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Free speech, racism, and universities

Published: Leeds Student (5 December 2008)

In November 2005, I sat down with Dr. Frank Ellis in his office at the Russian and Slavonic Studies department of Leeds University. What he said over the next hour would eventually lose him his job and spark a national debate in Britain on free speech and its reaches in a civilized society.

At the time, I and most of my contemporaries, believed Dr. Ellis was an aberration, a strange lecturer versed in an esoteric branch of eugenicist psychology. His support for the Bell Curve— a 1992 book which, using psychometric testing, posited that black people were hereditarily intellectually inferior than their white fellow-citizens — and his warm words of support for the American white supremacist movement, American Renaissance, gave most students and staff the impression he was a racist crank. And they weren’t entirely wrong.

Following on the publication of the interview came months of vacillation from the university where it tried to strike a balance between a commitment to free speech and creating a safe and hospitable environment for its minority students. Eventually, Leeds University organized a settlement package, and Dr. Ellis went to live a merry retirement on full benefits.

But I soon realized that far from being a lone figure in the academic wilderness, Dr. Ellis was part of a larger tranche of academics who were being targeted by students and universities around the world for research into sex and race differentials in human psychology. The majority of these academics were researching in the field of psychology which made Dr. Ellis unique – his official title put him as a lecturer in Russian history.

But the treatment was the same – all over the world, professors, research students, and lecturers, were complaining of an ideological climate that was stifling their ability to research freely, and also turning promising colleagues away from this area of scientific inquiry.

In 1997 a psychology professor at Edinburgh university, Chris Brand, had been dismissed from his position for actions that had “bought the university into disrepute”. His offense had been to make a statement defending the Nobel laureate Daniel Carleton Gajdusek who had been arrested on suspicion of paedophilia. Brand disputes this narrative and says that the university had been hunting for an excuse to dismiss him since the release of his “race-realism” book, “The g Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications.” The book had garnered a strong reaction and was denounced by many as scientific racism and undiluted bigotry.

“My book had come out in the spring and there was all this fuss about it,” he says. “They wanted to investigate me for bad teaching, bad examining, bad research – all kinds of inquiries were made. My enemies decided to see what on earth they could do to bring me down for good. So they started to read my emails.” In his emails they found one saying that Gajdusek – who had bought fifty Papa New Guinea children to keep him company in America while doing research – had “not done any harm”. “In fact,” Brand adds, “quite a few of the children had done very well out of their time with Gajdusek.”

But Brand’s case became paradigmatic of what was to occur over the next ten years. His views were understandably repugnant to the university establishment and his students (I was spluttering all through our conversation). But his treatment set out a modus vivendi for universities dealing with extremist academics. Although, not all furrowed the same path.

In 2002, Geoffrey Sampson, professor of Informatics at Sussex University, was caught in a national media storm when he published an article on his personal website titled “There’s nothing wrong with racism.” In it he wrote that “There is overwhelming scientific evidence that races differ to some extent in their average intelligence levels — yellow-skinned Orientals tend to be rather brighter than Whites, Negroes tend to be rather less bright.” The university publicly distanced itself from the comments saying they did “not share or condone Professor Sampson’s personal views on race in any way,” but, unlike the Brand case, they held that “the principle of academic freedom recognizes an individual’s right to express personal views, however unpalatable they are to others.”

In early 2006, the Frank Ellis case had the potential to be a watershed for British universities because he was the first lecturer to be suspended under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000. But Leeds University baulked at the challenge of putting him through a tribunal and granted him early retirement, leaving in his stead a residual ambiguity for faculty all over the country. Meanwhile, Ellis believed his thesis that political correctness is the newest form of thought control was now vindicated (this idea was expounded haphazardly in his slender polemic, ‘Political Correctness: the theoretical struggle’).

This ambiguity has been highlighted by recent developments as lecturers suddenly find themselves splashed across the national newspapers as the result of quiet articles in scientific journals. Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, was thrown into a maelstrom in 2006 when he published an article in The British Journal of Health Psychology which insinuated that Africa was poor and suffered high levels of ill-health because its people were less intelligent than those in the West. After fierce denunciations from various charities and activist groups, the university backed Kanazawa’s right to undertake the research.

More recently there were calls from Oxford University students for the dismissal of David Coleman, a professor of demography, who had espoused anti-immigration views and co-founded the MigrationWatch pressure group. While not strictly an issue pertaining to psychology research, it did involve an academic making intemperate pronouncements in his field of expertise and being damned. Although the Students Action for Refugees (STAR) started a petition for his dismissal, the university did defend his right to academic freedom and he was not disciplined.

‘The legacy of the Holocaust’

Paul Irwing is a lecturer in Organisational Psychology at Manchester University. His research, done in conjunction with Richard Lynn, Professor Emeritus at Ulster university, has pointed him towards the conclusion that men are more intelligent than women – by about five IQ points. He has never been the subject of a concerted campaign to oust him from is job but he sees it happening around him. “It’s part of the historical legacy is Nazism,” he says. “I think for some reason Nazism has become associated with any kind of biological or genetic theory. And you know somehow because it was a horrific genocide against a specific race – I mean I don’t do race differences by the way – but the whole area has become just completely undiscussable. Obviously the consequences of race prejudice are horrific, but I wouldn’t have thought that the logical consequences is therefore we don’t study it. I would have thought even the opposite in a way.”

But what about someone like Frank Ellis who had no scientific grounding in the field about which he is confabulating? “Unless you have considerable scientific expertise, you’re better off just not getting involved,” he says. “Again, I don’t want to demonize him or what have you, but in that particular case, you might think that it was motivated by racism or something like, now, whether it was or not I don’t know. But it’s obviously not motivated by scientific knowledge.”

His co-author Richard Lynn is one of the most distinguished and controversial researchers into race differences. His latest book, “Race differences in intelligence”, displays, according to Leon Kamis in the Scientific American, “a truly venomous racism, combined with scandalous disregard for scientific objectivity.” Lynn puts the ideological distaste for his research down to something else. “Over the last century or so we’ve had a kind of feminisation of the climate of opinion in Western societies,” he says. “Or another way of putting it: people have become ‘tender minded’ to use the phrase of a concept of William James. People have become sensitive about the feelings of others as regards possible inferiority. One aspect of this is political correctness of course. To be politically correct you have to avoid any kind of judgment that some people are inferior to others.”

Ideas like those promulgated by Professor Lynn pose a number of problems for universities and free speech advocates. His scientific racialism, which holds that psychometric testing has proven the intellectual inferiority of black people, has the potential to give succor to far-right groups all over the world. Does he find that a problem? “I can’t say I’m too worried about that,” he says. Does he think it is has implications for public policy? “There are problems where you have two races differing in ability living side by side,” he says, “because the race with lesser ability feels discriminated again or it feels inadequate, so that is a recipe for this race feeling dissatisfied with this society. And that is one of the reasons no doubt why the blacks erupt in riots every now and again – wherever they are.”

But their methods have been attacked as flimsy and unsound by an extensive court of scientists. Evolutionary psychology basically views human intuitions, instincts and consciousness through the lens of Darwinian natural selection. Our brains work to create optimum conditions for the survival and replication of our genes, and many of our abilities and prospects are governed by our innate genetic inheritance. Therefore, it is logically possible that different races, evolving in different climates and geographical surroundings, developed unequal competencies in varying abilities.

Flawed work

Dr. Viren Swami teaches in the Division of Public Health at Liverpool University. He trained in evolutionary psychology but has since distanced himself from the field. “I started off as very much the evolutionary psychologist, in some ways believed in the whole idea,” he says. “But it draws suspicion. If you don’t agree with something politically then you’re bound to go and look into it in a bit more detail and see if people are actually doing what they’re saying and if they are actually correct. When you actually do that kind of work, academically speaking, you actually find a lot of psychological work is flawed – it’s not the full story anyway. I think there is a great deal of variance in human behavior – across cultures especially which evolutionary psychology simply can’t handle.”

Psychologists investigating sex and race differences in intelligence have one method of obtaining data: psychometric testing. It uses Intelligence quotient (IQ) testing to get a mark of intelligence and extrapolates from that data to make more general claims about differences in aptitude between the races and sexes. “It came up once in the 1960s and it seems to be something that keeps coming up again,” says Dr. Swami. “I think it makes quite racist claims – Asians being less creative and that kind of thing. When you generalize about populations you are bound to be able to make generalizations like that but what does it actually mean in terms of actual practicalities? Very little.”

Professor Lynn disputes this. “The IQ test has good predictive value for a number of things such as earnings,” he says. “We did a study recently in which we took the intelligence of children measured at the age of eight and this is quite a good predictor of the earnings in their 40s. Now, the more intelligent they were at the age of eight, the better their earnings were in their 40s. Why would that be? The answer can only be that intelligence is a good predictor – it must be measuring something if you can do a half hour test of an eight year old and that will give you a rough measure of its earning thirty years later… I think these rejections are put by people who don’t like the results of intelligence tests, so they denigrate them.”

The ambiguity in university regulations and legal greyness is not a purely British phenomena; it is mirrored all over the West. In Denmark, at the University of Aarhus, Professor Helmuth Nyborg was suspended in 2006 for his article in the Personality and Individual Differences Journal entitled “Sex-related differences in general intelligence g, brain size, and social status.” After an investigation it was found his research was not consciously tendentious and he was reinstated. I contacted him by email and he relayed a message of enforced reticence. “I have been legally advised not to say anything that can be construed by my university as acting disloyally as a civil servant,” he wrote.

In Australia in 2005, Andrew Fraser, professor of law at Macquerie University, was suspended from teaching for remarks he made in a letter to the Parramatta Sun newspaper in which he wrote that “an expanding black population is a sure-fire recipe for increases in crime, violence and a wide range of other social problems”. With his statutory retirement date approaching, Professor Fraser recently announced he would take a case for “political discrimination and anti-white racial vilification” to Australia’s ‘Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission’. The results of this ruling could have a far-reaching impact.

In the United States and Canada, where a lot of the most esteemed differential psychologists work, there are similar complaints from academics. Phillipe Rushton is one of the most cited psychologists in race differences. He teaches at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, and he has spoken at the American Renaissance conference. He is alleged said of black people in Rolling Stone magazine: “It’s a trade-off: more brain or more penis… you can’t have everything.” But he denies he is a racist, and in fact our interview ends prematurely after I ask him whether he has a visceral dislike of black people. “I’m telling you it’s balderdash,” he snaps, before ringing off. It seems the truth hurt, on this occasion.

“We have laws in Canada – hate laws, they call them – which say you mustn’t demean certain groups,” he avers before his strop. “And so various activists made complaints to the Ontario provincial police who investigated me – there’s a six-month investigation to see whether I had contravened the hate crime laws. They decided in the end that I had not…It sends a chill of course to anybody else in my department or at other universities in Canada who might have thought they wanted to do the same research that I do, or to come out and say anything positive about my own research. There is a chilling effect.”

Is he worried? “I find it totally and completely atrocious. The prime contribution of Western society to the world – the Anglo-Saxon peoples of Britain, Canada and the US had made democracy – the greatest contribution I believe to the world. And the central basis of that is free speech.” Again, the barely concealed, thoroughly unscientific, racism radiates its way through.

In the United States, Donald Templer shines the beacon. He teaches at Alliant International University and complains that “there is academic freedom except for the extremely sensitive area of racial differences in intelligence, and race more generally.” Templer believes that black people have the lowest IQ. “But there is some evidence that the Austrialian Aborigines may have even lower IQ than the blacks,” he says. “Put it this way: the blacks and the Austrialian Aborigines [are bottom].” Ipso facto, Templer thinks “we should be very cautious, very careful about letting people from low-IQ countries come here.”

The pace of targeting academics seems to be increasing, I suggest, to get him talking. “I think you are correct. Once a year, of the last four years, I’ve been going to the conference of the International Society of Intelligence Research, and until four years ago, I thought that the great anger directed towards psychologists who write on racial differences was mainly in the United States, but, if anything, it may even be worse in Britain and Continental Europe – it’s certainly as bad.”

It’s readily obvious to any anorak interested in this arcane domain, that all over the world there remains an undefined and elastic regulatory apparatus to deal with psychology academics doing research in race and sex differences (and, also, those academics gleaning these theories with no pedigree in the field). And this blind spot is becoming more glaring as the field grows. “I don’t see why you are puzzled by it,” says Michel Treisman, a lecturer in psychology at Oxford University. “It’s been a major feature of the academic world, and outside the academic world, for some time.” But yet, I am puzzled, and I think universities are too.

This issue has created and will continue to create problems until there is a clear course of action to deal with it. At the moment universities respond capriciously in direct proportion to the amount of bad press they have to endure. But there has to be a more thorough and accessible guideline, which treads delicately on the thin line between protecting academic freedom and cleansing our institutions of higher learning of racist demagogues who threaten the well-being of students.

I have come to the realization during the course of this investigation that much of the research is either unsound or heavily tendentious, and when racists are using cod-science to prove their bigoted presuppositions, there is a real problem. Ideas matter, even when they are false.