May 18, 2013

Harvard students denounce academic freedom

From the Boston Globe:
Harvard students erupt at scholar’s claim in thesis
Thesis asserted Latino immigrants have lower IQs 
By Meghan E. Irons |  GLOBE STAFF     MAY 18, 2013

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.

Hey, it worked for Dr. Faust back during the Larry Summers imbroglio ...

136 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

And yet, it moves.;\

Beefy Levinson said...

I am quite certain all of the nice SWPL undergrads feel smugly superior to their superstitious witch burning Puritan ancestors too.

Anonymous said...

Mestizopheles will likely win the day...

Hunsdon said...

I would call it a micro-aggression, but it's worse, far worse than that. This happened on President Faust's watch. What did she know, and when did she know it? If she was unaware of these sorts of hatethought/hatecrimes, was it willing ignorance?

What had she done to ensure that these sort of things did not take place? She must have known that, even in the halls of Harvard, there were those who were cognitively discriminatory!

To what extent did she, whether through action or the failure to take action, foster a climate that encourages this sort of racialist heresy? Or was there some sort of devilish bargain struck? (Sorry, I had to go there.)

Kaz said...

Wow.. This is quite the reaction..

Nanonymous said...

...urged the university to investigate how the thesis came to be approved

I really hope that a thorough investigation is conducted and reveals how utterly non-controversial the thesis' finding are.

Svigor said...

This is absurd, of course. If we rounded up our stupidest Whites and sent them all to Mexico, and a Mexican wrote a paper about how stupid they were, would that be tantamount to arguing the racial superiority of Mexicans over Americans?

No, the Harvard Mafia and the Media-Gov't Complex would attack White Americans for encouraging their "disabled" to leave.

Anonymous said...

why don't those useful idiots all volunteer to have their IQ's lowered to that of the average mexican immigrant.

Victor said...

I suppose these disciples want to excommunicate the heretic. Blasphemy will not be tolerated in the Holy Church of Harvard.

Anonymous said...

This is a disgrace - this is shaping up to be the Scopes Monkey Trial 2.0. What's worse is that it's happening at Harvard. Perhaps this action is the single most searing indictment of intelligence testing I've ever seen. The SATs of these 1200 students would all be superlative, as would their IQs. That they would seek to impose to ban a line of inquiry they find unpalatable puts them on the same side of history as the Catholic church when they were against Galileo, the state of Tennessee in the Scopes trial, and yes, the Nazis.

I'd like to see those names and signatures published so that in ten years time or so these witch hunt inquisitors will have their reputations haunted for the rest of their lives. In general I have a strong sense that these people are on the wrong side of history. I mean, can anyone else think of an example where the truth was covered up after someone spoke out about it strongly and convincingly? What are the sort of lag times involved? It would be interesting to compare and contrast the different cases so that we might get some idea as to when the truth eventually emerges in our case.

Even in the Galileo case, it only took about a hundred years for the opposition from the church to subside, though the battle was presumably won in the popular mind before then. Certainly in the science community the battle was won far before then.

Anonymous said...

The Boston Globe article is lying. The thesis didn't claim hispanics "lack" ability, but that they score lower than whites on cognitive ability. I doubt the word "lack" is in the thesis.

Yan Shen said...

While Jason Richwine is vilified here in the United States, Singapore has more or less based its policies over recent decades upon the principle of cognitive elitism.

TangoMan said...

Seeing this kind of reaction just hurts my soul. To see such stupidity internalized makes me weep for the future.

When I see this kind of reaction I increase my respect for the power of propaganda. Show these same students this photo of North Koreans in emotional meltdown after the death of Living God Kim Jong-Il and they'd laugh at those simpletons for their devotion to their leader and for being bamboozled by such blatant propaganda. Hold up a mirror so that they can see their own enslavement to propaganda and they rush to break the mirror and denounce you for even suggesting that they're victims of propaganda, for they know the TRUTH and they don't have to even read the Richwine dissertation to know that they're right and he's wrong and evil.

These are our future leaders. The nation's brightest. An army of Manchurian candidates.

Art Deco said...

I will chime in here as a skeptic on the utility of IQ as an independent variable in describing economic phenomena. Just ask yourself the question:

1. How many of these petitioning youths have read the study?

2. How many could read it with any degree of critical engagement?

3. How many have looked at anyone's dissertation submitted at that university or anyone's outside the graduate students in a department in which they are enrolled?

4. How many of them are troubled that academe has provided considerable succor to Howard Zinn, Nicholas de Genova, Ellen Schrecker, William Chafe, Sarah Deutsch, and Ward Churchill?

--

Some stated views make no sense except as status markers.

David said...

Good for Ellwood and Borjas.

I conclude from this petition, though, that Harvard students are no wiser than poor community college students in the deep South.

It appears the Harvard creationists consist of grad students, not undergrads - but maybe this impression is false. Would be interesting to know, because undergrads aren't exactly an important voices at the Ivies. Is "Fernando Berdion, a Kennedy School masters candidate in public policy and spokesman for the students" just a frontman (sorry - frontperson; this is the post-Summers Harvard, after all). In other words, is he one scholar atop a mound of froshs?

UC Irvine to the rescue:

>"'Trying to force a genetic explanation onto the issue is not in accord with the evidence [...],' said Frank Bean, immigration scholar at the University of California at Irvine. He said he had not read Richwine's thesis."<

An immigration scholar who hasn't read (and possibly couldn't even grasp) Richwine's paper. Sure, these are serious people. [/sarcasm]

New Jack said...

http://www.policymic.com/articles/42871/fair-sentencing-act-are-crack-cocaine-laws-intentionally-racist

Fairness in sentencing folks.

Unknown said...

Banning IQ research is the least they can do. Harvard will surely follow up by not using IQ-type tests like the SAT in their admissions process anymore, right?

Anonymous said...

The troubling part is just how mind-bendingly dull Richwine's paper was. He literally could have written a 100 page dissertation arguing that 2 and 2 add up to 4, and not been any more boring.

And yet Harvard erupts in outrage.

Anonymous said...

When it goes quite like this I always figure there is a takimag article or something coming out. I'm usually right. Very, very occasionally Steve goes on holiday.

Auntie Analogue said...


Harvard students nailed their little tantrum nearly eighty years to the date - 10 May - in following their 1933 German forerunners in the burning of books.

Anonymous said...

On a side note about Harvard, I am reading a book about the mountain photographer Bradford Washburn, who was at Harvard's Institute of Geographical Studies.

His future wife asked the dean of Harvard Law School in the late 30's how come women can't go there. He said because they will take the place of a man who has to make a living.

How times have changed.

Luke Lea said...

The crowd psychology here is interesting. Collective denial and complete unwillingness to even look at the facts. The way orthodox dogma of the Catholic church and of many fundamentalist Protestant sects was enforced before modern times was a little different I think. For one thing there were no empirical issues of fact involved in most cases (excepting Galileo) but rather abstract theological ideas: whether God the Father and God the Son were of the same substance for instance. For another it was usually the church or state officials who punished public dissent not the laity -- though maybe Harvard students are more like future church and state officials in training.

And yet I must admit there are situations in which I myself would be emotionally up in arms if someone in a place like Harvard seriously advocated, say, denying certain racial or ethnic groups their full civil rights. In fact I was pretty upset by that "extreme pornography" public event held in SF that Conor Friedersdorf wrote about the other day. These things touch my amygdala just as surely as surely as what Richwine wrote touched theirs.




Matthew said...

Who/whom. The study of evolution should be allowed because it offends your religion, the study of racial differences in intelligence should be banned because it offends mine.

These people think they're better than the folks who opposed Scopes and Galileo, but they aren't, really.

Luke Lea said...

Here is an interesting paradox: If races differ in their various abilities then individuals will discriminate by race in a multi-racial democracy, whereas in a uni-racial democracy every person must necessarily be judged as an individual.

Porter said...

I can sympathize with the scholars chafed Harvard Crimson. Surely Black Studies majors must be in the furious vanguard of those denouncing the spurious concept of “race.” And who now wants to be holding a heretofore prestigious Ivy League degree in Gay Studies only to have it devibrantized by association with the Richwine thesis?

Look, young men and women of predetermined race and ethnicity attend Harvard to learn what is correct not what is true. You see those letters in the Harvard seal? PRO-PRI-UM

Hugh said...

YES YES YES

Harvard can really lead the way here by abandoning all IQ based criteria for admitting students. Anyone should be able to just turn up and sign up.

What a shining example that would be for all us Neanderthals!

Anonymous said...

"Mexico will be world's seventh economy, says Goldman's Brics guru Jim O'Neill"

http://www.centralamericalink.com/en/News/Mexico_will_be_world_s_seventh_economy_says_Goldman_s_Brics_guru_Jim_O_Neill/

"Mexico will be the seventh world economy by 2020, with 7.8 percent of the global gross domestic product, said Jim O'Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs, during his presentation at the Mexico Week in London.

According to O'Neill, who also created the Bric concept more than ten years ago, Mexico's gross domestic product will grow 3.6 percent in 2012, the same rate as Brazil's and by 2013, Mexico's economy will have grown 3.8 percent In eight years, Mexico's economy will be above those of Russia and India, O'Neill added."

Anonymous said...

Our future elite overlords don't like it when the truth is made obvious.

rightsaidfred said...

Well, the place started out indoctrinating the next group of clergy in the orthodoxy of the day.

I see they are going back to their roots.

kaganovitch said...

I'd be more impressed if students at harvard abdicated their own slot at harvard in favor of hispanic immigrants rather than abdicating some poor laborer's job in favor of hispanic immigrants

Anonymous said...

The Dark Days, they've only just begun.

Anonymous said...

Well, Dr. Faust made a deal with the Devil - and as always, the Devil comes back and claims what is 'rightfully his own'.

Anonymous said...

I'd bet that none of them are upset that terrorist Bill Ayers has a job working for a university, but hypocrisy is the sea these fish live in.

JSM said...

"While Jason Richwine is vilified here in the United States, Singapore has more or less based its policies over recent decades upon the principle of cognitive elitism."

Which explains why Yannie is here, not there.

Anonymous said...

You can't demand that serious scientific research is banned. That would be ignorant. So, we label serious scientific research something else, then we ban it.

Anonymous said...

The list of signatories is available here.

Anonymous said...

The list of signatories (link above) is easier to read if you download it as pdf (File/Download as). There are also comments from the signatories. A few examples:

Azum Ali, Graduate Student, Harvard Kennedy School:

another example of racially prejudiced research: the Belfer Fellowship awarded to Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, who has asserted time and again that Middle Eastern adherents of Islam are predisposed to anger and violence. I hope this movement takes a wider view of bigotry beyond Richwine.

Rene Gomez, Other, Harvard Kennedy school:

As an ethnic minority I am deeply distributed by this dissertation. Do not publish this piece of garbage.

Ilona Gerbakher, Graduate Student, Divinity:

next you'll be banning Jews from Harvard...oh, wait…

Diego von Vacano, Alumnus/Alumna, HKS1996

HKS needs new faculty hires that are sensitive to race/Hispanic identity immigration issues, not focus just quantitative skills.

Afroza Hossain, Graduate Student, HDS

Unacceptable… as unacceptable as inviting Ayaan Hirsi Ali to be a fellow at HKS.

Benjamin D. Fidler, Graduate Student,Harvard Law School

This is appalling and should not be protected under the guise of intellectual inquiry or academic freedom. This pseudo-scientific nonsense has no place in this great University.

Virginia Coklow (name at graduation Virginia Ravenscroft), Alumnus/Alumna, Harvard College:

Racism based on IQ has been thoroughly discounted scientifically and academically. Accepting this dissertation is like accepting a dissertation based on any other completely disproven theory. Even if it were not morally reprehensible it would just be embarrassing on academic grounds. What's next, a dissertation based on the possibility that maybe the earth is flat after all?

Silvia Rodriguez, Vega Graduate Student, HGSE:

THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE! AND DISCRIMINATORY SCHOLARSHIP!

Anne Kalt, Graduate Student, Harvard Medical School:

This is horrifying. It makes me feel ashamed for my school. All of the above requests should be met immediately to maintain the integrity of the institution we call our academic home.

Claire Elizabeth Whelen, Graduate Student, Harvard School of Public Health

Please explain how such work could ever be accepted by Harvard. It is completely unacceptable.

Esther Silberstein, Graduate Student, Harvard Law School:

While I hesitate to sign a petition that calls for academic censorship, the dissertation seems to be not only provocative in its anti-immigration agenda, but also severely lacking in its level of scholarship and academic rigor.

Herbert Castillo, Undergraduate Student, Harvard College:

Completely outraged at the fact that Harvard was not critical about this. I demand a public apology.

Anna Fetter, Graduate Student, Harvard Graduate School of Education:

As a Mohawk woman at Harvard University, I am deeply saddened that Harvard tacitly condoned and approved of this.

Anonymous said...

This feels like the 1960s or something. Or 1800s - I vaguelly recall that some Victorian lady commented on Darwin, (quoting from memory here) "let's hope it isn't true, but if it is true, then let's hope it doesn't become generally known."

JohnC said...

A very important point which Larry Auster often spoke of: Equality of IQ of all races is the key premise for demonstrating white racism. Why do blacks have much lower income than whites? Since we know, for a fact, that they have exactly the same IQ and ability as whites, the only possible explanation is white racism/privilege. In other words, equal IQ isn't just about raising up black and brown people -- it's a incredibly powerful tool for enforcing white guilt. The Cultural Marxist left isn't going to give that tool up without a ferocious fight.

Larry's entry on this topic:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/019843.html

Anonymous said...

It seems likely that America will sooner rather than later get a European-style hate crimes regime where many things now protected by the First Amendment are criminalized. The current establishment has little tolerance for thoughtcrimes and the future one will have even less, as demonstrated by this petition.

Half Sigma once suggested that the traditional support for free speech by the American left is a remnant of McCarthy era persecution of communists. The European left has no such love for free speech, and has no compunctions about persecuting thought criminals. As the leftist hegemony in America gets more total, the power of the government will be increasingly used to stamp out heretical thoughts.

Unknown said...

This at Harvard fight over Jason Richwine's work looks to me like a fight between the adherents of orthodox and degenerated technocracy. The degenerated technocrats want Richwine's work to be cast onto the bonfire because it disturbs the peace and endangers the one-world project. Orthodox technocrats say that IQ data matters and that, if the United States is going to feed useful human resource inputs into its economic machine, these human inputs should be sorted, graded and excluded based on this IQ data. The orthodox technocrats argue the view common at Harvard circa 1933 and the degenerated technocrats argue the common Harvard view circa 1983. The orthodox technocrats are arguing the position favoured by the industrialists before the Second World War and the degenerated technocrats are repeating the feelings-based one-worlder arguments of the postwar era *.

Orthodox technocrats say "we must feed the economic machine scientifically graded human resource units in order to keep it running and growing" and the degenerated, or propagandised technocrats say "we need to make sure the human resources units already imported here get along. They must be treated equally no matter what. We have been instructed to do so."

Degenerated technocrats want to buy the world a Coke while orthodox technocrats want to sell them one. That's the big difference between them.

Most of us who visit this site are neither kind of technocrat and see our countries as more than giant economic machines; even if we also believe IQ tests do measure something real and have value for that reason. So people who see their countries as neither a giant labour camp or a giant kindergarten can stand back a bit from this technocrat versus technocrat squabble. Facts are still facts though and facts still matter. Immigration policy still matters too.


* Note: See the 1946 propaganda cartoon "The Brotherhood of Man" for details. It was made mostly to encourage white and black auto workers to try to get along with one another. This was intended for the "little people" but has crept all the way up to the level of Harvard as the decades rolled on. That's how the technocracy became a degenerated technocracy.

JohnC said...

A classic example of IQ equality being leveraged to charge white society with rampant racism. From a master of the art, Tim Wise:

"I asked her [a black conservative girl], as I would anyone on the right, how she would explain the persistent racial disparities between whites and people of color, if she rejects (as the right does, and as she admitted she did), the notion that racism and discrimination, either past, present, or a combination of the two, were largely to blame.
At no point did she even try and answer my question, because like most conservatives, she cannot; at least not without sounding incredibly racist in the process. Because the only possible answer, if one rejects the discrimination thesis as an explanation for ongoing and glaring disparities in income, wealth, education, and elsewhere between whites and black folks, is inherently racist: namely, that those persons of color must in some way be inferior, either biologically or culturally, relative to whites."
http://www.timwise.org/2013/02/hearing-no-evil-the-amazing-obtuseness-and-ignorance-of-campus-conservatives/

Anonymous said...

Tell them that George Borjas (Richwine's thesis adviser) also used data from AFQT which shows group differences in IQ (AFQT is an IQ test).

Meandering Phil said...

Doesn't Jason know that academia is supposed to only pretend to be interested in discovering the truth, not actually finding it and publishing it when it pertains to minorities? Doesn't Jason know that brown skinned people are more naturally just more talented, good, and wiser than those evil white people who stole everything and all their ideas from people of color? White men eat their babies, smoke sulfur, and make blood sacrifices to the ancient Babylonian deities. How could they possibly be brighter than Hispanics?

Francis said...

Veritas, huh? Might as well change the motto while you're at it, then.

Howard K. said...

"I don't think providing smart potential immigrants educational access is something we must unquestioningly be taxed to pay for and must "bear any burden" to provide."

Exactly. Right now, we are paying to put the children of illegal Hispanics through college who got in more easily than the descendants of native born whites who built this place from nothing, and who bled to defend it. We are giving those children of illegals more access to scholarships, opportunities and programs on college to enrich their time there and provide them with better opportunities after they leave. Opportunities they are more likely to squander, in an education they are more likely to fail. Its obscene. Harvard has just damned itself once again as being on the wrong side of history.



"I conclude from this petition, though, that Harvard students are no wiser than poor community college students in the deep South."

I'd say they are less wise than those community college students. The community college students are there to either save some $$$ by doing a couple of years at a lower priced college before transferring to a better place to finish out a BS and get the credentials, or else they are at community college to get an associates degree for a skilled trade to have a more secure future than the Queer studies and Art History majors these nuthouses turn out.

Anonymous said...

Professor Faust was spotted shortly afterwards going over the petition with her poodle, which has the odd habit of standing on two legs. Just another one of those sights that helps to define the Crimson experience.

Anonymous said...

I believe the intellectual energy of the Stevosphere is somewhat misdirected. Many assume that the public knows and understands the facts about IQ and race, and focus on meta-explanations such as social-psychology.

You also have an absurd amount of effort wasted discussing the role of Jews in this. If you read the petition, there are few obviously Jewish names, and lots of Hispanic, Asian and Anglo names. The core problem is egalitarian blank-slate liberalism. For various reasons, Jewish intellectuals are worse when it comes to being infected by and spreading this virus, but Jewishness is not the core of the problem (and even it were, what can we do about it?).

What is central is that a large percentage of the public, including Harvard students genuinely believe that science has proven:

• Race is a social construct. Hispanics do not exists as a race.
• IQ test do not measure intelligence, or are severely biased against minorities
• Jason Richwines thesis was shoddy and full of errors.
• Flynn, Nisbett and Gould have proven that there are no race differences in IQ.
• Limiting immigration based on IQ is Eugenics=Hitler=Genocide. This one is just soft-thinking but important and disprovable.

Why do they believe this? Because there is sufficiently ambiguity for the elite to distort the truth, and because you have literary hundreds of articulate researcher and pundits claiming this aggressively.
Their only weakness of the elite is their identity requires a large percentage of them to operate whiting the bounds of reason and facts to some extent.

Sitting here and philosophizing about why they intentionally lie is a waste of time. If you read the petition anonymous linked to, many of the students base their claims on specific (false but on their face reasonable) critiques of the thesis.

There is probably no place on earth with more people able to prove these fallacies wrong than Steve’s comment section. What I try to do is go to the comment sections and fight back. The problem is numbers.

I which more of the time and effort was directed from meta-discussion of why we are losing the fight (Jews, which-hunt psychology etc.) to the actual fight, which is still ongoing. We would still probably lose, but leave a bitter aftertaste in their months.



Anonymous said...

Drew Gilpin Faust's real name is Catherine Drew Gilpin. Why is a heterosexual woman (she's married) choosing to use a man's name rather than a perfectly good woman's name (Catherine)? This tells me a lot about Harvard right there ...

Luke Lea said...

In trying to understand this phenomenon I've been doing a little research on old New Left sociologist C. Wright Mills and his concept of "the cultural appratus" which readers of this blog (and its author) might be interested in. What is the cultural apparatus? Mills defined it this way:


"The cultural apparatus is composed of all the organizations and milieux in which artistic, intellectual, and scientific work goes on and of the means by which such work is made available . . . it contains an elaborate set of institutions: of schools and theaters, newspapers and census bureaus, studios, laboratories, museums, little magazines and radio networks. . . Inside this network, standing between men and events, the images, meanings, and slogans that define the worlds in which [we] live are organized and compared, maintained and revised, lost and cherished, hidden, debunked, celebrated. Taken as a whole the cultural apparatus is the lens of mankind through which men see; the medium by which they report and interpret what they see."


Under the Orwellian maxim that those who control the cultural apparatus control the world, New Leftists in the Sixties made it an integral part of their proposed march through the institutions, in which they have largely succeeded. What they did not foresee was how this apparatus could be shared with the right and co-opted by the moneyed interests in society, leading to America's new manufactured consensus of which these goings on at Harvard are but one manifestation.

Anyway, here is a link to some quick notes I put together on the subject. I wish Steve would take this up and write an article about it as only he knows how to do.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PpXlgtV19fbSTHgO-PP6aYvrqf3upgCqXqxDxwFXyYM/edit?usp=sharing

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...
The list of signatories is available here.


The comments left by them are sometimes pretty funny.

Elizabeth Quintero Osuna writes, "I will not sit by while history repeats itself" -- in other words, "I'm going to join in on the book-burning."

Ruthzee Louijeune writes, "another example of racially prejudiced research: the Belfer Fellowship awarded to Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, who has asserted time and again that Middle Eastern adherents of Islam are predisposed to anger and violence. I hope this movement takes a wider view of bigotry beyond Richwine." You mean the Ayaan Hirsi-Ali who is under constant security due to countless death threats from angry, violent Middle Eastern adherents of Islam?

Rene Gomez weighs in: "As an ethnic minority I am deeply distributed by this dissertation. Do not publish this piece of garbage. " I thought it could be easily discredited?

Ilona Gerbakher opines: "next you'll be banning Jews from Harvard...oh, wait..." Jews are very oppressed at Harvard, and surely banning them is a natural consequence of Richwine's findings.

These were just the first couple comments listed. I thought Harvard people were supposed to be smart?

Svigor said...

Whups, wrong thread, sorry bout that.

Dan Kurt said...

re: "These [Harvard Students] are our future leaders. The nation's brightest. An army of Manchurian candidates." TangoMan

They may be our future leaders and an army of Manchurian candidates but they are not the Nation's brightest. Harvard has permitted affirmative action to dilute its student body for decades: women, backs and browns have replaced brighter male whites and North asians. The same is true of all the other Ivys and non-Ivy top tier universities.

Dan Kurt

Dan Kurt said...

re: "Harvard will surely follow up by not using IQ-type tests like the SAT in their admissions process anymore, right?" unknown

SATS probably are not as important to Harvard's admission policy as you are implying.

1) SATS are no longer significantly g-loaded. The analogies content has been jettisoned. Mensa does not consider recent decade's SATS in considering membership. SATS can now be gamed by tutoring whereas IQ tests can't be.

2) My nephew, now in medical school, was wait listed by Harvard in spite of perfect SATS ( 800 v., 800 q., and A+ essay) and an impressive extra curricular record including being editor-in-chief of his H.S. newspaper. He did not get into Harvard but three of my nephew's acquaintances did: a female and two blacks none of whom had anywhere near his intellectual credentials.

Dan Kurt

Henry Canaday said...

Young people have fast processors and empty hard drives.

kaganovitch said...

considering the subject and the representation of jews at harvard in student body and perhaps even more so in "harvard community" it is heartening to see so low a proportion of jewish names in this petition (I make it 80 +/- out of 1000).Perhaps the tide is turning?

Pat Boyle said...

I think back on what I did and what I thought when I was college undergraduate - and I am appalled.

Many dictatorships suppress college students. They close the schools in time of political crisis. Sounds about right to me.

I'm trying to think of a major social advancement that was led by college students. Bill Gates and Michael Dell had to drop out of college in order to make their contributions.

This headline seems catchy because it is Harvard. Presumably had it said "Marysville Community College students denounce academic freedom" no one would have bothered to read the article. So we must think that the ideas of Harvard students are important.

Are they?

Albertosaurus

Cail Corishev said...

His future wife asked the dean of Harvard Law School in the late 30's how come women can't go there. He said because they will take the place of a man who has to make a living.

Just yesterday, I ran across a discussion where someone claimed that the house in The Brady Bunch was obviously ridiculously large, because a single income -- even the white-collar income of an architect -- could never support a stay-at-home wife, a large family, and a nice two-level home.

But at that time, before women inflated the workforce and drove down wages, a man with a good middle-class job certainly could do just that. My own grandfathers and great-uncles did it as farmers, builders, and small businessmen, with nary a one-percenter among them. Those were the kind of families all those suburbs were built for. We gave that away, and a generation later people think it's an impossible dream.

You'd think we'd have learned that adding millions of extra people to a workforce that has no demand for them isn't a good thing.

Anonymous said...

Harvard is like the Medieval Church, and many of its students not nearly as educated as their age counterparts who've been raised on farms and who rely on their observations to teach them about biology and yes, evolution.

Anonymous said...

Just goes to show you can be high IQ and uneducated. That a place like Harvard has failed to educate is, well, damned predictable, actually.

Their profs should be picketed. You can't do anything about this nonsense until you go after them.

Bobbye said...

Wow, an old fashioned church fight. You iSteve guys of the Fundelmentalist Church of Evolutionary Realism just can't stand how the Kennedy School grads of th High Church of The Cusp of Evelutionary Utopia interpret the Sciptures. Each group is so sure that they are the True Bearers of the Sacred Truth. Yes, church fights as fun to watch, as long as no one has a sharpe stick.

Cail Corishev said...

Mexico will be the seventh world economy by 2020, with 7.8 percent of the global gross domestic product, said Jim O'Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs, during his presentation at the Mexico Week in London.

Good for them. Sounds like they're going to need all the workers they can get, to fill all the jobs created by such a fast-expanding economy. We should be good neighbors by not stealing those people.

Anonymous said...

Seeing this kind of reaction just hurts my soul. To see such stupidity internalized makes me weep for the future.

These are our future leaders. The nation's brightest. An army of Manchurian candidates.


I don't disagree with you that the future is bleak, but I don't find the petition troubling yet. If it reaches 25% of the student body, then we'll know that the end is near.

Let me put it into some context. Most of the signatories have Spanish surnames and most of the rest can be assumed to be good friends of the first group. Each probably felt some level of peer-pressure or ethnic obligation to sign it. Also, I doubt many would sign such a ridiculous petition if they thought signing it would bring negative consequences in their personal lives. Also, many SWPLs can be convinced to sign ANY petition.

David said...

PULLING UP THE LADDERS DEPT.

Four out of 5 high-IQ elitists agree:

There is no such thing as IQ! And even if there were, it shouldn't be used (anymore) as a qualification for anything. That would be wrong, wrong, wrong.

Ambacti said...

The list of signatories seems to consist predominantly of Hidalgo-Americans. They probably realize that Richwine's thesis undercuts the imperative for affirmative action, of which they have been the primary beneficiaries.

Dear Abbott Lawrence Lowell said...

Their behavior is rational... Hvd is a social credential, they paid a lotta $$$ or shivved their way through armies of preppies to get there. They can't trade on the name so effectively if it's associated with Racism. See: Duke lax barbarians

Laguna Beach Fogey said...

They shove the MultiKult down our throat--and we can't even discuss it.

The more they suppress inquiry like this, the more likely it is that popular reactions to their race-replacement and third world colonisation schemes will emerge in ways they will be unable to control.

Anonymous said...

I'm wondering who these students are who have time to protest. When I was at Harvard it was a daily grind of problem sets, labs, and library research. Foremost on my mind was my next gig: graduate school. I had one extracurricular activity to relieve the pressure and enjoy some social life. The whole experience seemed to fly by in the blink of an eye. It was the eve of the Reagan era and I don't recall a single protest about anything. The only activism I personally witnessed was Ron Unz in a shabby coat debating members of the Spartacus Youth League outside the Freshman Union.

Anonymous said...

why don't those useful idiots all volunteer to have their IQ's lowered to that of the average mexican immigrant.

Well, if they just did a dime at Harvard, it certainly didn't raise their IQs. 97% graduation rate, homes

Anonymous said...

Ha. I should have scrolled down to the last post before I commented. Indeed, this is a document mostly endorsed by graduate students, the majority of whom are Hispanics, presumably in ethnic studies vanity departments. Grad students at Harvard have no juice, whatsoever. They are invisible and the administration doesn't care what they think.

Hacienda said...

Big Brains turn into Physical Cowards.

Tis always been, tis always will be.

Anonymous said...

***I mean, can anyone else think of an example where the truth was covered up after someone spoke out about it strongly and convincingly? What are the sort of lag times involved?***

Aristarchus of Samos first proposed the heliocentric model about 1,800 years before Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. So....there's that.

Anonymous said...

The comments by the people who signed that petition are just sad. They read like arguments of brainwashed teens. I really need to just stop reading about this controversy. It's bad for my soul and makes me weep for my country.

Sword said...

Going through that list, I note that 31 of the first 100 signatories have names that sound like non-Hispanic, non-jewish names.

Either it means that the minorities are a majority of Harvard people, or it means that the majority group is somewhat resistant to groupthink.

Anyway, someone should download that list, and shame them with it in years hence. Might have some chilling effect.

Anonymous said...

IQ Haiku

Smart people at Harvard
Say we are all equal.
How retarded is that?

Mr. Anon said...

I second Hunsdon: we can all at least hope that Drew Gilpin Faust will be forced from her job over this scandal. It would serve her right.

jody said...

"Mexico will be the seventh world economy by 2020, with 7.8 percent of the global gross domestic product, said Jim O'Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs, during his presentation at the Mexico Week in London.

According to O'Neill, who also created the Bric concept more than ten years ago, Mexico's gross domestic product will grow 3.6 percent in 2012, the same rate as Brazil's and by 2013, Mexico's economy will have grown 3.8 percent In eight years, Mexico's economy will be above those of Russia and India, O'Neill added."

none of this is accurate. some of it is wildly wrong. does anybody check numbers or run numbers on this stuff besides me?

acedemick standurds said...

H can revoke that doctorate right after they get around to rescinding the various Kennedys' fraudulent certs. Hell, BU should cancel Martin Luther King Jr.'s plagiarist Ph.D. too, just to restore trust to these supposedly important institutions.

kudzu bob said...

HG Wells famously remarked that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. Who knew that it would end in a tie?

Anonymous said...

" Anonymous said...
The list of signatories is available here." Interesting. I wonder how many of the mostly foreign sounding names on the list were "holistically" granted admission, i.e., displaced better qualified white males as per Ron Unz's recent article.

Anonymous said...

I am quite certain all of the nice SWPL undergrads feel smugly superior to their superstitious witch burning Puritan ancestors too.

What are you talking about? One-third of Harvard undergrads are Jews. The other two-thirds are primarily NAMs and foreigners. I doubt descendants of Puritans even make up fifteen percent.

Anonymous said...

Flash!

Students at Harvard shocked, shocked to learn there is such a thing as intellectual discrimination.

ben tillman said...

3. How many have looked at anyone's dissertation submitted at that university or anyone's outside the graduate students in a department in which they are enrolled?

This reminds me of Jacob Neusner's scathing review of Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners":

A revised doctoral dissertation accepted for the Ph. D. at
Harvard University in the field of Political Science, this
hysterical book, full of pseudo-scholarship and bad arguments,
calls into question the scholarly integrity of Harvard's
doctorate. For the three named Doktorvater, Stanley Hoffmann,
Peter Hall, and Sidney Verba, have accepted as a contribution to
learning what in fact adds up to little more than a rehash of
familiar anti-German prejudices, dressed up with a year of
archival research on some special cases and problems....

Let me (as a Harvard alumnus, class of 1954) show what I think
takes place in this book by giving another case of the same mode
of argument by appeal to a handful of examples -- but now having to
do with the standards of excellence demanded at Harvard for a doctoral dissertation. Ought we not to argue that the very corrupt character of intellectual life at Harvard University defines the precondition for the acceptance of such remarkably overblown rhetoric for a doctoral degree? Should we not speculate -- with a suitable array of episodic examples to prove our case--that an institution full of ambitious, bitter, prestige-hungry, headline-hunting careerist, academic
entrepreneurs alone can account for such a travesty of learning?
Here is a Harvard professor and the Harvard-educated son of a
Harvard professor -- the very chosen, the elect, the prince of the realm: does he not reveal the quality of the entire aristocracy
of scholarship that Harvard tells us it supplies to the USA? No,
I do not think any reasonable person can agree that he does. But were we to mount such an argument and conduct such a speculation, then we should replicate the mode of argumentation that fills and
disgraces the pages of this work.

Anonymous said...

I was editor of a local Mensa newsletter, around 30 years ago. One very common topic of discussion was, what on earth is i.q? The only common view was, it was a score on a test. There seems to be little correlation with life performance and i.q. In fact, most persons qualified for Mensa on the planet work as manual laborers of some sort.

Test scores will depend upon a person's native language vs. the language the test uses. Not having access to the thesis, I cannot say if Richwine eliminated this as a variable.

However, based on personal circumstances, much more can be said. I live in Mexico, and know immigrants, legal and illegal, in large numbers. I happen to like them. Voluntarily, I do not see other Anglos for months at a time. So, any claim of personal racism withers and dies on the vine very fast.

For a very long time, until large numbers of them were raised without the influence of a father, white males pretty much dominated the creative and productive worlds. So, why is it impossible that genetics makes the difference? Is it purely coincidence that most modern technological and medical improvements in the 20th Century were implemented by Caucasian societies?

Living in the Mexican culture for some years I can say the culture is not conducive to great science and math. We are products of our personal cultures. Middle class kids tend to be formed with middle class values. Mexican kids tend to be formed with Mexican values. I don't see the environment of logic and theory one sees in STEM families, which produces STEM students. What I see are "pluggers" in the best families. Young students who study hard, memorize and regurgitate (sort of like most doctors.) But, not much creativity and inventiveness. Nor much of logic and Sherlock Holmes curiosity.

My own feeling is the difference is cultural. I cannot prove it, but to say one cannot even investigate the topic is pretty much like telling Copernicus he must not question Earth as the center of the Universe. We expect better of institutions like Harvard. Fie upon those who signed the petition.

Anonymous age 71

Anonymous said...

The signatory list appears to be roughly 50% Hispanic, probably 10-15% Jewish, and maybe 20% other non-White. Whites seem to be only 20% of these objectors. But that's just a quick eyeball of the first few names.

I'd love to see this list broken down into likely race, gender, school, and graduate/non-graduate status. It would be interesting.

Anonymous said...

A casual skimming of the list revealed mainly conquis, Subcontinentals, and Asians, with a smattering of Ashkenazi, German and British surnames. The best one belonged to awoman who appears to be a "Native American" scholar; Landwehr, from the German for territorial army. Way to defend your ancient tribal homeland, Ms. Proud Eagle.

- The Judean People's Fron

Anonymous said...

Steve linked to John Horgan's Scientific American article about the Richwine affair before. At the time Steve didn't quote the following. Did Horgan add it to the article later?

"*Clarification: Some readers may wonder what I mean by “ban,” so let me spell it out. I envision a federal prohibition against speech or publications supporting racial theories of intelligence. All papers, books and other documents advocating such theories will be burned, deleted or otherwise destroyed. Those who continue espousing such theories either publicly or privately (as determined by monitoring of email, phone calls or other communications) will be detained indefinitely in Guantanamo until or unless a secret tribunal overseen by me says they have expressed sufficient remorse and can be released."

The Guantanamo and "overseen by me" parts imply irony. But earlier in the article, when he first brought up banning, he wrote "I don’t say this lightly". So which is it? The capacity for consistency has got to be correlated with intelligence, by the way.

Post-Postscript: Scientific American has just published two excellent article on “stereotype threat,” which is a kind of reverse placebo–or “nocebo”–effect; victims of negative stereotypes may underperform because they believe the stereotype. See here and here. Some clever critics of my post might accuse me of hypocrisy, because these articles present esearch on race and and should be subject to my proposed ban. Obviously I’m trying to eliminate research that reinforces rather than counteracting racism. I mean, Duh.

Here he again seems serious. Of course, the stereotype threat idea is an attack on whites. The promotion of this false idea reinforces anti-white racism. He does seem serious about banning - not racial animus in general of course, only its white-on-non-white varieties. But when asked how it would be implemented, he gave a nasty, flippant, but seemingly non-serious answer.

Rubber Mallet said...

Some of the comments from the petition are laughable and depressing.
"Another example of racially prejudiced research: the Belfer Fellowship awarded to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has asserted time and again that Middle Eastern adherents to Islam are predisposed to anger and violence."
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-Dutch feminist, wrote the screenplay for the 2004 short film "Submission", which highlights abuse of women in modern Islam. The director, Theo Van Gogh was assassinated by an adherent of Islam shortly afterwards.

"I have yet to read the entire dissertation..."
Don't worry, it doesn't seem like anybody else on the petition has and it clearly hasn't stopped you from signing the petition anyway.

"Harvard cannot endorse racist pseudoscience"
Then write a dissertation proving Richwine wrong, with statistics and other empirical data. A petition banning non-conformist thinking is pseudoscience. Just because, as Rene Gomez puts it: "As an ethnic minority I am deeply disturbed by this dissertation", is simply not an excuse to ban statistically sound research.

Probably my most favourite comment "next you'll be banning Jews from Harvard...oh, wait..."
Poe's law strikes again.

Anonymous said...

The list of signatories is overwhelmingly comprised of HKS students. The undergraduates on it seem to be disproportionately Latino (I would guess that it was forwarded to Fuerza Latina and the other Hispanic cultural society mailing lists). Most undergrads would have been too busy moving out for the summer to have taken notice, if they'd care in the first place.

Dave Pinsen said...

"While Jason Richwine is vilified here in the United States, Singapore has more or less based its policies over recent decades upon the principle of cognitive elitism"

Has it really? Singapore has had a pretty liberal immigration policy, IIRC, and, if memory serves, discussion of race or religion has always been taboo. You don't really need to talk about race if you don't have race based preferences.

hbd chick said...

@anonymous - "Did Horgan add it to the article later?"

yes, he did. which is now confusing people, of course -- makes it look like he was kidding from the start. =/

kaganovitch said...

According to my count only 80 +/- jewish names out of a thousand. Given the demographics of the student body and even more so the "harvard community", this is an extraordinarily low number. Perhaps the tide is turning?

Anonymous said...

@ Anonymous 5/19/13, 2:12 PM

Less than twenty years ago, "NAMs" of all types made up less than 20% of the undergraduate student body at Harvard. Foreigners were much more numerous among the graduate students than among undergraduates. Your claims deserve skepticism.

Anonymous said...

90% of Harvardites think a friend of Wright and Ayers should be president. But they think a free-thinking scholar who deals with truth about race should be blacklisted and anyone associated with his work should be condemned as 'guilty by association'.

Welcome to Jewish-controlled America.

And Jews say McCarthy was bad.

When Richwine was at Harvard, how come no one sounded the KKK alarm????

Anonymous said...

What gringos should do is go for divide and conquer. Instead of speaking of HISPANICS as a whole, discuss Hispanic IQ along racial lines: white, mestizo, creole, mulatto, Indio, and etc.

This way, the issue will be not 'whites are smarter than hispanics' but 'conquis are smarter than conqueredez'. We need to break apart this bloc called 'Hispanic'. Since conquis side with Jews, Negroes, yellows, and Homos against us, I say the hell with them. I say we make the conqueredez feel resentment at blanco conquis.

Anonymous said...

Why aren't Harvard tards or Hartards bitching about the 'racist' policies of Canada? Canada seems to agree with Richwine-ism.

I guess since Canada is more 'socialist' than the US, its 'racism' can be overlooked.

Anonymous said...

Would Mexico prefer to take in 10 million Europeans or 10 million Guatemalan Indians? I'll bet the former.
Must be 'racist'.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...

I really need to just stop reading about this controversy. It's bad for my soul and makes me weep for my country.


Fuck, if I only was weeping for my country I'd be fine, because I'm also absolutely terrified for the future of human civilization.

Anonymous said...

How about investigation into all the Marxists at Harvard. Marxism killed 70 to 80 million in the 20th century, so how come so many Marxists are allowed to publish stuff at Harvard?


Oh, oh, oh, but that would be McCarthyism!

Unknown said...

re: "Harvard will surely follow up by not using IQ-type tests like the SAT in their admissions process anymore, right?" unknown

SATS probably are not as important to Harvard's admission policy as you are implying.

1) SATS are no longer significantly g-loaded. The analogies content has been jettisoned. Mensa does not consider recent decade's SATS in considering membership. SATS can now be gamed by tutoring whereas IQ tests can't be.

2) My nephew, now in medical school, was wait listed by Harvard in spite of perfect SATS ( 800 v., 800 q., and A+ essay) and an impressive extra curricular record including being editor-in-chief of his H.S. newspaper. He did not get into Harvard but three of my nephew's acquaintances did: a female and two blacks none of whom had anywhere near his intellectual credentials.

Dan Kurt


Ah. So you're saying that Luis from El Paso has as much chance as anyone else of getting into Harvard, despite the fact that he only scored 950 on his SATs. Good to know that Harvard realizes there are "many different kinds of intelligence" and puts its money where its mouth is during the admissions process. Very reassuring indeed.

Hunsdon said...

My Latin is nonexistent, but how about "Veritas Vendibilis" or "Acceptable Truth" as Harvard's motto?

Anonymous said...

Less than twenty years ago, "NAMs" of all types made up less than 20% of the undergraduate student body at Harvard. Foreigners were much more numerous among the graduate students than among undergraduates. Your claims deserve skepticism.

From the Harvard Gazette:

Minority representation remained strong. The admitted class is 20.7 percent Asian-American, 10.2 percent African-American, 11.2 percent Latino, 1.7 percent Native American, and .5 percent Native Hawaiian.
...

Foreign citizens make up 10 percent of the admitted students.


So that is 54.3 percent which leaves 45.7 percent to Jews and American whites. If Jews really do make up 1/3 of the student body, then American whites make up 12.7 percent. Even if Jews only made up 1/4 of the student body, American whites are still only 20.7 percent.

And of those whites, how many are actually descendants of the Puritans who founded the place?

Anonymous said...

Maybe Mexico will surpass France, Italy and UK in the next decade. With a big emphasis on maybe...

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2001rank.html?countryName=Mexico&countryCode=mx&regionCode=noa&rank=12#mx

Anonymous said...

"Aristarchus of Samos first proposed the heliocentric model about 1,800 years before Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. So....there's that."

Ouch. Of course, the speed of transmission of ideas and the absolute number of highly intelligent people was significantly less in those days. One needn't think that the new dark ages will last a few thousand years. I hope.

Anonymous said...

" He did not get into Harvard but three of my nephew's acquaintances did: a female and two blacks none of whom had anywhere near his intellectual credentials. "

Your nephew has two black acquaintances and they both got into Harvard? Wow. What are the odds of that?

I didn't even meet any black people in the 70's and 80's growing up let alone knowing 2 that got into Harvard.


Anonymous said...

LOL

The protesting students should get copies of the dissertation and have a book burning. That is the sort of folk they are.

Dan Kurt said...

e: "Mexican kids tend to be formed with Mexican values. I don't see the environment of logic and theory one sees in STEM families, which produces STEM students. What I see are "pluggers" in the best families. Young students who study hard, memorize and regurgitate (sort of like most doctors.) But, not much creativity and inventiveness. Nor much of logic and Sherlock Holmes curiosity." Anonymous age 71

1) "…sort of like most doctors." You are at an age that probably you are meeting more and more doctors. Doctor's of your age are most likely retired and will be rarely encountered. You are wrong about them all or nearly all being "pluggers." The cohort of MDs that entered medical school in the 1950s and 1960s were the creme d' la creme of the colleges. To get into the first tier of medical schools was an incredibly hard nut to crack. With the 1970s came affirmative action, expansion of class sizes, new medical schools and revision of curricula all of which dropped the mean IQ of the entering classes compared to what existed before. My sister, now retired, was a university professor in three medical schools and she has told me the above information. Few "pluggers" could make it in the 50s and 60s especially since the g-loaded MCATs allowed medical schools to see the intelligence of applicants and no political correctness was dictating admission policies.

2) "Mexican kids tend to be formed with Mexican values." I had a math/engineering professor, he had a double doctorate, when I was an undergraduate. He was an expert about the subject of gears, especially the math and mechanics of materials concerning gearing. He escaped Poland before WWII as a young academic and began teaching in Argentina. He then taught in Brazil and eventually Mexico. When I encountered him had he made it to the USA and was a tenured professor. I had him for both math and engineering classes and got to know him. He told me that he almost never met a student in any of those "Latin" countries who had the raw talent to be a first rate engineer with the exception of recent immigrants from Europe and occasional Asians. He never mentioned IQ to me or even culture. He seemed to be perplexed by the difference between the dearth of potential in students South of the Border compared to the surfeit of really bright students in the USA. BTW, his only child became a medical doctor and then an Ophthalmologist. The Polish professor was a devout Roman Catholic.

Dan Kurt

Grover Prosling said...

he Boston Globe article is lying. The thesis didn't claim hispanics "lack" ability, but that they score lower than whites on cognitive ability.

Indeed. It is old news that Hispanics score lower on these tests than white averages, or that Asians score higher than whites. What's exactly "controversial" about that? lol, so the liberals are running for cover and playing the PC "petition" card? The same hypocritical liberals that talk "diversity" on one hand, but on the other, make sure their kids go to schools with minor numbers of minorities? lol

IQ and Immigration Policy", Jason Richwine, 2009.

Abstract:
The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence.


Richwine's claims should be examined on the merits not the PC propaganda of hypocritical liberals. He asserts that IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability or intelligence. The jury is still out on that claim on three counts: (a) definition of "general intelligence", (b) strength of correlation between the 20th century constructs know as IQ tests and different definitions of said "intelligence" and (c) strength of the correlation between various tests and real-life life outcomes like job status, compared to OTHER relevant variables such as family background. The issue is not the red-herring that "liberals seek to avoid tests" - but whether the sweeping, almost utopian claims about tests advanced by assorted "racial reality" proponents measure up against hard data. They don't.

Far from the quasi-religious "we have found the answer", "open and shut case" claimed by various "biodiversity" types- such correlations are modest in numerous instances and their predictive power likewise modest and limited. The SAT's primary predictive power as a stand in for example is most strongly associated with first year college grades. Most studies find that the correlation between SAT scores and first-year college grades is not overwhelming, and that only 10 percent to 20 percent of the variation in first-year GPA is explained by SAT scores (Harris et al 2011- the Myth of Standardized Tests)

Likewise good scores on tests like the GRE correlate reasonably well with good scores on other tests like medical school admissions and grades in a SPECIFIC DOMAIN of courses, BUT this does not necessarily translate into predictive power for life outcomes 10 or 20 years down the road, RELATIVE to other variables in the mix.

Richwine's claims are debatable, and may not be strong at all, ut liberals should look at the merits before launching into PC mode.

Grover Prosling said...

IQ and Immigration Policy", Jason Richwine, 2009.
The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market.


^^Again, liberals need to examine such claims on the merits. Richwine's data is nothing new for white immigrants to the US, who have also posted low scores, "more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market." The white Irish have long shown these characteristics and in fact, their rise occurred in spite of low IQs, due heavily in part to their adept use of political machinery, ethnic solidarity, discrimination against the non_Irish and mass violence againt non-whites. As scholarly study notes:

"In the city's building trades such as plumbers and the masons, Irish-dominated unions adopted nepotistic membership requirements that kept out new arrivals... Similarly the Irish used their political connections to entrench themselves in both skilled and unskilled city government jobs for policemen, firefighters, rapid transit workers and school teachers, even before these workers had their unions recognized."

"nepotistic membership requirements that kept out new arrivals... Similarly the Irish used their political connections to entrench themselves in both skilled and unskilled city government jobs for policemen, firefighters, rapid transit workers and school teachers, even before these workers had their unions recognized."

"The work taken by Irish men differed from that of Irish women in some respects, however. Irish men were heavily tied up with the political machine. They could secure employment in municipal services, with the machine a powerful intermediary. This is not to say that Irish women had no connection with the machines in their search for bread. Some Irish women, usually American-born daughters of Irish immigrants were able to teach school through the help of the machine, and as the city expanded its educational services, these women benefited... But for men, connections to politicians, the ability to trade a vote for a job, helped them secure employment on large-scale construction projects, a labor sector that supported many New York Irish families. When in 1865 the New York State Supreme Court building was being constructed, Irish men made up the vast majority of those drawing a paycheck. Other heavily Irish male occupations also depended on the machine and on the governmental process.

As early as 1855 Irish men were the largest group of the cartmen of New York, including those that specialized in doing city work on sanitation, landfill road projects and the like. To be a private cartman one required a license; to work for the municipal government in particular one needed good connections. Even before the massive influx of the feminine Irish in 1843, the Democrat-dominated Common Council gave a large number of market licenses to Irish men, much to the chagrin of native American entrepreneurs."
--FROM: Bayor and Meagher 1996, The New York Irish, 96-97

Dr Van Nostrand said...


However, based on personal circumstances, much more can be said. I live in Mexico, and know immigrants, legal and illegal, in large numbers. I happen to like them. Voluntarily, I do not see other Anglos for months at a time. So, any claim of personal racism withers and dies on the vine very fast."


Of course.It is one thing to be bigoted against a particular group and another thing to recognize that a particular ethnicity/race is lacking in certain attributes and still be friendly with them. A distinction lost mostly on liberals.
Conversely ,it can be stated that its BECAUSE you see Mexicans are hapless low IQ peasants that you get along with them better than with say Anglos who are your equal or superior in various abilities(well not mental ,you were a Mensa newsletter editor after all)

I remember reading about why the old world WASPs at the State Department were so hostile to Israel, it wasnt just that Israel was a fierce modernist imposition on the quaint and charming Araby but that the brusque and intelligent Israelis were as smart as them and never let them forget it!
A lot of hostility towards Jews,Asians and Indians on this board has similar motivations.Why cant these old world people be charming,hospitable with their great cuisines(Jews excepted) know their place instead of acting all huffy and smart?

"For a very long time, until large numbers of them were raised without the influence of a father, white males pretty much dominated the creative and productive worlds. So, why is it impossible that genetics makes the difference? Is it purely coincidence that most modern technological and medical improvements in the 20th Century were implemented by Caucasian societies?"

No coincidence of course. Whites were the top dogs in pretty much all fields due to the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution they perfected.
The morale boost that comes from conquering rather than being conquered is also a very strong albet intangible factor.

The problem with India for instance is that it imported the industrial revolution without really completing its Renaissance. There was a Hindu revivalism,courtesy of Bengalis in arts,sciences and literature but it was cut short by the British when it started getting nationalistic.

The white commenters here love to blame whats afflicting them on others-Jews,blacks,Hispanic immigration,h1b and what have you.
But all of these are just symptoms of the disease which really started in the 1920s brought on by the corruption that prosperity inevitably brings. To which theprohibition and New Deal were incredibly lunk headed responses.



Anonymous said...

At first I was dismissive, seeing that most of the names were of hispanic or asian students. Then I saw "TEST", a graduate student of "TEST123", that great scholar and gentleman, and I was immediately sold. They should void the dissertation immediately.

Anonymous said...

Steve linked to John Horgan's Scientific American article about the Richwine affair before. At the time Steve didn't quote the following. Did Horgan add it to the article later?

Horgan added it later, after having become a laughing stock. He tries to pass off the original article as satire or something.

Jeff W. said...

Cai Corishev said:

"You'd think we'd have learned that adding millions of extra people to a workforce that has no demand for them isn't a good thing."

Good for corporate bosses and owners. Corporate profits, as a percentage of revenue, have never been so high.

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/05/-corporate-profits-as-a-share-of-gdp.html

Good for the money-printing complex (the Fed and its favored big banks) and those who use freshly-printed fiat (Uncle Sam). Remember they started off in the fiat era of the 1970's with wage and price controls. Those were difficult to manage. Since 1973 they have used other, very effective methods of wage suppression.

It's just bad for you and me and our families, that's all. Who? Whom?

BB753 said...

Nothing short of Richwine burning at the stake will satisfy these bigots!
The problem with our elite and their elite cubs like those Harvard student is that they live in an ivory tower. With little or no contact with actual feral low IQ denizens. That and a total lack of morals and shame too.
In twenty years they may find out they´ve turned every first world nation into third worlds dumps making very little revenue for their finanial rackets and of course totally unlivable even for the very rich. Commuting by helicopter is expensive and dangerous. Favellas soon encroach upon gated communities. What´s the point of being rich if you can´t enjoy life to the point where you can´t walk down the street without being mugged or kidnapped? Think of the children!
If any of those idiots are reading this thread they can´t say they weren´t warned. Oh, and look out for the masses with pitch forks!
They´ll be at your gate sooner than you can say amnesty.

Anonymous said...

"Young people have fast processors and empty hard drives. "

high on fluid, low crystal

Pat Boyle said...

Let me remind everyone that the academic discipline with practitioners who have the lowest IQs is in fact Public Administration. It may be Harvard but the JFK School harbors the dimmest bulbs on campus.

Bill O'Reilly keeps touting his MPA from there as a sign of his smarts. Not so.

I imagine that you could learn something at the JFK School but you would have to supplement your curricula with classes from more serious schools. There are two types of Public Administration schools - those who prepare students to be top level government managers. These have curricula very much like that given to MBA students - classes in quantitative methods and supervision in organizations. And there are those who focus on 'policy' questions. These have classes in political topics.

It's the difference between taking accounting and taking ethnic studies.

Albertosaurus


Dr Van Nostrand said...


I imagine that you could learn something at the JFK School but you would have to supplement your curricula with classes from more serious schools. There are two types of Public Administration schools - those who prepare students to be top level government managers. These have curricula very much like that given to MBA students - classes in quantitative methods and supervision in organizations. And there are those who focus on 'policy' questions. These have classes in political topics."

Really? I thought policy courses could be quite challenging.
They are dealing with concepts,ideas, how they relate to each other and applying them to real world.
Wouldnt they be the bigger picture people?
It may not be a STEM type of smarts but smarts nonetheless.
I dont know what is the standard of curricula at the JFK school but I wouldnt be surprised if like much of the Ivy League,the type of skills acquired at more of who you know than what you know.

ogunsiron said...

Is the master's in public policy a the Kennedy school as hard to get into as the other graduate programs at Harvard ?

Some speculation :
There was a bit of controversy here in Quebec a few years ago concerning our then leader of the opposition André Boisclair( who is gay). A few journalists wondered how he had managed to obtain a master's in public administration from Harvard, given that he had dropped out of his bachelor's in economics from Université de Montreal.

In this document (in french) :
http://www.ql.umontreal.ca/volume12/numero2/interviewe.html

Boisclair clearly admits that he never got his bachelor's degree. He also says that he chose the Kennedy school because it's progressive and it's a bunch of "democrats" running the school.

The Kennedy school website, as of today, lists a bachelor's degree as a requirement for all its programs.
It's possible, though, that circa 2005, when Boisclair attended, a bachelor's degree wasn't strictly required! That doesn't sound very rigorous. I'm betting that Boisclair got admitted primarily because he was a young, french speaking, gay, leftish rising star of Quebec politics and not because he was particularly brilliant.
To give you an idea of his non-brilliance, he can't even speak english fluently even though he's a young guy who studied in Boston.

The lack of jews on that list may be partially explained by the Kennedy school's target student body being merely reasonably smart politicians and politician wannabes from all around the world and not geniuses, though there must be some very high IQ people attending the school, of course.

Anonymous said...

***I mean, can anyone else think of an example where the truth was covered up after someone spoke out about it strongly and convincingly? What are the sort of lag times involved?***

Aristarchus of Samos first proposed the heliocentric model about 1,800 years before Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. So....there's that.


Ptolemy's geocentric system carried the day over competing models precisely because it was more convincing. Ptolemy's system could reliably predict the positions of the planets and made no assumptions that were not based on observations. Aristarchus's heliocentrism was just a hypothesis that was not supported by data. For example, he correctly assumed that stellar parallax couldn't be observed because the stars were so far away, but it was not until the 19th century that this could be empirically proven.

Anonymous said...

Really? I thought policy courses could be quite challenging.
They are dealing with concepts,ideas, how they relate to each other and applying them to real world.
Wouldnt they be the bigger picture people?

If I could hazard a guess, it's because once ideas are in the mix, then ideology will reign, and leftist viewpoints are the ruling ideology of the upper and upper middle classes. What is the blog all about? The left doesn't want an honest cost-benefit analysis of illegal immigration and affirmative action, because it knows deep down it would not even pass a very low level of critical scrutiny. If you had unemotional and data driven discussions in a MPA program, the vast majority of the non-ideological students would would side with the right, further marginalizing the left.

The left's power is like that of orthodox religious leaders throughout history, their views are deferred to, and they are given the imprimatur of moral superiority even by people who do not share their politics, they determine what is acceptable in polite society. You can probably be quantitative in certain schools of government and administration, but only within prescribed limits. My guess is that Richwine didn't ruffle any feathers in the classroom at the Kennedy School, but he did in his thesis, which his fellow students were not privy to and so the left is apoplectic that they didn't sniff him out before he earned his doctorate from "their" school of government.

rob said...

Dan Kurt and a few others have hit on one of the structural weaknesses of the current 'Meritocratic' elite.

Several studies, including Unz's, have shown that Ivy League schools discriminate against black, hispanic, and Jewish applicants.

No, I'm totally kidding. They discriminate against white gentiles, particularly working-class, rural, and ostensibly conservative whites in favor of the groups above.

The talented tenth of blacks and latinoas has been fully coopted. The only interest they have in changing the system is for more money, prestige and power for the the talented tenth. Even if he's the dumbest person in the room, there's way more money in being the 'clean' and 'articulate' black man in the room than being the smartest man trying to organize and lead blacks. Even Al Sharpton, not the sharpest (heh) tool (heh) in the shed, finally figured that out. The same applies to mulatto, mestizo and aristofop Hispanics.

White gentiles look like another story. Whether it's because Jews are frightened of flyover whites or just because suppressing them was what they marched through the institutions for, there are lots of smart and capable white who aren't co-opted. Guys who got Honors degrees at state U are not as plugged into or dependent on the system. Keep your mouth shut about HBD (or any other suppressed knowledge) if you want to go to Harvard has very little influence on people who know that Harvard doesn't want them.

It can be hard to transfer unspoken knowledge to the next generation. We all know that blacks do worse on culture-reduced and non-verbal IQ tests, and so does Jencks. NYC ed bureaucrats were never told, so they tried to include more abstract reasoning on admissions tests, hoping blacks would do better. Liberals sixty years ago may have said that Mexicans weren't naturally dumb, but Eisenhower's Operation Wetback still rounded up a bunch to send home: they weren't foolish enough to believe their own propaganda.

When genetic causes of IQ differences are too obvious to ignore, say after a couple more generations of desperate attempts at educational solutions, what can the elite do? They were almost all chosen for buying into the diversity/multicultural experiment. A big chunk of the elite got there because of it. I don't think they'll either want to apologize or change directions. No one will want to be first, because even if there aren't large purges, no one will want to be Watsoned or Richwined. There's not a competing elite to take over after this one stumbles a bit. The mono-multi-cultural elite can eff up really badly when there are no other plug and play alternatives.

Off topic: Does anyone know how google chooses the captcha words? I have 'supremacy.' Is google trying to tell me something?

Whitehall said...

I once sat on a non-stop from Boston to SFO next to a returning Harvard student. Her dad was a psychology prof at Berkeley.

She claimed to have participated in a classroom disruption against E.O. Wilson and his sociobiology lecture. It was just so non-PC.

What hypocrites!

I correctly predicted that her parents would pick her up at the airport in a green Volvo station wagon.

Please remember that the derivation of "professor" is "professor of the faith."

David said...

>I wonder how many of the mostly foreign sounding names on the list were "holistically" granted admission, i.e., displaced better qualified white males as per Ron Unz's recent article.<

They are living our lives. But since they are inferior, the whole thing is going tits up. Look around.

David said...

The failure of Harvard, Scientific American, and system pundrity is total.

The intelligentsia is never other than a bootblack for the powerful, even in the good old USA. For a very shameful example, look at its response to World War One.

Just like they wanted WW1 then, so the powers that be want amnesty now - and damn the torpedoes. In response, as Steve pointed out, the strangest bedfellows are now circling their wagons. (This bad mixed metaphor is mine.) The order of the day is boost amnesty, and the mainstream intellectuals are falling right into line.

How trustworthy are they on any issue?

Anonymous said...

Grover Prosling : "(c) strength of the correlation between various tests and real-life life outcomes like job status, compared to OTHER relevant variables such as family background."

If family background was independent of IQ that might be a valid comparison to make.

I'm reminded of the perennial Guardian lament - "why are there so many middle class children in the best state schools?"

Anonymous said...

Larry Summers of course appointed Elena Kagan who has no use for freedom of speech. She believes in shutting down 'hate speech', and if SC were to be taken over by her kind--and it's coming--, Sailer and the rest of us will be dragged off to jail.

So, who cares about Summers when he favors people like Kagan?
We should care about his freedom of speech when he doesn't care about ours?

Anonymous said...

The SW should look for means to encourage its Mexicans to flock to NY and other such places.

If blue liberal states really love blacks and browns, send more of them there. Tell blacks in the South that Vermont and Minnesota offers a lot more free services. Tell Mexicans that NYers love them and offer more freebies.

Anonymous said...

"high on fluid, low crystal"

That's the case at least for the small white contingent. For the other 70-80%, it's straight Who-whom, and they are the "who". They have a vested interest. It could be quite powerful to show a pie chart of the likely ethnicities of these signatories.

ogunsiron said...

Anonymous said...
" He did not get into Harvard but three of my nephew's acquaintances did: a female and two blacks none of whom had anywhere near his intellectual credentials. "

Your nephew has two black acquaintances and they both got into Harvard? Wow. What are the odds of that?

I didn't even meet any black people in the 70's and 80's growing up let alone knowing 2 that got into Harvard
===
I graduated high school in the usa, a while ago, and I can think of 5 black kids who went to Harvard, MT and Princeton in my grade. I was in the same classes as they were.

Matthew said...

"Good for corporate bosses and owners. Corporate profits, as a percentage of revenue, have never been so high."

Interesting from that graph that corporate profits as a share of GDP soared most of all during the George W. Bush years, while W was turning a blind eye to the housing scandal and the massive number of illegal flooding into the country. Despite those levels being historic highs, they have returned right back there post-recession, during the Obama years.


Anonymous said...

"Most studies find that the correlation between SAT scores and first-year college grades is not overwhelming, and that only 10 percent to 20 percent of the variation in first-year GPA is explained by SAT scores"

quite unfortunate that SAT hasn't caught up with the grade inflation. One could be forgiven for assuming that A stands for 'average' and F for 'fantastic!'
And there are more things to life than grades, stephen hsu's investigation found effort enough to make good grades in all subjects bar maths and physics.
More low IQ folks in colleges, more self-esteem boost needed, maybe SAT can degrade itself further and hand out more 800s.

Harry Baldwin said...

Anonymous said...I was editor of a local Mensa newsletter, around 30 years ago. One very common topic of discussion was, what on earth is i.q? The only common view was, it was a score on a test. There seems to be little correlation with life performance and i.q. In fact, most persons qualified for Mensa on the planet work as manual laborers of some sort.

Surely you understand that Mensa comprises that portion of high-IQ people who feel the need to be validated because they're under-achievers. Do truly successful high-IQ people who work and socialize with other successful high-IQ people feel the need to go to Mensa meetings?

ben tillman said...

You also have an absurd amount of effort wasted discussing the role of Jews in this. If you read the petition, there are few obviously Jewish names, and lots of Hispanic, Asian and Anglo names. The core problem is egalitarian blank-slate liberalism.

Bullshit. Ideologies are never a problem. They have no agency. Proponents of ideologies, however, may be a problem.

Moreover, as Jewish scholars like Sutcliffe and Israel tell us, the genesis of liberalism is a result of the interplay between Jews and gentiles; it is a reaction of gentiles to the Jewish presence among them: "In short, the Enlightenment came to define itself, Mr. Sutcliffe argues, as the antithesis of all things Jewish." Pointing to liberalism is not exculpatory.

Moreover, the notion that Jewish and Spanish names are mutually exclusive is ignorant. The first name on the list is Octavio González . I know Jewish Gonzálezes. You don't? Then maybe you shouldn't be commenting on this topic.

ErisGuy said...

For this gross violation of human decency, Harvard must be punished: it should be closed for ten years, its endowment seized, and the professors and administrators re-educated through labor.

Dr Van Nostrand said...


Moreover, the notion that Jewish and Spanish names are mutually exclusive is ignorant. The first name on the list is Octavio González . I know Jewish Gonzálezes. You don't? Then maybe you shouldn't be commenting on this topic"

While there are Jewish people with Hispanic surnames. Most people with Hispanic surnames are not Jewish.
If this less than subtle distinction is lost on you then perhpas you shouldnt be commenting on anything.

Anonymous said...

The "Kremlin on the Charles River" living up to it's reputation, I see. Next, expect to see these same liberal "comrades" in the student body demand that the heretic professors make public "self criticisms" to atone for their counterrevolutionary ways.