]

As the Boston Globe reports "Harvard students erupt at scholar's claim in thesis":

Harvard students, outraged over a doctoral dissertation arguing that Hispanic immigrants lack “raw cognitive ability or intelligence,” this week urged the university to investigate how the thesis came to be approved and to ban future research on racial superiority.

The students presented 1,200 signatures to president Drew Faust and the dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, David Ellwood.

“Academic freedom and a reasoned debate are essential to our academic community,’’ the petition said. “However, the Harvard Kennedy School cannot ethically stand behind academic work advocating a national policy of exclusion and advancing an agenda of discrimination.”

The thesis — “IQ and Immigration Policy,’’ by Jason Richwine, a former doctoral candidate at the Kennedy School — compared IQ scores of US residents, including immigrants from a variety of countries, and concluded that the scores of Hispanic immigrants were substantially lower than those of native whites. The paper argued that the United States should allow only immigrants with high IQs.

I'm of the view that free speech is for everyone, even bigots.

In a Globe interview Friday, Richwine lashed back at students pushing the petition, calling their demands to ban such research “worrisome and shameful.”

“I wonder what thoughts they would seek to ban in the future,’’ said Richwine, who said he stands by everything in his thesis. “This is a really worrisome idea here, that the students want to dictate what scholarship will be allowed at Harvard University.”

Ellwood, the Kennedy School dean, said in a statement that any views and conclusions by its graduates do not reflect the views of Harvard. He urged scholars and critics to engage in reasoned discussion and criticism after fully reviewing the work.

“All PhD dissertations are reviewed by a committee of scholars,’’ Ellwood said in the statement. “In this case, the committee consisted of three highly respected and discerning faculty members who come from diverse intellectual traditions.”

George Borjas, chairman of the Kennedy School’s Standing Committee on Public Policy, which accepted Richwine’s work, also defended the paper.

“Jason’s research was sound,’’ wrote Borjas, in an e-mail to the Kennedy School student newspaper, The Citizen. “None of the members of the committee would have signed off on it if they thought that it was shoddy empirical work.”

Richwine isn't the only scholar to encounter controversy over suggesting a race/IQ correlation. So did Charles Murray and (Richard Herrnstein) over their 1994 book The Bell Curve. And Satoshi Kanazawa in 2006 for suggesting Africa is in poverty because its residents have low IQs, to which PZ Myers responds: "I am not surprised that people could develop tests in the Western world, rush into a completely different culture (not to mention one distracted by serious internal problems), and find that the inhabitants do not respond to their tests with quite the due seriousness they do at home...When a test reports that a population of 75 million people is dominated by a cohort that is incapable of reading beyond the grade school level and is unable to understand geometry, I tend to be suspicious of the validity of the test, or of the conclusions about ability being drawn from it...So this guy thinks African populations, unlike, say, European populations, have not faced the challenges of “evolutionarily novel problems”? That on an evolutionarily significant timescale, selection has been working on Europeans to generate nearly 40 point differences in IQ from their ancestors, and more improbable still, these same forces haven’t applied to Africans? This is cartoon biology, free of any constraint by fact or theory."

Sorry, banning research isn't the way to go. It only empowers the persecution complex and makes the critics look bad. SHOW why such research falls off the scientific method.

[Buzz Clik]

1. "I'm of the view that free speech is for everyone, even bigots." Not to mention academic freedom.

Sorry, banning research isn't the way to go. It only empowers the persecution complex and makes the critics look bad. SHOW why such research falls off the scientific method.

Bingo. Well said.

ON EDIT: I'm guessing it's beyond coincidence that you live where you do and embrace those attitudes.

[johnp3907]

2. I agree with your take on this.

Fight this garbage with real science and honest research.

[dballance]

3. I Agree - No Banning Research. Even When I Find it Distasteful.

Let it be published and either be vindicated or doomed through contradictory research.

If institutions start to publish with a pattern of some sort then it will be noticed.

On Edit: By saying NO banning research I don't mean ALL research should be approved. There are, in particular, ethical guidelines when it comes to human and non-human subjects in research. There are such guidelines elsewhere.

[Democracyinkind]

4. I'm all for academic freedom, but

I would like to know how this particular thesis came to be approved when it contains such obvious unscientific racist bullshit. I'd never accept a paper containing such tracts - not to suppress scientific inquiry but to teach the difference between objective, scientific statements and racist hyperbole. The latter, by definition, can not be scientific in nature.

[LostOne4Ever]

5. Agree with you OP

Further, once we open the door to banning one line of thought we find repulsive we will also inadvertently open the door to banning needed research we agree with.

Shut the racists up by disproving them and making them look like the fools they are!

[Warren DeMontague]

6. Agree.

I understand being offended, but "banning" research is not the way to go. I suspect that additional research will do a fine job of discrediting this on its own.