Tuesday, November 6, 2012

This important (and still relevant) book review by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net, originally appeared in The Journal of Philosophy and History of Education, Vol. 46 (1996), pp. 137-150, and is here reprinted by permission of the authors.

Review of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles A. Murray, The Bell CurveIntelligence 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)
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).

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

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)

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 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." 

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
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 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.
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.

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.

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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