The official stance on racial differences propagated by the Ivory Tower is well known:
Because race has such profound social, political and economic consequences, we should be wary of allowing the concept to be redefined in a way that obscures its historical roots and disconnects from its cultural and socioeconomic contextBut these public affirmations are rarely directed towards the actual students. I searched through the course curriculums of the eight Ivy League universities (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown, UPenn). If a course reading list contains Mismeasure of Man, that is substantial evidence of the ideology presented. This a proper assumption because such a high rate of elite professors are liberal. Generally, the interpretations of a given text correspond to the professor's tilt.
I went to each college's website and searched [Name of Important HBD Book] syllabus. The table below compiles the results. Here's some interesting tidbits:
- Cornell required Guns, Germs, and Steel for all incoming students in 2001, then discussed it in freshmen seminars and special lectures.
- A Yale course syllabus does mention The Bell curve, but here's the context: "The mischief of H & M's The Bell Curve will be examined".
- Brown didn't read his book, but Gould was their 1996 Commencement speaker.
- A Penn course read Cracking the Bell Curve Myth without actually reading the original book.
- Not one class used the most accomplished psychometrician's magnum opus, The g Factor.
So this isn't the most robust analytical study, but I think it gives a clue as to what students are learning. There is a large measure of error using Internet searches and it's quite possible Dartmouth and Brown have crappy search engines or minimal virtual archiving.
Nonetheless, I conclude the country's elite students are generally receiving a biased perspective on race and intelligence. Does this mean the students will accept the obfuscation being perpetrated? Not necessarily, but college education can have significant effects on one's permanent outlook. With ample research on both sides, it's curious that the supposed leaders of free inquiry are reluctant to bypass their own prejudices.
9 comments:
Have you seen the actual Bell Curve book? You can't really read it, its not meant to be read cover to cover. It's more like an encyclopedia where you just look things up once in a while.
THe school I went to wasnt exactly Ivy League, but I am proud of the fact that we had a surprisingly open-minded, neutral coverage of the race/IQ issue including excerpts from the Bell Curve and a few life-skills questions along the lines of "What would you do if you were a social worker and you had a pregnant black woman with an IQ of 75 and a drug problem, should you put the kid up for adoption?"
And it wasnt even a psychology course; everyone had to take it. I suspect, though, the Bell Curve stuff has been dropped from the curriculum now.
I went to a small liberal arts school in the northeast, where I took a class called "Biology of Race and Gender." The reading list was pretty much what you would expect: Gould, Lewontin, and Diamond, aming others. The professor spent most of the class wielding Occam's Butterknife and spouting logical fallacies - which, of course, I was too blind to recognize at the time. Of course, we also denounced Charles Murray's ideas without ever reading his book. The course might as well have been called "Why Blacks and Women are equal to White Men in Every Way."
Looking back, it might be the worst course I took in college. It was entertaining and I somewhat enjoyed the work, but it was based entirely on dishonesty and lies. It took independent study for me to reach my own conclusions, and realize that most of what I had learned in the class was complete garbage.
Sorry if I came off sounding dismissive; I'm sure it's possible to read the BC cover to cover, but to do it in a college course, would be asking a bit much. Also, I should add that it was that one course that did the most to change me from a liberal into a conservative (though looking back I realize I had never been a true liberal to begin with, just a hater of conservatives.)
Pinker requires his students to buy some of his books.
Most books are very cheap on "used books" sections of Amazon.
There is this course by Pinker & Dershowitz: Psychology 1002: Morality and Taboo Harvard Law School 47212A ...
On the reading list:
April 16: Race, IQ, and profiling. Should the black‐white test score gap be studied, and if so, should a genetic hypothesis be discussed and tested?
Should legal policies (such
as airport security or traffic stops) be color‐blind regardless of the answers to these
questions?
Jensen, A. & Rushton, P. (2005) Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive
ability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11, No. 2, 235–294. [electronic]
Nisbett, R. (2005) Heredity, environment, and race differences in IQ: A Commentary on
Rushton and Jensen (2005). Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11, No. 2, 302–310.
[electronic]
Suzuki, L. & Aronson, J. (2005) The cultural malleability of intelligence and its impact
on the racial/ethnic hierarchy. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11, No. 2, 320–327.
[electronic].
Rushton, J. P, & Jensen, A. R. (2005) Wanted: more race realism, less moralistic fallacy.
Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11, No. 2, 328–336. [electronic]
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/teaching/Morality%20and%20Taboo%20syllabus.pdf
"Have you seen the actual Bell Curve book? You can't really read it, its not meant to be read cover to cover."
:P I did, the piece of paper I used for my bookmark is covered in page notes.
There is a general feeling in academia that one can dismiss writers without reading them, because obviously these 'experts' who are educating know what they're talking about. People have no idea how little they know, and that leads them to build a lot of views on sand.
The g-factor by Jensen is a highly technical work. It'd be ridiculous to expect college students to have the diligence to read it outside of a full blown graduation requirement class.
"People have no idea how little they know, and that leads them to build a lot of views on sand."
I am going to have to agree with All in All on that one.
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