Yesterday I wrote about higher education's woes. I identified one of its problems as letting ideology interfere with the search for truth.
Suppose for example research shows not all races have similar IQ profiles. That fact would certainly conflict with what many really, strongly want to be true, for the sake of human rights and fair treatment for all.
Should it then be suppressed? Many today would answer "yes," suppress the truth because we don't like how it may be used. This is a problem for universities which are supposed to exist to find truth, however unpalatable it may turn out to be. BTW, this is no new problem, I'll tell you a true story.
As an undergrad I shared a 4 br. apt. with three other guys for a year. One of them - Bill - majored in psychology, and after graduation went on for a PhD in research psych at Berkeley. The story concerns Bill, who sadly died over 20 years ago, in his 60s.
While at UC Bill linked up with profs doing research on intelligence. They'd found that the age at which infants switch from being interested in bright colors to intriguing shapes covaries with subsequent IQ scores. Smarter kids switch from color to shape at younger ages than those less intelligent.
They were excited that using this nonverbal relationship they could show that the distribution of infants making the switch did not vary by race. They wished to show the paper IQ tests were biased in favor of white and Asian kids and that the differences the tests found were "apparent but not real."
Be clear, the researchers wished to debunk IQ tests and find that all races were approximately equal in IQ. Bill was a research assistant and administered some of the tests, as well as helped crunch the data.
No matter how they massaged the numbers, white and Asian kids made the switch younger than brown and black kids, exactly what IQ tests showed. Although the groups overlapped, Asian kids were smartest, followed by whites, followed by browns, followed by blacks. The color vs. shape tests were non-verbal, parental language skills were not a factor.
The researchers hated the results, didn't publish them, and because Bill had spent his time on research that was never published, he ended up working at a state home for the retarded instead of at a fine university. His was a professional job, paid okay, but was not what he trained for.
Just before I retired one of Bill's own children graduated from my university and I saw Bill for the first time in maybe 25 years. He looked terrible, I believe he may have been terminally ill then though we didn't know it.
My point in telling this story is that suppression of unloved research findings isn't new, this happened when both he and I were in our 20s, and that's 60 or more years ago. Everyone involved, except the infant subjects, is now dead.
The results should have been published, we need to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. When academia doesn't insist on accurate findings, regardless of how happy or angry they make us, society suffers, the academy suffers.
