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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums1,200 Harvard Students Demand Investigation Into Jason Richwine’s Thesis On Hispanic IQ
Over 1,000 Harvard students delivered a petition to Harvard Universitys JFK School on Saturday, demanding an investigation into how and why the school approved a 2009 doctoral thesis arguing that Hispanics have lower IQs. The thesis was written by Jason Richwine, a co-author of a paper by the conservative Heritage Foundation that argued immigration reform would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion. The discovery of Richwines paper by the Washington Post sparked a firestorm around the Heritage study, and several days later Richwine resigned from the think tank.
Now Harvard students want to know how a thesis built on those views and assumptions was able to make it through the approval process in the first place. Academic freedom and a reasoned debate are essential to our academic community, the petition read. However, the Harvard Kennedy School cannot ethically stand behind academic work advocating a national policy of exclusion and advancing an agenda of discrimination.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/05/17/kennedy-school-students-demand-inquiry-into-immigration-thesis/6Izovn4svIW6jvlm7VSDFO/story.html
http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/05/19/2033831/1200-harvard-students-demand-investigation-into-jason-richwines-thesis-on-hispanic-iq/
Donald Ian Rankin
(13,598 posts)If you can attack Richwine's methodology, fair enough (I haven't bothered to read his work; I have no idea if it's sound).
But this appears to mostly be attacking him because they don't like his conclusions, which is utterly contemptible.
Xipe Totec
(43,890 posts)Donald Ian Rankin
(13,598 posts)siligut
(12,272 posts)And that is contemptible in any case, but as a Harvard doctoral thesis it undermines what an institute of higher learning is about.
Donald Ian Rankin
(13,598 posts)a thesis.
That he (if he, and I don't know if he did but it seems not unlikely) hoped for a certain conclusion from his research and did indeed arrive at that conclusion is grounds to apply extra scrutiny to his work, but not to dismiss it if the methodology is indeed sound.
ZRT2209
(1,357 posts)Donald Ian Rankin
(13,598 posts)I think that attacking Richwine because you don't like his forest (conclusion) is not legitimate unless you can also demonstrate that his trees (methods) are flawed.
tiny elvis
(979 posts)do you need to examine my methodology?
Donald Ian Rankin
(13,598 posts)bahrbearian
(13,466 posts)did he submit one?
Donald Ian Rankin
(13,598 posts)I've seen a quote (I'm sure you can find it on DU) from someone senior claiming that the faculty wouldn't have signed off on his research without checking the methodology closely.
Whether they're telling the truth I don't know for sure, but they'd be fools not to.
bahrbearian
(13,466 posts)aquart
(69,014 posts)aquart
(69,014 posts)So you're willing to believe there's a methodology that can prove moving from one country to another is only done by stupid people?
Or is it only people who speak Spanish as a first language who are born stupid?
Or only people who speak Spanish AND move to another country?
Harvard has a LOT of explaining to do.
Donald Ian Rankin
(13,598 posts)I think (although I'm not positive) that the gist of what he claims is that Latino immigrants to the USA, and their short-term descendants, will, on average, have lower IQs than non-immigrant whites.
I am pretty confident that a) better educated people will, on average, score higher on most measures of intelligence than less well educated people, b) richer people are, on average, better educated than poorer people and c) both immigrants and Latinos are, on average, poorer than non-immigrant non-Latino whites in the USA.
So the claim that Latino immigrants will, on average, score lower on IQ tests would only be even remotely surprising if you believed that IQ is purely a result of innate rather than learned factors, which I don't.
(Incidentally, all those claims are obviously false if you omit the "on average" .
I don't know if Richwine claims there's a biological or a causal factor on top of that - if he does so without extremely strong evidence, that would be at least circumstantial evidence for a charge of racism, as would the political conclusions he draws from it. But race and immigration status both correlate so strongly with things that are obviously going to correlate with things that are obviously going to alter your performance on an IQ test that I'd be more surprised if they didn't correlate than if they did.
aquart
(69,014 posts)sheshe2
(83,925 posts)Richwines dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. While its clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.
Toward the end of the thesis, Richwine writes that though he believes racial differences in IQ to be real and persistent, one need not agree with that to accept his case for basing immigration on IQ. Rather than excluding what he judges to be low-IQ races, we can just test each individuals IQ and exclude those with low scores. I believe there is a strong case for IQ selection, he writes, since it is theoretically a win-win for the U.S. and potential immigrants. He does caution against referring to it as IQ-based selection, saying that using the term skill-based would blunt the negative reaction.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/08/heritage-study-co-author-opposed-letting-in-immigrants-with-low-iqs/
MattBaggins
(7,905 posts)WTF is that and what idiots allowed that in a doctoral thesis?
freshwest
(53,661 posts)KamaAina
(78,249 posts)-K-A, Yale '85
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)also an education deformer.
PennsylvaniaMatt
(966 posts)How such a blatantly racist paper could be approved at, of all places, Harvard. I'm amazed that a student of Harvard could be so naïve and stupid as Richwine demonstrated.
Donald Ian Rankin
(13,598 posts)I certainly hope so, although I don't know for sure.
alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)It's a good goddamn question.
aikoaiko
(34,184 posts)Dissertations are more about assumptions, rationales, methods, data, and conclusions that combine into a novel contributing to the literature and not about being politically friendly.
Rozlee
(2,529 posts)As the daughter of illegal immigrants, this douchebag gets my goat, but I don't know how Harvard can claim that his methods are flawed when he puts his own spin on them. That's the trouble with cherry-picking, as we learned from the lead up to the Iraq War. He can produce his conclusions from his own experts, their experiments, their studies and wrap it up in a neat bow to present it as scholarship. You can argue that it's a form of free speech, even though it's a slippery slope toward greater forms of racial and ethnic slighting that might eventually lead to a whole lot worse.
But, a part of me is perverse. I kind of like the shitstorm he's brought on himself that has the Heritage Foundation and conservatives on the defensive.
dmr
(28,349 posts)Sure would like to see the data that backs his assertions.
Baitball Blogger
(46,758 posts)Last edited Sun May 19, 2013, 08:53 PM - Edit history (1)
what a 100% Latina can do, if given the chance to set the record straight.
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)Who knows? Maybe Sonia will run for President.
Baitball Blogger
(46,758 posts)joeglow3
(6,228 posts)It frees people up to study things that others don't/won't like (and who would try to prevent them from conducting it). The issue is NOT the content.
The issue is what methodology did he use. Was it flawed? Was he graded accordingly?
As much as the content disgusts me, I support academic freedom more. If it was crap (which I assume it is), the issue is why was it not treated as such?
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)There is a significant and consistent variation in IQ results between populations; the average IQ score for Hispanics in the US is about ten points lower than for non-Hispanic whites (the Hispanic average is at the ninetieth percentile of non-Hispanic white scores). There is considerable literature on the subject; the data are inarguable. One can disagree with the conclusions Richwine chose to draw from those data (for instance the idea that these differences are genetic and not the result of cultural, environmental, and socioeconomic differences between groups), but that doesn't change the fact that this gap in IQ between broadly defined "racial groups" does exist. See here, here, [link:books.google.co.uk/books?id=1iKgwo2q_54C&pg=PA273|here], and here, for a start; also here for an American Psychological Association report.
TheDebbieDee
(11,119 posts)non-Hispanic whites. I'd bet donuts to a dollar that non-Hispanic whites would score lower, on average, on an IQ test developed and written by Hispanics.........
ETA: All of which means (now that I've re-read your post) exactly what you just said................
Donald Ian Rankin
(13,598 posts)I think that
a) Performance on any kind of test which is genuinely designed to measure intelligence will be heavily affected by the quality of your education.
b) The quality of your education will be heavily affected by how rich your parents are.
c) Non-hispanic white people in the USA are, on average, significantly richer than hispanics.
So I suspect that unless you devise a test specifically to score hispanics higher than whites (which would probably only be possible with general-knowledge questions which cannot really be claimed to have much to do with intelligence) then whites in the USA will continue to score higher on average unless and until they're not richer on average, no matter who designed the test.
quakerboy
(13,921 posts)But my understanding is that this overall trend also applies to many other testing formats as well, things like SAT's. And that its fairly well documented to be due to cultural differences.
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)(sorry for the source, I wouldn't ordinarily link to The American Conservative, but the author makes plausible points, to wit, that the observed differences in IQ are more a result of socioeconomic factors and affluence):
Consider, for example, the results from Germany obtained prior to its 1991 reunification. Lynn and Vanhanen present four separate IQ studies from the former West Germany, all quite sizable, which indicate mean IQs in the range 99107, with the oldest 1970 sample providing the low end of that range. Meanwhile, a 1967 sample of East German children produced a score of just 90, while two later East German studies in 1978 and 1984 came in at 9799, much closer to the West German numbers.
These results seem anomalous from the perspective of strong genetic determinism for IQ. To a very good approximation, East Germans and West Germans are genetically indistinguishable, and an IQ gap as wide as 17 points between the two groups seems inexplicable, while the recorded rise in East German scores of 79 points in just half a generation seems even more difficult to explain.
The dreary communist regime of East Germany was certainly far poorer than its western counterpart and its population may indeed have been culturally deprived in some sense, but East Germans hardly suffered from severe dietary deficiencies during the 1960s or late 1950s when the group of especially low-scoring children were born and raised. The huge apparent testing gap between the wealthy West and the dingy East raises serious questions about the strict genetic interpretation favored by Lynn and Vanhanen.
(snip)
Perhaps the strongest evidence supporting this cultural rather than genetic hypothesis comes from the northwestern corner of Europe, namely Celtic Ireland. When the early waves of Catholic Irish immigrants reached America near the middle of the 19th century, they were widely seen as particularly ignorant and uncouth and aroused much hostility from commentators of the era, some of whom suggested that they might be innately deficient in both character and intelligence. But they advanced economically at a reasonable pace, and within less than a century had become wealthier and better educated than the average white American, including those of old stock ancestry. The evidence today is that the tested IQ of the typical Irish-Americanto the extent it can be distinguishedis somewhat above the national white American average of around 100 and also above that of most German-Americans, who arrived around the same time.
Meanwhile, Ireland itself remained largely rural and economically backward and during the 1970s and 1980s still possessed a real per capita GDP less than half that of the United States. Perhaps we should not be too surprised to discover that Lynn and Vanhanen list the Irish IQ at just 93 based on two samples taken during the 1970s, a figure far below that of their Irish-American cousins.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/race-iq-and-wealth/
Bette Noir
(3,581 posts)uponit7771
(90,364 posts)siligut
(12,272 posts)In order for a measurement of IQ to be somewhat relevant, the criteria has to correspond to survival. Richwine may want to believe he has conducted a scientific research study, but his so-called research brings on shades of William Shockley.
1KansasDem
(251 posts)Jason Richwine is a racist.
Gravitycollapse
(8,155 posts)southmost
(759 posts)The IQ tests are racially biased.
Xithras
(16,191 posts)...but they do reflect differences in the quality of the educational systems available to students, which ARE heavily impacted by race. The tests themselves don't actually favor any particular race, but they do highlight glaring differences in the way we educate our kids, and to the impact of poorer nutritional options in minority communities (food quality has a huge impact on cognitive development).
They're a reflection of the society we live in.
WMDemocract
(36 posts)He's certainly created a stir from the Latino community. So much for Latino outreach!
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/community/2013/05/10/heritage-foundation-analyst-resigns-over-writings-saying-latinos-have-lower-iq/
http://nbclatino.com/2013/05/13/jason-richwine-on-hispanic-iq-comments-i-dont-apologize-for-any-of-the-things-that-i-said/
http://hispanicrage.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/jason-richwine-is-wrong-about-mexican-americans/
GeorgeGist
(25,323 posts)Arthur Hays Sulzberger
on point
(2,506 posts)Did the conclusions match the evidence?
I am going to say no because the conclusions are straight out of a discrimination handbook.
That may be the bigger scandal that some folks granted a degree for this garbage and their career should be over at Harvard
but for a thesis, only the research counts.....
patrice
(47,992 posts)critique is that because those peers are critiqued by the very same standards as to process and logic.
patrice
(47,992 posts)how (rhetorical) you tread around such an issue: I know someone who didn't get her Master's degree, because her school/ committee disagreed with one of her conclusions: The most recent decline of American Labor dates from the more wealthy and powerful unions' slavish reactions to Nixon (and "winning" the Vietnam War) and Joe McCarthy, and George Meany a great Commie-hater, to curry favor with Nixon - Labor's own Pinko Purge (which resulted in poorer unions, where women and people like Cesar Chavez and all, were abandoned and, perhaps to some extent, even attacked and intimidated about the Farm Workers' and Migrant Labors' rights. Thus, defining an essential trait, if any, of the economic-political schism in American Labor that we see today.)
I remember wondering why those of us who were against the War on Vietnam weren't heard.
Context: http://books.google.com/books/about/Stayin_alive.html?id=h9acQrZmpmAC
Thanks, kpete.
Go Harvard!
d_r
(6,907 posts)seriously. Find the Methods section in this manuscript -
http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/140239668?access_key=key-plj3hup2dcblwl5jlys
ETA-
I'm just going to be honest here, I've read through as much as I can put up with, and no way can I see this partially fulfilling the requirements for a Ph.D. I am not talking about the conclusions, I am talking about the organization and lack of sound methodology. This is not doctoral level work in my experience. I would never let a student send that to committee members because I would be embarrassed. Again, not the conclusions the slap shod work.
patrice
(47,992 posts)Dreamer Tatum
(10,926 posts)Unless you've read the thesis, you have no idea what it reveals other than data which is already known.
clarice
(5,504 posts)I haven't read the man's report, probably won't, but I find myself
wondering (as does Mr. Rankin) if it is wise to dismiss a rigorously researched idea (if indeed this was) simply because we viscerally disagree with the premise of said idea.