Review of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles A. Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Basic Books, 1994)
Abstract
Almost 20 years
ago (1994-2013) Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve,
1994, ignited a fierce academic debate with its controversial themes on IQ and
race; specifically: 1-that intelligence as measured by IQ tests has replaced
family wealth and status in determining jobs, income, class, and place in
American life; 2-that white IQs average 15 points higher than African-American IQs; 3-that
high IQ ruling whites, with fewer children than the low IQ nonwhite majority,
are increasingly restricting nonwhites in ghettoes in fear of the latter's
rising crime, drug use, and illegitimate births.
This review:
1-sets The Bell Curve's controversial themes in the context of a brief history of IQ
and testing; 2-cites, from over 150 reviews, both favorable' views and critics'
charges of faulty research and bias against African-Americans, welfare, and affirmative
action; 3-examines five critics' charges in depth; 4-gives co-author Murray's
reply to these charges; 5-places the book's controversial issues in perspective
as a clash over American values; 6-relates the book to 1980s-90s U.S.
conservative socio- economic-political trends; and 6-concludes by relating IQ
and race to America's ideal of equality of opportunity.
Controversial
Book on IQ, Race, and Place in the U.S.
Rarely has an
845-page academic book (with 93 graphs, 49 tables, seven appendices, 108 pages
of end notes, and a 57-page bibliography) stayed on the New York Times bestseller
list for 15 weeks. Seldom is such a book so widely and critically reviewed,
including journal cover stories (Cose, Cowley) and entire journal issues.(Black
Scholar, National Review; New Republic, School Psychology Review)
This happened to Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles A. Murray, The Bell Curve:
Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Basic Books,
1994), because the book touched a raw nerve about race, class, jobs, income,
and relations between rich and poor, black and white, and haves and have nots.
Why Critique The Bell
Curve ? Most reviewers of The Bell Curve (over 150 reviews examined)
criticized its controversial themes, especially:
1-that fixed IQ has replaced traditional family status and wealth in determining one's place in life; and 2-that strife over race and class is inevitable as rich high IQ whites increasingly act to curb welfare, crime, drug use, and illegitimacy excesses of the low IQ poor of all races.(Herrnstein and Murray) reverse equality of opportunity gains made since World War II. The book uses current antagonism toward welfare and crime to urge more gifted education while cutting low IQers' education, welfare, and remedial programs.(Herrnstein and Murray)
1-that fixed IQ has replaced traditional family status and wealth in determining one's place in life; and 2-that strife over race and class is inevitable as rich high IQ whites increasingly act to curb welfare, crime, drug use, and illegitimacy excesses of the low IQ poor of all races.(Herrnstein and Murray) reverse equality of opportunity gains made since World War II. The book uses current antagonism toward welfare and crime to urge more gifted education while cutting low IQers' education, welfare, and remedial programs.(Herrnstein and Murray)
The Bell Curve's
Main Points The preface begins, "This book is about differences in intellectual
capacity among people and groups and what those differences mean for America's
future."(Herrnstein and Murray, p. xxi; Gould 1994, 1995) The book's five
controversial inferences follow.
1-Intelligence
(as measured by IQ tests) has replaced family wealth and prestige in
determining one's job, income, social class, and future, and that of one's
children. Any small IQ gain made by enriched education for low IQ children is
soon lost.
2-Normal bell curve
distribution of IQ (5 percent high, 125+; 20 percent bright, 110-125; 50
percent average, 90-110; 20 percent dull, 75-90; and 5 percent very dull,
50-75) is skewed by IQ racial differences found to be constant since 1900: East
Asians, 3 points higher than whites; whites 15 points higher than blacks.
3-High IQ ruling whites have had generations of better home nurture with good books and table talk and longer education in better schools and universities, advantages passed on to their children, who largely intermarry.
4-With fewer children than the lower IQ majority, ruling whites feel more threatened over race, class, jobs, income, violence, crime, drugs, and illegitimacy.
5-The worst prospect is that ruling elites will increasingly restrict low IQers in ghettoes in fear of growing underclass violence, crime, drug abuse, and illegitimacy.
In Authors' Own
Words:
On cognitive
elites' becoming increasingly isolated from the lower IQ majority, the authors
wrote: There is "a deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom
end of the cognitive ability distribution."(Herrnstein and Murray, p. 509).
On why The Bell
Curve book was written (to explore inevitable
explosions as the U.S. increasingly splits into high IQ rich whites and low IQ
non-white poor): "Inequality of endowments, including intelligence, is a
reality. Trying to pretend that inequality does not really exist has led to
disaster."(Herrnstein and Murray, p. 551).
On the futility
of welfare and affirmative action:
"Trying
to eradicate inequality with artificially manufactured outcomes has led to
disaster. It is time for America once again to try living with inequality, as
life is lived."(Herrnstein and Murray, p. 551).
The authors'
careers and writings offer insights into Bell Curve policy
recommendations:
Author Richard J.
Herrnstein, Harvard psychologist, died of lung cancer September 13, 1994, a
month before publication of The Bell Curve.
Born to Hungarian immigrants in New York City, he graduated from City College
of New York. At Harvard he studied under behaviorist B.F. Skinner (1904-90),
chaired Harvard's psychology department, and was a nationally known researcher
on IQ and genetics. His September 1971 Atlantic Monthly article
on intelligence held that IQ, being genetic, made inequality inevitable in
jobs, class, and income. His affirmation of the genetic nature of IQ and the
unworkability of affirmative action and welfare led to physical harassment by
1970s student protesters.(Herrnstein 1971, Brimelow).
Co-Author Political
scientist Charles Alan Murray is Bradley Foundation Fellow, American Enterprise
Institute, said to be "one of the most conservative social policy think
tanks in the country."(Haynes) This Iowa-born son of a Maytag executive
earned a Harvard B.A. degree (1965) and worked in Thailand as a Peace Corps
volunteer in rural health. His political science Ph.D. degree from
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1974) led to work at the American
Institute for Research (1974-81), Washington, D.C. There, evaluating federal
welfare, he found that poverty levels varied with the national economy,
regardless of remedial programs, and that remedial programs, including
President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, had little lasting effect
and wasted taxpayer money.
Murray believed
in the trickle-down theory: that tax breaks for industry stimulate production,
with benefits trickling down to ordinary workers. Subsidized by conservative
think tanks, including the conservative Heritage Foundation, he published in
1985 Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980,(Murray
1985) citing the failure and waste of government anti- poverty programs.
Murray's Losing Ground, favored by the
Reagan administration, anticipated many Bell Curve findings.(Murray
1985).
Murray's
Anti-Welfare Findings
U.S. policy on
welfare changed, Murray found, from limited temporary aid for the needy to near
permanent government handouts expected as a right by have nots.
That change,
Murray found, came from the mid-1960s- 70s anti-Vietnam, anti-big business,
anti-government student protesters; from President Lyndon Johnson's Great
Society programs; and from civil rights movement demands. This misguided
concern about the poor led to unwise expansion of federal welfare, compensatory
education, and affirmative action programs.
M urray's Losing Ground, 1985. described
"Harold and Phyllis," a
needy couple expecting their first child. Before the mid-1960s, they would have
married, sought any kind of job, and received minimum government aid until they
found work. After the mid-1960s the couple's welfare payments increased if they
were unmarried, had illegitimate children, and if Harold became an absentee
father. This shift of welfare from temporary aid to an expected right, often
generational, Murray labeled as "a domestic Vietnam." He lamented
that this erroneous mindset had made welfare more attractive and rewarding than
the work ethic.
Liberals assailed
Losing Ground for advocating an end to
welfare and affirmative action. But growing anti- welfare sentiment led to its
1995 republication.(Brimelow).
Murray and the
Bradley Foundation:
Barbara Miner,
managing editor of the Milwaukee- based education journal, Rethinking
Schools, wrote that the Milwaukee-based Bradley
Foundation ($425 million in assets) paid Murray and Herrnstein to write The Bell
Curve because it fitted that foundation's
conservative agenda. It funded Murray's research when he worked at the
Manhattan Institute and continued his $100,000 annual grant at his new American
Enterprise Institute post. The Bradley Foundation's role in subsidizing The Bell
Curve became public when The Milwaukee
Journal on October 23, 1994, reported that the
foundation paid the authors to write the book and funded a pre- publication
conference on the book's findings to which only selected favorable reviewers of
the book were invited. The Bradley Foundation's motive and its top priority is
to promote vouchers for school choice, including public funds for private and
religious schools.
Vouchers have made more gains in Milwaukee than elsewhere in the U.S. Opponents charge that Bradley Foundation-backed vouchers are meant to dismantle public schools by using tax dollars to fund elitist private schools, ultimately nationwide.(Miner).
Vouchers have made more gains in Milwaukee than elsewhere in the U.S. Opponents charge that Bradley Foundation-backed vouchers are meant to dismantle public schools by using tax dollars to fund elitist private schools, ultimately nationwide.(Miner).
Brief History of
IQ and Testing
The Bell Curve
authors' motives and the book's
controversial nature can best be understood in the perspective of a
brief history of IQ and testing.
In China
An overview
history of IQ, testing, and race begins with ancient China's civil service.
Examinations based on Chinese classics, then thought to hold essential wisdom,
selected the best minds to administer that vast society. Most modern countries
have adopted and modified China's competitive test-based civil service system.
Plato's Republic
Plato's
influential classic, The Republic, described a utopia ruled by philosopher
kings selected through continuous testing to find the brightest and best minds.
Schooling and testing from ages six to 20 selected the brightest for higher
learning from about 20 to 30. The brightest of these were again test-selected
for special schooling from about 30 to 35. The best became key administrators,
ages 35 to 50, and the most successful of these became ruling philosopher
kings--the Einsteins, Gandhis, and Shakespeares of their time.
Below the few
best top rulers were administrators at various levels. At the bottom were the
laboring majority with limited civil rights. Girls as well as boys from any
class could, by ability, rise to the top or drop to the bottom. Platonists have
since favored selective education according to ability because it makes for
social order and efficiency. Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve is
in this tradition of rule by elites on the basis of intellect or IQ.
Intelligence and IQ
Intelligence and IQ
Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, 1859, with its survival of the fittest theme, stimulated interest in measuring human intelligence. Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton's (1822-1911) Hereditary Genius, 1869, stated that "Ability goes by descent." He favored eugenics, or selective breeding, to benefit mankind.
Measuring
James McKeen Cattell studied at Wilhelm Wundt's psychological laboratory, University of Leipzig, Germany, and later studied individual differences with Galton in England.
At the University of Pennsylvania, Cattell established the first U.S. university psychological laboratory to measure individual differences. He taught at Columbia University and in 1890 coined the term "mental tests."
Alfred Binet
(1857-1911)
In 1904 the
French Minister of Public Education asked psychologist Alfred Binet to devise
tests to identify children with learning difficulties. Large classes and
inflexible curricula in French public schools gave teachers little time to find
and help slow students. Binet
prepared intelligence
tests to identify normal and subnormal Paris school children ages 3 to 11. The
Binet- Simon age-graded tests of 1905, improved in 1908, proved reliable and
useful.
Binet's tests to
identify students needing help were not meant to measure intelligence, which he
believed was complex. Though not himself a genetic hereditarian, his tests were
used to serve hereditarian views.
Stern, Goddard,
Terman
German
psychologist William Stern in 1911 introduced the "mental quotient"
concept, dividing a child's mental age by chronological age which, when
multiplied by 100, is today's IQ.
H.H. Goddard
translated the Simon-Binet scale into English in 1910 and verified its
reliability in Vineland, New Jersey, schools. Goddard held a hereditarian view
and saw intelligence as a single unit.
Clark University
graduate Lewis Terman improved the Binet-Simon tests when he became Stanford
University psychology professor. This 1916 Stanford revision of the Binet-Simon
tests became the standard intelligence test. Goddard, Terman, and others turned
Binet's tests--originally to identify and help the learning disabled--into
tests believed to measure inherited intelligence.(Gould 1995)
World War I Army
Tests
In 1917 Harvard's
Robert Yerkes and his committee of psychologists developed and administered
World War I Army Alpha tests (using arithmetical reasoning, number series
completion, and analogies) to nearly two million recruits. The Army Beta tests
had similar pictorial questions for illiterate recruits.
Army Alpha and
Beta test results showed that immigrant recruits on average scored lower than
American-born recruits, that more recent southern and eastern European
immigrants scored lower than western European immigrants, that black recruits
scored lowest of all, and that the average Army recruit had a mental age of 13.
Despite doubts
about the validity of the Army Alpha and Beta tests, intelligence testing
increased as immigration and industrialization grew. Such tests were used in
public schools for tracking bright, average, and slow students, and in industry
for efficient job placement.
Racism and
Elitism in Testing
Mental testing
influenced politicians to favor immigration of apparently brighter northern
Europeans and to limit lower ability immigrants from other areas. Journalist
Walter Lippmann warned that racism and elitism are inherent in intelligence
tests. In his 1923 New Republic article he wrote that we "cannot measure intelligence when
we have never defined it." (Seligman 1992; Question, p. 52)
Scientists Leon Kamin, Stephen Jay Gould, and others have since also warned that IQ tests are elitist, unscientific, and racist. (Kamin 1974; Gould 1981)
Scientists Leon Kamin, Stephen Jay Gould, and others have since also warned that IQ tests are elitist, unscientific, and racist. (Kamin 1974; Gould 1981)
Eugenics, U. S.,
and Nazi Germany
Intelligence
testing declined in reaction to eugenics practiced in parts of the U.S. during
the 1920s-30s. Some low IQers, in and out of state institutions, thought to be
feebleminded, were lobotomized and sterilized, often without their consent. The
horrors of Nazi Germany's race policy (1933-45) also increased unease about
intelligence testing.
World War II and
After
The new test
makers were careful not to call their tests intelligence tests. Over nine
million World War II recruits took the Army General Classification Test.
Testing grew with the popularity of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget's theory of stages
of human development and was further encouraged by those wanting to measure
gains made in Project Head Start and other early childhood education enrichment
intervention programs.
Anti-testing
sentiment came in the mid-1960s-70s from student protesters and liberal
educators and politicians who saw IQ tests as racist, undemocratic, and
unreliable. Conservatives reacted by tying anti-IQ testers to the communist
threat. The USSR disavowed IQ tests, determined as communists to remake human
nature and not believing (in theory) in giving anyone special advantage. Arthur
Jensen's 1969 article reopened and widened the IQ controversy.
Arthur R. Jensen
and Other Geneticists
Psychologist
Arthur R. Jensen, son of a San Diego businessman, earned degrees in psychology
at the University of California-Berkeley, San Diego State University, and
Columbia University. After working with British psychologist H.J. Eysenck at
the University of London, he became educational psychologist at the University
of California-Berkeley. His 1969 Harvard Educational Review article,
"How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?," stated:
"Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed."
Emphasizing the fixed genetic nature of intelligence, Jensen wrote that enrichment programs do not boost the IQs of deprived children. Because up to 80 percent of IQ is genetic and any educational enrichment is soon lost, compensatory programs fail and are wasteful. Jensen, like Herrnstein later, was physically threatened by student radicals and forced to have bodyguards on and off the campus.(Jensen, 1969)
Echoing Jensen's view of IQ as genetic and fixed was Stanford University physicist William Shockley, Nobel Prize winner as co-inventor of the transistor. Shockley's advocacy of eugenics provoked even fiercer liberal opposition.(Seligman 1994, Trashing; Samuelson 1994)
The 1994 Bell
Curve, with its racial overtones, dramatically
revived the controversy over IQ and race which Jensen, Shockley, and others
aroused after 1969.
Praising The Bell
Curve
The fierce debate over The Bell Curve can be seen in
The fierce debate over The Bell Curve can be seen in
the following
praise from reviewers who liked the book and the more numerous quotes from
reviewers who condemned the book. First, some quotes praising the book.
Norman Prodhoretz's 1968 Memoir, past editor of Commentary, 1995:
"I'm a strong defender of The Bell Curve. I think The Bell Curve has been subjected to the most vicious lynching of any book since Making It."
"I'm a strong defender of The Bell Curve. I think The Bell Curve has been subjected to the most vicious lynching of any book since Making It."
Murray and
Herrnstein were right about one thing: it pays to choose your parents
carefully.(Adler, 1994)
The Bell Curve
is not an argument for racial
discrimination. It is an argument against racial discrimination...sanctioned by
university and media and government and corporate elites; [and against] racial preferences
and quotas.(Barone)
Herrnstein and
Murray are right in saying that there is no proven way to raise IQs on a
consistent basis.(Besharov)
"The Bell
Curve makes a strong case that America's
population is becoming dangerously polarized between a smart, rich, educated
elite and a population of unintelligent, poor and uneducated people.(Browne)
To those
determined to use the coercive power of government to achieve equality of
results, in education, social standing, income, etc., ...Herrnstein and Murray
are saying they are hopeless Utopians...certain to end in failure and
frustration. The Bell Curve is a bullet right
through the heart of socialism.(Buchanan)
The Bell Curve
has much to offer. Its excellent analysis
of the transformation of the American elite deserves high praise...as do its
cautious and modest proposals for reforms.(Genovese)
Criticizing The Bell
Curve: short quotes from more numerous
critical
reviewers:
The Bell Curve...is scientifically flawed [reported a
The Bell Curve...is scientifically flawed [reported a
panel of experts
at Howard University, a traditionally African American university in
Washington, D.C.]. ...The book uses data selectively and then ignores any data that c-baked
opinions, the consensus among scholars is that Murray and Herrnstein are wrong.
...The fact that most African-Americans have descended from people who endured
more than 300 years of bondage and discrimination seems to have been of little
significance to Murray and Herrnstein.(Boyd)
Unsure whether
they are addressing ordinary...readers or professional scholars [Bell Curve authors]
offer either too little or too much information.(Browne)
There are other
kinds of "intelligence" that are crucial to determining a person's
performance in life....[including] common sense, experience, intuition,
creativity and...social intelligence. ...In any field such as art, technology,
teaching and science, creativity is at least as important as IQ....The book is
an exercise in rhetorical brinkmanship.(Allman)
A tendentious
tone abuses science to promote far- right policies. ...As the country lurches
to the right, many people will be seduced by the text's academic trappings and
scientific tone into believing its arguments and political inferences well
supported. Those readers should think again. ...The work is a string of
half-truths. ...The arguments stem from the same tradition of biological
determinism that led, not so long ago, to compulsory sterilizations in the U.S.
and genocide elsewhere. ...The Bell Curve plays
fast and loose with statistics in several ways. ...The book exaggerates the
ability of IQ to predict job performance.(Beardsley)
It offers a
conservative attack on the liberal egalitarianism of the 1960s. ...The Bell
Curve...comes from a cold and dark place in
American thought. ...If you take this [book] seriously, eugenics is just around
the corner.(Bellicose)
What if racial
differences in IQ are the result of over 200 years of slavery and more than 100
more years of discrimination and oppression?(Besharov)
Clever Arguments,
Atrocious Science.... The Bell Curve is
a house of cards constructed to push a political agenda--an attack on
affirmative action, the welfare system, and schools that fail the gifted.... To
couch their opinions as scientific truth is downright dangerous. The Bell
Curve could trigger insidious discrimination....
Now, the slamming [of doors of opportunity] will be justified on the grounds of
lower intelligence. That's not the kind of America we want.(Carey)
Christian
affirmations of the intrinsic and equal value of each individual as created and
beloved by God find little support in The Bell Curve's
totally secular worldview. Here cognitive elites...need not recognize
any...obligations to share with their neighbors or worry about a just
society.... The whole book seems morally and spiritually tone-deaf.(Callahan)
The Bell Curve
will undoubtedly give encouragement to
both the crudest and the most subtle form of racism.(Fischel)
For black
children who need a load lifted from their backs, Murray and Herrnstein just
add more baggage, delivering a gloomy message of predestination and a racial
caste.... [Does] Charles Murray [have] the IQ to understand why one sentence
from Einstein is worth more than everything in The Bell Curve ("Genius
is 90 percent sweat").(Reiland 1994, 1995)
The Bell Curve
is not only sleazy; it is, intellectually,
a mess.(Ryan)
Perceptive Views in Depth of Five
Critics
l-Howard Gardner
Believes in Many Kinds of Intelligence.
Harvard
educational psychologist Howard Gardner disliked Herrnstein and Murray's
"academic brinkmanship." They almost embrace, then do not fully
endorse, intelligence tied to genes. They want to abandon affirmative action
and limit low IQers' childbearing and immigration.
Gardner fears class warfare as Bell Curve readers are persuaded to identify with high IQers and distance themselves from low IQers.
Gardner fears class warfare as Bell Curve readers are persuaded to identify with high IQers and distance themselves from low IQers.
Gardner
questioned The Bell Curve's assertion that
genes explain social class. Longer schooling may raise IQ. Also, IQ and school
success are affected by nutrition, individual motivation, and parental
attention. Many factors besides IQ, including luck, account for one's
socio-economic status.
Herrnstein and
Murray mention, wrote Gardner, but do not credit findings that IQ has risen
worldwide in this century, an increase that cannot be explained by genes alone;
that IQs rise among African Americans who move from the rural south to the
urban north; and that when poor black children are adopted into higher socio-
economic status families, their aptitude and achievement improve.
Psychometricians,
Gardner noted, are "intoxicated with the IQ test." He doubted the
notion of a single measured intelligence, believing in many kinds of
intelligence along with the linguistic and logical skills measured in IQ tests.
Training and inborn talent, he wrote, account for chess and musical experts,
whose skill depends as much on practice as on native ability. Genes may
regulate human behavior, but learning alters the way genes function.
Intelligence is learned as much as it is inborn. Expectations of parents and
teachers are important and do affect IQ.
Gardner cited
Harold W. Stevenson and James W. Stigler, The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools
are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education.
Chinese, Japanese, and American students tested had about equal IQ scores. East
Asians learn more, not because they have higher IQs, but because they attend
school more days, study harder in school and at home, have better prepared
teachers, and have parents who prod and coach them.(Stevenson)
Herrnstein,
Murray, and most Americans believe that lack of ability causes failure. But
East Asians believe that lack of effort causes failure. Success or failure
depends, not on our genes, but on demands we make on ourselves, wrote Gardner.
Gardner called
Herrnstein and Murray dangerously confrontational in setting up an
us-against-them mentality (high IQers vs. low IQers). He criticized the authors
for ignoring successful social and educational intervention programs with
deprived children, as described in Lisbeth B. Schorr's 1988 Within Our
Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage,(Schorr)
written in part to counter Murray's anti-welfare Losing Ground.(Murray
1985) The proven success of some intervention programs casts doubt on The Bell
Curve's gloomy message that aiding the poor is
futile. It is callous to write The Bell Curve and
omit studies of workable intervention programs for the poor, wrote
Gardner.
2-Critic Alan Ryan
thinks Herrnstein is obsessed with the genetic heritability of intelligence and
Murray is obsessed with wasteful welfare programs. The resulting politics in
their book, Ryan added, is "at best slightly mad and at worst plain
ugly."(Ryan)
Herrnstein began
as a disciple of behaviorist B.F. Skinner, who believed that a controlled
environment shaped behavior. But Herrnstein was later captivated with Charles
Spearman's g factor in tests, which supposedly correlated with intelligence.
Skeptics say g explains nothing. Herrnstein's acceptance of g only matters,
wrote Ryan, because it "reinforced his [Herrnstein's] fascination with
ethnicity." Wrote Ryan: once you find that criminals' average IQ is 93,
then you increasingly believe that lower IQers are doomed social misfits.
Murray saw the
widening gap between rich and poor as leading to an American "Custodial
State," wrote Ryan. High IQers live in walled-off and well policed
enclaves with decent schools. Poor low IQers live in squalor in shut-off urban
slums. Ryan wrote that Herrnstein believed that the bottom 10 percent of low IQ whites is heading
for the same degradation as the black underclass.
Ryan's
interpretation is that Herrnstein's mysterious g in intelligence, combined with
Murray's view of a cast- ridden America, led them to write "what people
already think in their heart of hearts:"...that blacks and white trash are
born irremediably dumb, that African Americans have been over promoted and
given unfair advantage, and that federal affirmative action has displaced
smarter whites with incompetent blacks. These negative themes in The Bell
Curve, Ryan believed, come from Herrnstein's
gloomy prediction of America's declining intelligence combined with Murray's
prediction of pending fascism.
3-Critic Nancy Cole: The
Bell Curve Slights the Power of Education.
Nancy Cole is
president of the Educational Testing Service and was education dean at the
Universities of Pittsburgh and Illinois. The Bell Curve,
she wrote, slights the role of education. If IQ alone determines one's place in
life, then little is left for school, learning, education, teachers, and
teacher education. Vast public and private schools and the education industry
are all wasted efforts. This is simply not true, she declared.
The Bell Curve
authors, she charged, would educate only
the high IQers and neglect the rest. "I find that a dangerous...social
policy.... The influence of this book is almost totally negative," she
wrote.(Cole 1994, 1995)
Cole would never
hire Herrnstein and Murray as teachers because their "beliefs in inherited
immutable capabilities...are contrary to the basic role of the teacher."
The Bell Curve, she wrote, makes leaps of
unproved inference not substantiated from its selective data.
"I am
[sorry] the book is out there," she wrote. It hardens the views of those
already negative about human possibilities. It justifies those who do not want
to provide learning opportunities for all children. "The most dangerous
thing about this book is that the authors attempt to absolve us from dealing
with the fundamental issues of race, class, and poverty."
We must do more, not less, to improve learning for all children.
We must do more, not less, to improve learning for all children.
She concluded
that the book does a disservice in implying that race and class opportunities
are dictated by a fixed IQ score. The book is negative and harmful regarding
social and educational policies. Its appearance was timed politically to
support conservatives wanting to restrict immigration of low IQers and cut
public education costs.(Cole 1994, 1995)
4-Critic Charles Lane
Finds The Bell Curve Racist and Divisive.
Critic Charles
Lane detected sympathy for, but no specific endorsement of, eugenics in The Bell
Curve. He did find racial bias in the book's
sources. The book cited five articles from Mankind Quarterly,
a reputedly pro- white and anti-black anthropological journal founded in
Edinburgh, Scotland, 1960. Seventeen researchers cited in The Bell Curve also
contributed to Mankind Quarterly, ten of
them present and past editors or on its editorial board.(Lane, Mercer, Rosen
and Lane)
Mankind
Quarterly's founding purpose was to counter
"communist" and "egalitarian" influences. One Mankind
Quarterly founder championed South African
apartheid. Another, active in U.S. White Citizens' Councils, had testified
before the U.S. Supreme Court against the 1954 Brown desegregation decision.
Some Mankind
Quarterly authors were pro-Nazi scientists. One
editorial board member was academic mentor to Dr. Josef Mengele, Nazi
experimenter on concentration camp inmates. The quarterly is financed by the
Pioneer Fund, founded in 1937, a New York foundation allegedly pro-Nazi,
pro-eugenics, and white supremacist.(Reed 1994, Progressive;
Reed 1994, Nation)
A Pioneer Fund
letter in 1989 proposed that the U.S. abandon integration because "raising
the intelligence of blacks...still remains beyond our capabilities."
Pioneer Fund President Harry F. Weyher has denied that the fund ever supported
eugenics research, despite the interest in eugenics of its founders and early
directors.(Mercer)
The Bell Curve
cited studies by thirteen scholars who
received over $4 million in Pioneer Fund research grants. These included Arthur
R. Jensen and psychology professor Richard Lynn, University of Ulster, Northern
Ireland, and a Mankind Quarterly associate
editor.
Richard Lynn's
research in South Africa and the former Belgian Congo compared black African
lower IQs to higher black American IQs. He attributed the higher black American
IQs to their admixture of white genes. Lynn is also a source for stating that
East Asian IQs average a few points higher than white IQs, a finding which is
disputed.
Critic Lane wrote
that "Herrnstein and Murray aren't answerable for every belief of every
member of the racialist crowd they rely on for so much of their data." But
he faulted the authors for not disclosing the racist views of their sources and
for re-introducing eugenics thinking.
5-Robert J.
Samuelson: In Our Meritocracy, Ability Counts
Newsweek writer
Robert J. Samuelson challenged The Bell Curve's
concept of a cognitive elite. "If the Founding Fathers
ever envisioned an ideal social order, it was surely a meritocracy: a system
under which people succeed mainly on the basis of ability and
effort."(Samuelson 1994, 1995)
"And yet,
[our] meritocracy is now under furious intellectual assault" in books like
The Bell Curve, whose thesis is simply not
true. Instead of cognitive elites ruling a caste society, Samuelson pointed
out, consider the vast increase of U.S. managers and professionals. Between
1940-93, when the labor force slightly more than doubled, managers quadrupled
from 3.8 million to 15.4 million, engineers quintupled from 300,000 to 1.7
million, lawyers increased from 182,000 to 777,000, and physicians from 168,000
to 605,000.(Samuelson 1994, 1995)
“We don't live in
a classless society," wrote Samuelson, "(and never will), but we do
live in an enormously fluid one....[This] is the central point that [Herrnstein
and Murray] miss or minimize."
Samuelson added
that "the success of the people at the top does not cause the poverty of
the people at the bottom." Of 2,729 top executives at 208 major
corporations in the mid-1980s, 17 percent did not go to college or were college
dropouts, and 28 percent had bachelor's degrees from nonprestigious colleges.
"The image
of a pampered elite that can easily program its own future is vastly
overdrawn," wrote Samuelson. ..."Whatever its defects, [our]
meritocracy is a huge advance over the preceding barriers of race, sex,
religion, and ethnicity. Life is unfair...[and] always will be--but it is not
rigged, at least not in America."(Samuelson 1994, 1995)
Bell Curve
Co-author Murray Answered Critics:
Murray's answer
to these and other critics is that The Bell Curve is
moderate in its language, claims, and science and that its statistical analysis
is standard and straightforward. Yet hostile critics call him and Herrnstein
pseudo-scientist racists drawing wrong conclusions from faulty research
methods. Critics were mistaken, he protested, when they charged that his and
Herrnstein's motive was to eliminate federal welfare programs.(Vangelis, Murray
1995)
Critics'
hysterical opposition to The Bell Curve,
Murray wrote, comes from our national obsession with race, which dominates all
U.S. social policy discussion. He quoted reviewer Michael Novak's explanation
for the extreme attacks on the book: "The sin attributed to Herrnstein and
Murray is theological: they destroy hope," hope that government can solve
problems of race, poverty, and crime.
Murray said that
critics unfairly exaggerate what The Bell Curve contains
about race. This exaggeration Murray attributed to the liberal left's own
"psychological projection onto our text." The left believes that
society caused racism, poverty, and crime and that the only remedy is
government welfare and compensation. Hope is all the left has to believe in,
wrote Murray.(Murray 1995, Novak)
Attacks on The Bell
Curve, Murray believes, are really attacks
"against the psychometric tradition on which it is based"; that is,
on Charles Spearman's g factor of cognitive ability. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould's
book, The Mismeasure of Man, and his New
Yorker article rejected psychometrics as a false
science. But Gould's denial of Spearman's "g" factor, Murray
asserted, "has been thoroughly discredited among scholars."(Murray
1995)
Murray stated
that what he and Herrnstein actually wrote about genes, IQ, and race is that
both genetic and environmental factors determine the average 15 points higher
white over black IQ score. He and Herrnstein, he wrote, did not make as
aggressive a case for genetic differences as the evidence suggested.
Despite The Bell
Curve's over 1,000 sources, critics picked a
dozen so-called tainted racist sources, all published, incidentally, Murray
pointed out, in respected and refereed journals. Critics label Mankind
Quarterly and the Pioneer Fund as
racist. Yet their present management is racially fair, even if some called
their founders racist.
Murray thus
countered with seeming logic Bell Curve critics'
charges that the book is racist, that it confused correlation with causation,
that it neglected enriched remedial education programs, and other charges.
Charge and counter-charge continue.
When the
controversy over The Bell Curve wanes,
Murray concluded, its findings will stand the test of time. Critical attacks
have made the book more widely read, he noted, and thus more influential in the
current national reexamination of welfare policy.
Why the
Resurgence of IQ Studies? Behind the Recent Resurgence of IQ Studies
After Nazi
horrors cast a pall on genetic studies on race, many scholars focused more on
education-acquired skills (nurture) than on genetic studies (nature). Large
post-World War II changes--the founding of the United Nations, the independence
of former colonies, and post- war economic growth--encouraged western nations
to try to reduce world-wide socio-economic problems. In this attempt to improve
society, social scientists turned to planning and remediation. Nature-oriented
geneticists turned from studying human subjects to studying less controversial
fruit flies, ants, and honey bees.
But disillusion
with social planning climaxed in the 1980s-90s as many realized that post-World
War II liberal social policies had failed to solve socio-economic problems. As
more was learned about how genes work, genetic scholars gained more acceptance
in American universities. New studies suggested that the brain structure of
girls differed from that of boys in mastering science and mathematics, and
offered other genetic explanations for human differences and difficulties.
In this climate
of acceptance of genetic studies, Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, and others
boldly declared that IQ determined class, place, and income, and also accounted
for national strengths and weaknesses. That climate of acceptance was
accompanied by a national economic slowdown, growing inner city crime and drug
problems, rising welfare costs, and anguish over the mounting national debt.
Charles Murray's assertion that welfare was a waste and affirmative action a
mistake gained acceptance. In suggesting that biology is destiny, The Bell
Curve authors urged that government policy
change in favor of the gifted while cutting low IQers' benefits, or else
America and western civilization will decline.(Old)
The Bell Curve
Controversy in Context The Bell Curve and
the Clash over American Values
Some see the
furor over The Bell Curve as part of a
conservative-versus-liberal clash over American values. The Founding Fathers
embraced hard work, free enterprise, free markets, and laissez faire
government. Elite Calvinists promoted big business, international corporations,
profits, and--recently--testing and IQ for economic efficiency.
This business ethic was challenged in the mid-1960s-70s by new liberal baby boomers whose mindset came from affluent suburban rearing, greater educational opportunities, and mid-1960s-70s anti-Vietnam, pro-civil rights activism. It was these better educated younger Americans, removed and alienated from the Puritan ethic, who formed the mindset of mid-1960s-70s student protesters.
This business ethic was challenged in the mid-1960s-70s by new liberal baby boomers whose mindset came from affluent suburban rearing, greater educational opportunities, and mid-1960s-70s anti-Vietnam, pro-civil rights activism. It was these better educated younger Americans, removed and alienated from the Puritan ethic, who formed the mindset of mid-1960s-70s student protesters.
The dramatic
increase in levels of education in this past half century enlarged the U.S.
leadership pool. The percentage over age 25 with four or more years of college
rose from 5 percent in 1940 (3.4 million) to 20 percent by 1985 (27 million).
Fifty percent of high school graduates now enter some kind of college; about 25
percent graduate from college. Professionals in the work force rose from 4
million, 1950, to 16 million, 1980. U.S. doctoral degrees granted rose from 382
in 1899-1900 to 33,000 in 1976-77. In 1982 about 750,000 Americans held
doctoral degrees.(Snyderman, p. 252)
Better educated
younger Americans of the mid- 1960s-70s developed a concern for social justice,
particularly for have-not minorities. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy,
Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King, Jr., sensitized the new concerned
liberals. The civil rights movement radicalized them. Anti-Vietnam War and
anti-big business views galvanized them into rebellion. They opposed IQ and
testing as racist and unfair. They favored affirmative action and compensatory
education to level the playing field and give have nots a long denied
advantage.
The 1994 Bell
Curve revived the clash between the Puritan
ethic and concerned liberals, between nature and nurture, between IQ testers
and compensatory education advocates, between haves and have nots, and between
political advocates of wealthy high IQers and poor low IQers. This clash
surfaced nationally with Jensen from 1969 and with The Bell Curve from
1994.
Race Relations
Confrontations
Recall how Americans
were horrified at Rodney King's brutal beating by Los Angeles police (1991) ,
mesmerized by the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial, and shocked at the racial division
uncovered by that jury's not guilty verdict. Americans await with concern the
consequences on race relations of the October l6, 1995, Million Man March in
Washington, D.C.
The Bell Curve
appeared just before and heralded the
conservative Republican Party victory in the November 1994 elections.
Republicans dominate Congress on the eve of an historic 1996 national election.
Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have been right of center. A new American conservatism bids fair to influence the early twenty-first century, when efficiency will be increasingly important in an information-based society. The Bell Curve's final influence awaits the consequences of these trends and the unfolding of race relations.
Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have been right of center. A new American conservatism bids fair to influence the early twenty-first century, when efficiency will be increasingly important in an information-based society. The Bell Curve's final influence awaits the consequences of these trends and the unfolding of race relations.
The Crucial Role
of Education
Critic Nancy Cole
and others fault The Bell Curve for
neglecting the role of education. In contrast, the theme of George Bernard
Shaw's play, Pygmalion, and its musical
stage and film versions, My Fair Lady,
exalted the power of education to improve the human condition. Speech teacher
Professor Henry Higgins bets his friend, Colonel Pickering, that he, Higgins,
can make a lady out of a London Cockney flower girl. He teaches her good speech
and better manners. Through the magic of education, he succeeds in making her
into a regal lady.
Conclusion: Will
Equality of Opportunity Prevail?
Most Bell
Curve critics agree that using IQ and
testing for
diagnosis and improvement is helpful. But using IQ and testing to categorize
people is unfair and undemocratic. We are not trapped by an iron law of nature.
We came into the world unfinished. We can and do improve ourselves and our
children. Education, perhaps more than IQ, has the power to improve, uplift,
and ennoble.
The Bell Curve
increased fears about, rather than helped
ease, race and class conflicts. Its critics see it as a threat to equality of
educational opportunity. Their cry against the book affirms the belief that all
people deserve an equal chance.
Resolving race and class tensions requires tolerance, good will, and
enlarging rather than limiting the American ideal of equality of opportunity.
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Biographical
Sketch of Authors
Franklin Parker
attended Berea College, Ky. (B.A., 1949, a southern Appalachian work-study
college); the University of Illinois, Urbana (M.S., 1950); and Peabody College
of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn. (Ed.D., 1956). He taught history of
education,
philosophy of
education, and comparative and international education at the Universities of
Texas, Austin (1957-64); Oklahoma, Norman (1964-68); and West Virginia
University, Morgantown (1968-86), where he held a chair as Claude Worthington
Benedum Professor of Education. His post-retirement teaching has been at
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff (1986- 89), and Western Carolina
University, near Asheville, N.C. (1989-94).
Author of
twenty-four books, several encyclopedia articles, and many journal articles,
Parker's most recent work is George Peabody, A Biography, 1995 revision of the
1971 edition by Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville.
Betty J. Parker
attended Berea College, Ky. (B.A., 1950), where she met and married Franklin
Parker in 1950. She studied at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University,
Nashville, Tenn. (M.S., 1956); accompanied her husband on field research in
Africa (1956-57, 1961- 62), Britain (1954 and later years), China (1978, 1986);
and co-authored books on international education with him. She taught public
high school English and later Reading at the University of Texas, Austin;
worked for the American Friends Service Committee's Southwest Office, Austin;
was on the AFSC's Executive Committee; and is a self-employed editor.
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