Definitely an interesting piece. I personally would not have signed off on a dissertation like this but someone like him wouldn't have come to work with me either in the first place--which is part of the answer of how this racist, pseudo-scientific research came to be. -Angela
The Inside Story Of The Harvard Dissertation That Became Too Racist For Heritage
The idea that some racial groups are, on average, smarter than others
is without a doubt among the most discussed (and debunked) “taboos” in
American intellectual history. It is an argument that has been advanced
since the days of slavery, one that
helped push through the draconian Immigration Act of 1924, and one that set off a scientific firestorm in the late 60s that’s hardly flagged since.
Yet every time the race and IQ hypothesis reclaims the public
spotlight, we are caught slackjaw, always returning to the same basic
debates on the same basic concepts.
The recent fracas sparked by Dr. Jason Richwine’s doctoral
dissertation is a case in point. The paper is a dry thing, written for
an academic audience, yet its core claim, that Latino immigrants to the
United States are and will likely remain less intelligent than “native
whites,” has proved proper tinder for a public firestorm. The Heritage
Foundation’s Senior Policy Analyst in Empirical Studies is now a former
Senior Policy Analyst — Heritage could not risk further tainting an
immigration report it hoped would be influential by outright defending
its scholar’s meditations on the possibly genetic intellectual
inferiority of immigrants from Latin America.
It might seem like the book is closed on
l’affaire Richwine:
he’s left his job, Heritage is left with a black eye, and not a single
mind has been changed about the value of research into race and IQ. But
there’s still one major unanswered question.
If the dissertation was bad enough to get him fired from the Heritage Foundation, how did it earn him a degree from Harvard?
A popular answer among Richwine’s defenders is that, quite simply, it
was exemplary work. Richwine’s dissertation committee was made up, by
all accounts, of three eminent scholars, each widely respected in their
respective fields. And it is
Harvard.
But dozens of interviews with subject matter experts, Harvard
graduates in Richwine’s program who overlapped with him, and members of
the committee itself paint a somewhat more textured picture. Richwine’s
dissertation was sloppy scholarship, relying on statistical
sophistication to hide some serious conceptual errors. Yet internal
accounts of Richwine’s time at Harvard suggests the august university,
for the most part, let serious problems in Richwine’s research fall
through the cracks.
Richwine Goes To Harvard
By his own account, Jason Richwine came to the Harvard Kennedy School
deeply fascinated with the link between race and IQ. Richwine told The
Washington Examiner’s Byron York that, as an undergraduate at American
University, he fell in love with Charles Murray’s work on the topic.
Murray, who will become an important player in Richwine’s story later
on, is one of the authors of the infamous
The Bell Curve, the
1994 book whose claims about the genetic roots of the black/white IQ gap
set off the most famous public food fight over race and IQ. Richwine
describes Murray as “
my childhood hero.”
People that knew Richwine at Harvard describe him as an introverted,
but kind, man. “He was a quiet and thoughtful person,” said Anh Ngoc
Tran, a contemporary of Richwine’s at Harvard who now teaches at Indiana
University. “[Richwine] was friendlier to international students,” Tran
said.
Another contemporary of Richwine’s echoed Tran, saying Richwine
was “not really all that outgoing. Always a really nice guy.”
Tran took pain to distance Richwine from accusations of racism. “I
don’t think he is racist,” Tran told me. “His wife is an immigrant.”
After the first two years of coursework, PhD candidates in Public
Policy at the Kennedy School move away from group classes toward
individual research. That means taking comprehensive exams (“comps,” in
grad student lingo) to show you’ve mastered the course material. After
comps, you start work on a dissertation, a piece of original scholarship
that’s supposed to demonstrate the candidate’s ability to produce
research at the level expected of an expert in the field. Dissertation
topics are determined in conjunction with a primary advisor, who goes on
to become the “chair” of a three-person committee that determines the
candidate’s fate. The topic is finalized in a formal “prospectus”
outlining the research agenda.
Richwine’s chair, as listed in his dissertation, was Professor George
Borjas, a prominent, if controversial, economist. A Cuban immigrant
himself, Borjas was a natural fit for Richwine’s dour assessment of mass
Latino immigration: he’s the nation’s leading academic immigration
skeptic, famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for
arguing that immigrants to the United States are likely to be unskilled
drags on the US economy. One of his most influential articles, a
1987 paper
called “Self-Selection and the Earnings of Immigrants,” argued that
countries with more income inequality than the United States are likely
to send over “low quality” immigrants— meaning people lacking the skills
to march up the economic ladder — as unskilled laborers lead a more
prosperous life here than in their home countries.
However much Borjas emphasized the skills, or lack thereof, of Latino
immigrants in his own work, he knew and cared little about their IQs.
“I have never worked on anything even remotely related to IQ, so don’t
really know what to think about the relation between IQ, immigration,”
he
told Slate’s
Dave Weigel. “In fact, as I know I told Jason early on since I’ve long
believed this, I don’t find the IQ academic work all that interesting.”
It’s then perhaps odd that Borjas put up little resistance to
Richwine’s proposed line of inquiry. “Jason had the topic fully formed
in his mind before he talked to me,” he wrote via email. “I played no
role in topic selection or forming the research agenda.”
This line raised eyebrows among some scholars familiar with social
science dissertations. Dan Drezner is a Professor of International
Politics at Tufts’ Fletcher School, an institution that’s somewhat
similar to Harvard’s Kennedy School in character, who’s been following
the Richwine case closely. “If I’m an advisor, and I have a student that
comes to me,” Drezner said, “the last thing I would do is say ‘write
this.’” They key issue is “how well formed was Richwine’s argument when
he came to Borjas?” Students should come up with their own dissertation
topics, Drezner said, but if an advisor didn’t sufficiently challenge
them on whether it was a good, well-thought out program, that could be a
problem.
What’s a “Hispanic?”
Some experts in the fields Richwine’s dissertation covered, judging
from the final product, had harsh answers to Drezner’s question. “The
committee was wrong to approve [Richwine's dissertation] and to accept
the prospectus,” wrote Diego A. von Vacano. Von Vacano is a professor at
Texas A&M University whose research focuses on Hispanic identity.
After he wrote a
harsh review
of Richwine’s work on the academic blog The Monkey Cage, I got in touch
with him to see if he could clarify the nature of his objections.
Von Vacano’s basic critique centers on Richwine’s definitions, or
lack thereof, of the terms “Hispanic,” “white,” and “race.” The most
grevious of Richwine’s errors lies in his account of the first: the lack
of a meaningful definition of “Hispanic” dooms the dissertation’s
ability to draw rigorous conclusions about the people he’s chosen to
study.
There’s enormous debate about just what “Hispanic” means and who
counts as one in any meaningful sense. Richwine’s third chapter, titled
“Hispanic IQ,” treats this debate in the most cursory of fashions. This
is the chapter’s full definition of the term Hispanic and defense of its
use:
Over 56% of immigrants living in the U.S. in 2006 were
Hispanic — that is, born in either Mexico (32% of total immigrants),
Central American [sic] and the Caribbean (17%), or South America
(7%)…Hispanics are not a monolithic group either ethnically or
culturally, but the category still has real meaning. Hispanics can be of
any race, but they are most often “Mestizo” — a mixture of European and
Amerindian background. Mexico, for example, is 60% Mestizo (LV 2006,
241). Hispanics also share ethno-cultural tendencies that are different
from the majority Anglo-Protestant culture of the United States
(Huntington 2004, 253-255). Most come from Spanish-speaking nations with
cultures heavily influence by Catholicism. And many Hispanics choose to
identify themselves as such, as the existence of groups like the
Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the National Council of La Raza (“the race” or “the people”), and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus readily demonstrates.
Von Vacano sees this as fatally inadequate. “Any serious work at the
doctoral level on these issues (even if mainly quantitative or
policy-oriented),” he told me, “requires a substantive component of
analysis from the qualitative, historical, cultural, normative, and
theoretical perspectives (at least one or two dissertation chapters).”
These are not merely scholarly niceties: what Richwine means by
“Hispanic” is critical to the success of both of his two core arguments.
First, to prove that “from the perspective of Americans alive today,
the low average IQ of Hispanics is effectively permanent,” he needs to
show that one can speak meaningfully about“Hispanic” IQ. Richwine needs
this claim to be true for the entire third section of his dissertation,
the one that spells out the dangers of low IQ Hispanic immigration, to
succeed. Establishing the negative consequences of Hispanic immigration
means first establishing there’s such a thing as “Hispanic immigration”
in a scientifically useful sense.
Because Hispanic identity is so hotly contested among scholars of
race and ethnicity, that means both providing a clear account of why
people from an arbitrary set of geographic locations are homogenous
enough for generalizations about them are meaningful, controlled social
science. Richwine fails to do so.
First, Richwine asserts Hispanics are mostly some “Mestizo” mix of
Native American and European, making them genetically similar. But in
the unnerving world of race and IQ research, what mix they are matters.
Richwine believes that “socioeconomic hierarchies correlate consistently
with race all across the world” because some races are biologically
smarter; “there are no countries,” he writes, “in which ethnic Chinese
are less successful than Amerindians.” It stands to reason, on his
theory, that “mixed” Hispanics with more European or Asian DNA will be
concomitantly smarter, on average, than more heavily Amerindian or
African ones. But Richwine doesn’t attempt to show that the mix of
racial DNA inside any one “Hispanic” subgroup is consistent enough for
generalization, let alone the category as a whole.
That’s because it’s not. Even a cursory examination of research on
Latin American genetics uncovers an impossibly complex genetic
admixture, one that varies widely from country to country or even region
to region. To take one simple example, the average percentage of
identifiably African, Native American, and European DNA among
Brazilians
varies widely by region (although
some definitions of “Hispanic”
would exclude Portuguese-speaking Brazil, Richwine’s includes it).
Hispanic immigrants to the United States come from a bewildering array
of countries,
each with its own particular internal diversity.
As von Vacano puts it, “there is no literature that can meaningfully
support the idea that ‘Hispanic’ is a genetic category,” let alone one
that can be equated with the colonially-superimposed “Mestizo”
identifier.
Second, Richwine asserts that Hispanics share a similar culture
that’s distinct from so-called “Anglo” culture. Richwine’s only support
for this claim is a citation of Samuel Huntington’s
Who Are We?,
a book that warns of a wave of Hispanic immigration irrevocably
altering American culture for the worse. Huntington’s claims about
Hispanic inability to assimilate have been
subjected to serious quantitative challenge,
but more to the point, citing a polemic tract about immigration does
not constitute explaining what the purportedly unified Hispanic culture
is and why the fact that it involves a lot of Spanish-speaking and
Catholicism might be seen as allowing one to make generalized claims
about the group.
This is especially egregious when the scholarly consensus is that
there is no obvious unified Hispanic or Latino culture. As the introduction to
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Latin American Culture puts it,
“as all the chapters [in this book] reveal, any search for a communal
‘Latin American’ culture has remained an elusive, somewhat quixotic
idea.” This, again, is because Latin American countries vary widely —
compare Mexico to Brazil to Costa Rica to Argentina and find
extraordinary differences in wealth, social norms, political systems,
and ethnic backgrounds. Indeed, the vast diversity among “Hispanic”
societies should be obvious even to someone whose only experience of
these cultures involves dining out: Mexican chile rellenos are not
Cubano sandwiches, which definitely are not Argentine steak platters.
Finally, Richwine notes that Hispanic immigrants to the United States
have a sense of shared identity, but, again, it’s not explained why
that allows one to make generalizations about group IQ, let alone the
genetic component thereof. It’s just simply asserted, without any
explanation of who shares the shared identity — Cuban-Americans, for
example, have a different view of their American experience than
Salvadoreans — and why that’s relevant.
Continue reading
here.
