The New Inquisitors:
Heretical Scientists Purged from Academia

3,527 words

The Stalin and Hitler regimes were both noted for their repression of scientists and intellectuals who did not toe their respective party lines.

Many Left-wing academics, centered on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, were sponsored to leave Germany and emigrate to the US, where they took over the social sciences and created a virtual totalitarianism of their own in American academia.[1] This has often been referred to as “cultural Marxism” but has come to be popularly termed “Political Correctness.”[2] Ironically, those who fled a totalitarian regime laid the foundations for a system that is intolerant of views that do not accord with their central dogma, namely that man is shaped by environment rather than genes and is thus infinitely malleable; therefore, all men are potentially equal.

Essentially the same position was insisted upon in the USSR, to the extent that Mendelian genetics was banned as heretical and replaced by the neo-Lamarckian doctrine of a charlatan, Trofim Lysenko, an obscure plant breeder from Odessa who almost brought Soviet agriculture to collapse by his insistence that new stains of crops could be created by environmental conditioning. Lysenko claimed that one species of wheat could be converted to another by subjecting it to external influences, a process he called “vernalization.” Thereby, winter wheat could be transformed into spring wheat by subjecting it to cold, which would shock it into germinating another variety. Those Soviet scientists who rejected Lysenko’s ideas were removed from their positions. In 1940 N. I. Vavilov, first president of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, whose team proved that Lysenko’s notions on wheat breeding were fallacious, was arrested, and he died of a heart attack in solitary confinement in 1943. Mendelian genetics was smeared as “Nazi,” and the Seventh International Congress of Genetics, which was to be held in Moscow in 1937, was cancelled.[3]

Western Repression

Nonetheless, while the USSR eventually freed itself from the Lysenko dogma, its Western equivalent, the cultural anthropology of Franz Boas[4] et al., and the sociology of the Frankfurt School of Theodor Adorno, et al.[5] has remained dominant in Western academia. Those who challenge these dogmas are smeared and purged.

Repression of heretical scientists in the West might be more subtle (but not invariably so), such as the denial of funds if research does not accord with orthodoxy. It was the imposition of such biases in funding that prompted the formation of the Pioneer Fund in New York in 1937, “to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences,” by providing grants to institutions for specific studies that are unable to obtain money from “‘government sources or from larger foundations.” Recipients have included H. J. Eysenck, Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, Ernest van der Haag, and J. Philippe Rushton.[6] Most or all of these scientists have been subjected to verbal and physical assaults for their research in a situation that shows that the bounds of scholarly inquiry in the West are very limited. The Pioneer Fund comments on this situation:

Some of those who strongly oppose behavior genetic and psychometric research have sometimes made bizarre and false charges against scientists who conduct these studies, subjecting them to harassment, including dismissal and threats of dismissal, stalled promotions, mob demonstrations, and threats of physical violence, even death. Some physical attacks have actually occurred. These politically motivated attacks on the Pioneer Fund and its grantees are documented in The New Know-Nothings by Morton Hunt, and Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe by Roger Pearson.[7]

The following are some examples of scientists who have endured the stigma of heresy.

William Shockley

Shockley, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, applied science to the question of Negro and Caucasian IQ discrepancies and supported eugenics. Hence the great scientist suddenly became a “broken genius.”[8] Dr. Shockley was reduced to appearing at lectures holding a placard upon which he wrote a couple of basic points about race and IQ, or writing a few points on a blackboard, as frenzied Leftists did not give him the opportunity to speak.[9] Ed Brayton,[10] a liberal commentator who agreed that Shockley should have been opposed, yet was troubled by some of the methods, wrote:

After he won the Nobel Prize he became interested in eugenics and became one of the leading voices of racism in the US. Wherever he went, he was the object of fierce protests – as well he should have been.

But in many places those protests did not merely register their disagreement and disgust with Shockley’s views, they also tried – and often succeeded – in preventing him from speaking. They did this in a variety of ways, from drowning him out with bullhorns to storming the stage to intimidating the groups that invited him to withdraw their invitation. This was especially true on college campuses.

. . . In 1973, Shockley was invited to speak at Staten Island Community College but was unable to do so because a group of students, predominately white, made it impossible for him to be heard.

. . . The following year, Shockley was scheduled to debate Roy Innis of the Congress on Racial Equality at Yale. Once again, protesters managed to prevent the event from being held. The head of the Progressive Labor Party at Yale declared freedom of speech to be a “nice abstract idea used to enable people like Shockley to spread racism.” A local minister in New Haven called for a demonstration to take place that would be “as peaceful as possible and as violent as necessary” to prevent Shockley from speaking.

With such threats of violence and disruption, the Yale Political Union decided to withdraw the invitation to take part in the debate. A second campus group stepped in to extend an invitation, but they too ended up withdrawing under the intimidation of threats of violence from those on campus. A third potential sponsor likewise withdrew under pressure, and the debate never took place.[11]

Frank Ellis

A lecturer in Russian and Slavic studies at Leeds University, Ellis was pushed into early retirement in 2006 after being suspended earlier that year, pending disciplinary proceedings. He had opined that Black IQ scores are lower, surely a matter that is not in contention, regardless of the reasons. Ellis’ heresy is that he had stated in a BBC 5 Live interview[12] that he supported the views in the book The Bell Curve,[13] by eminent American psychologists Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray.[14] Ellis had expressed private views that had not been associated with Leeds University, stating that he had become interested in the way issues are suppressed after studying Soviet and post-Soviet regimes.

Leeds University Secretary Roger Gair said that Ellis had the right to express his opinions but not the right to discriminate against students and colleagues, although the latter was never in question. Ellis’ harassment by the University seems to have been a matter of acceding to Left-wing troglodytes.

James Watson

The co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA, for which he jointly won a Nobel Prize in 1962, Watson was, at the age of 79, harassed into a publicly humiliating retraction after stating that Black Africans lack creative intelligence. In an apology reminiscent of Galileo’s apology to the Inquisition for his comments about heliocentricity, Watson stated:

I am mortified about what has happened. More importantly, I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the ways they have. To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.[15]

Despite his back-pedalling, London Science Museum cancelled a sold-out lecture Watson was to give. The Federation of American Scientists said it was outraged that Watson “chose to use his unique stature to promote personal prejudices that are racist, vicious and unsupported by science.” Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island, New York, removed Watson as Chancellor.

Yet while Dr. Watson took fright and claimed he could not understand how he made such a statement, he had not long previously written in his autobiography:

There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.[16]

His latter views are consistent with Watson’s political evolution. Starting as a Leftist professor at Harvard, where he was among the faculty who declared themselves for America’s withdrawal from Vietnam,[17] Watson rejected the Left because of its fundamental opposition to the genetic foundations of human behaviour. He stated in 2007: “I turned against the left wing because they don’t like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.”[18]

Francis Crick, another of the three Nobel Laureates who discovered the DNA double-helix, had expressed views similar to those of Watson. Crick was combative, and during the controversy of American psychologist Arthur Jensen’s paper in the Harvard Educational Review on IQ differences among races, Crick threatened to resign as a Foreign Associate of the American National Academy of Sciences if steps were taken to “suppress reputable scientific research for political reasons.” He supported the research of both Shockley and Jensen.[19] Crick’s correspondence[20] shows he had a significant interest in eugenics and the question of IQ hereditability. For example he wrote to Dr. John T. Edsall of the Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health, in discussing Shockley and Jensen, that:

As to your point about the I. Q. results on American Indians being mainly due to their cultural tradition, this may be so, but personally I doubt it. How do you explain the relatively poor I. Q. performance of the children of middle-class American Negroes?[21]

In particular in 1969 in a talk on the “Social Impact of Biology,” broadcast in shorted version by the BBC, Crick stated, as he described it to Lord Snow:

As far as I remember I said that the biological evidence was that all men were not created equal, and it would not only be difficult to try to do this, but biologically undesirable. As an aide I said that the evidence for the equality of different races did not really exist. In fact, what little evidence there was suggested racial differences.[22]

Hence, when poor old Watson was stating that he did not know of anything in science that would induce him to believe that IQ differences were inherited, we may read this in the same light as Galileo’s retraction to Inquisition.

Chris Brand

Brand lectured in psychology at Edinburgh University for nearly thirty years (1970–1997). During the 1980s he served on the UK’s Council for National Academic Awards. His book The g Factor was published in 1996 where he stated that there are inherited differences in IQ between races.

As a result of his views in The g Factor, Brand’s lectures were disrupted by the Trotskyite-run Anti-Nazi League, in typical Trotsky-Troglodyte manner, and his book was withdrawn by John Wiley and Sons. Hence the merits of scholarship were – again – determined by thuggery.

After a complaint from the Chaplain of Edinburgh University, who was a supporter of the riotous Anti-Nazi League, Brand was suspended then dismissed for bringing the university into “disrepute,” that is, discussing issues that fall outside the de facto limitations of inquiry imposed on academia by intellectually-questionable, politically-motivated, self-serving “elites.”

After his removal from Edinburgh University, Brand ended up working as a waiter during 1998–1999 (while he was also Director of the California-based Institute for the Study of Educational Differences), which seems reminiscent of the way Germany’s intelligentsia became menial laborers under the post-1945 process of “de-Nazification.” Brand writes in summation:

The case was to go before a Scottish Employment Tribunal in 1999; but Edinburgh University offered a settlement of the maximum that any UK court could have offered for “unfair dismissal,” saying it was paying out “to prevent the airing of Brand’s opinions and views at public expense” (Times Higher 5 xi ‘99, p. 2) – a surprising attitude for a university. I accepted this settlement since to have proceeded to a trial would probably have been deemed “frivolous” by the Tribunal and put me at risk of paying what would have been the University’s enormous costs.[23]

The real reason for Brand’s removal from Edinburgh was his book The g Factor. The circumstances include the following:

Despite very favourable reviews (e.g. in ‘Nature’), “The ‘g’ Factor” fell foul of “political correctness” about race and IQ. In press interviews, Brand freely agreed there was a Black-White IQ difference, that the difference was substantially genetic, and that he was (qua supporter of the London School) what Kamin et al. had for years been allowed to call a “scientific racist” — or a “race realist.” On April 17, 1996, “The ‘g’ Factor” was withdrawn as ‘repellent’ by Wiley & Sons (New York and Chichester). Wiley followed up their modern version of censorship by refusing to publish a new book on ‘g’ by Berkeley’s Emeritus Professor Arthur Jensen — a proposal which Wiley had had under consideration for nine months.[24]

So much for the credibility of Wiley as a scholarly publisher. As for Edinburgh University, Principal Sir Stewart Sutherland felt obliged to emphasize to the media that he regarded Brand’s research as “false and personally obnoxious.”[25] The methodology of the inquisitors in academia is to meet any challenge with moral outrage not counter-evidence. They are often backed up by inane commentary from the news media and the delirious antics of the Western equivalents of Mao’s Red Guards.

Andrew Fraser

A lecturer in law at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, Fraser was prevented from teaching after having written a letter to the local press criticising immigration from Black Africa.[26] For this crime against humanity, “University vice-chancellor Professor Di Yerbury responded with a three-page memo to staff announcing that Professor Fraser would not teach until further notice . . .”[27] A report in The Weekend Australian stated:

Professor Fraser yesterday rejected an offer by the university to buy out his contract and launched a bitter attack on Vice-Chancellor Di Yerbury, describing her as an “intellectual coward.” Professor Yerbury responded by suspending Professor Fraser from teaching, citing a report in The Australian yesterday in which he claimed a group called Smash Racism was planning to disrupt his classes. . . . “We have a duty to act decisively to protect his safety and that of others on campus,” she said. Professor Yerbury told The Weekend Australian late yesterday that she would seek legal advice if he made further unauthorized public statements. . . . Yerbury said she was not bothered by Professor Fraser’s personal attack on her. “I will wear that as a badge of honour,” she said. “I made the apology because I was distressed and ashamed he had associated the university with views which so fundamentally contravened its position.”[28]

Two points here: (1) Apparently writing the letter to a suburban newspaper should have first been approved by the university; (2) Again the inquisitors in academia work in tandem with sociopathic Marxist rioters to repress freedom of expression and inquiry.

In September 2005, the law journal of Deakin University was directed not to publish Professor Fraser’s peer-reviewed paper “Rethinking the White Australia Policy.”[29]

Nicholas Kollerstrom

A physicist and historian of science specialising in astronomy, Kollerstrom was an honorary research fellow in Science and Technology Studies at University College London (UCL). In 2008 his fellowship was terminated after he had written articles for the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) critiquing aspects of Auschwitz the previous year. Dr. Kollerstrom appears to be a left-liberal belonging to the Green and Respect parties and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but that did not save him. A press release from UCL curtly stated:

UCL has been made aware of views expressed by Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom, an Honorary Research Fellow in UCL Science & Technology Studies.

The position of Honorary Research Fellow is a privilege bestowed by departments within UCL on researchers with whom it wishes to have an association. It is not an employed position.

The views expressed by Dr. Kollerstrom are diametrically opposed to the aims, objectives and ethos of UCL, such that we wish to have absolutely no association with them or with their originator.

We therefore have no choice but to terminate Dr. Kollerstrom’s Honorary Research Fellowship with immediate effect.[30]

According to The London Jewish Chronicle, there had also been disquiet at UCL regarding Kollerstrom’s “conspiracy theories” involving the 9/11 attacks, and other issues.[31] How these views impacted on Kollerstrom’s credibility as a physicist has not been explained.

Greg Clydesdale

Greg Clydesdale of Massey University,[32] New Zealand, was declared heretical in 2008 by Members of Parliament, the news media, the Race Relations Conciliator, and academia for having written a paper that documented the blatantly obvious: Polynesians are an economic underclass in an economy whose manufacturing base has long since been wrecked.

Pointing out with statistical data the continuing underachievement of Polynesians educationally and professionally is analogous to the boy who cried out “the emperor has no clothes.” Yet, the head of the “Pasifika” department, Sione Tu’itahi, at Clydesdale’s own university, castigated his colleague. The banal reaction was featured on Massey’s website lest the university be mistaken as having endorsed empirical evidence rather than emotion-laden dogma on such matters.

Furthermore, the university demonstrated its malice against Dr. Clydesdale, commenting: “Massey University has welcomed the announcement by Race Relations Conciliator Joris de Bres that he will investigate Dr. Clydesdale’s report. It is expected that several Massey academics and other staff will be pleased to participate in any review.”[33]

Dr. Clydesdale was obliged to forego the presentation of his paper to an academic conference on economic development in Brazil: New Zealand’s false image as a multicultural utopia could not be exposed to the outside world, any more than negative aspects of life behind the Iron Curtain could be exposed to outside scrutiny.

* * *

Several decades ago Wilmot Robertson, a scholar of the Right and author of The Dispossessed Majority, had a regular feature in his magazine, Instauration, entitled “Cultural Catacombs.” In the dark age of this civilization the catacombs seem to be where real scholars will be increasingly driven.

An alternative was offered by another genuine scholar, Dr. Clyde N. Wilson:

I fear that the academic situation is here the same as you describe it there–corrupt and substandard. It is normal to complain about the reign of Political Correctness, but not enough attention has been given to the sheer incompetence and lack of genuine scholarly vocation among the professoriate today. I see no remedy for the universities except unlikely revolution. The fact is that all genuine intellectual life for the foreseeable future will have to take place outside the formal institutions.[34]

Notes

[1] Gary Bullert, “Franz Boas as Citizen-Scientists: Gramscian-Marxist Influence on American Anthropology,” The Journal of Social, Political & Economic Studies, Washington, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 2009.

[2] Frank Ellis, Political Correctness and the Theoretical Struggle: From Lenin and Mao to Marcuse and Foucault (Auckland, New Zealand: Maxim Institute, 2004).