Pike, Ruth: License to Speak

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License to Speak

by

Ruth Pike


The current concern about freedom of expression and about some legitimate limits on that freedom reminds me of the first major academic conference I attended. It was the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in Chicago, 1972. Of the 400 or so sessions, one received unprecedented attention. The notorious Arthur Jensen had been invited to speak.

In 1969, Jensen published an article, How much can we boost I.Q. and scholastic achievement? in the Harvard Educational Review (HER). It was written in response to a request to provide his perspective on why compensatory education programs in the United States apparently provided little or no benefit to the children who they were intended to help. In the article, Jensen said, among other things, that racial differences in intelligence may have a genetic origin and that black and white children may benefit from different types of education. The rest of the HER issue and a second one, consisted of other articles commenting on Jensen’s work, most of them critical of his interpretation of the data presented.

The 1969 article was to become one of the most cited articles in psychological literature. The HER special volumes were on reading lists for graduate courses in psychology, education, statistics, ethics and so on.

The racial aspect of his paper was blown up in the mass media and resulted in protests at the University of California at Berkeley where he was a professor of psychology. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) demanded that his tenure be revoked. His lectures were disrupted and he received threats of violence, even death.

He had a few defenders. One was a professor at OISE, a member of my thesis committee. The academics who criticized Jensen’s detractors, did not necessarily agree with his views or approve of his research. They argued, rather, that political views should not be allowed to interfere with the impartiality and rigor of scientific investigations.

When the conference program was published, the AERA program committee was deluged with complaints and criticisms. The inclusion on the program of a man perceived to be a racist at a time when the civil rights movement was finally making some progress in undoing some discriminatory practices in the U.S. was, to put it mildly, certain to be inflammatory. In order to pacify the objectors and to handle the issue as an academic or scientific inquiry, an additional session was added to the program to follow Jensen’s talk, a full two-hour panel of experts in the field as well as a representative from SDS. This panel was to provide a forum in which the issues in question could be debated openly.

Compensatory education was a very frequent topic at the conference. Every form of education was considered to be the most promising tool for eradicating long-standing social inequities. This was the heyday of early education. Head Start, Bank Street, Bereiter and Englemann direct instruction, even Sesame Street, (a bargain at less than a dollar a day per child, according to the pitch,) were expected to undo the damage from decades of discrimination.

There was no disagreement about differential achievement across social class and ethnic groups. Some researchers, like Jensen, even espoused special education for different sub-groups of the population. Where they differed was in ascribing educational problems to environmental inequalities, inequality of schooling, teacher expectations, motivational factors, language deprivation but never to any innate characteristics.

The first couple of days of the conference were uneventful but that didn’t last. When I went down for breakfast on the day that Jensen was scheduled to speak, I found the hotel surrounded by picketers and police and hundreds of bystanders. Inside the hotel the halls were crowded, buzzing with anticipation and with apprehension. TV cameras, reporters, security guards, police on every floor. There were scattered clusters of sullen young people who didn’t look as if they belonged there, some with placards, not-dressed-for-academic-success like the aspiring graduate students who came to deliver papers. These intruders were rougher looking, tense, avoided eye-contact.

The ballroom in which Jensen was to speak was filled to capacity, standing-room-only at the back. The intruders were now dispersed across the ballroom. When the chair of the session finished his introduction, Jensen entered the room, surrounded by body- guards. As soon as he tried to speak, dozens of individuals stood up and shouted obscenities. The outburst might have been instigated by the interlopers but they were not alone in demonstrating their disapproval.

The chair called for order and again Jensen started to speak. Again he was silenced by angry hecklers. This was repeated five or six times. Finally he gave up and was led out of the ballroom by his bodyguards. He did not even get to read the first sentence of his paper.

During all of this, the man beside me, Harvard professor according to his name-tag, kept shaking his head and muttering, “So much for academic freedom. So much for academic discourse.” I can’t remember whether or not the supplementary discussion panel ever took place. It doesn’t matter because I got the message anyway.