Well…if you’re a student at Harvard it seems that Truth is whatever you don’t consider ‘scandalous’.
From Stacy McCain, we learn:
Meanwhile, Jason Richwine’s recent resignation from the Heritage Foundation, a subject I haven’t previously discussed, yields a secondary story that is either amusing or frightening, depending on whether you take Harvard students seriously:
Harvard students, outraged over a doctoral dissertation arguing that Hispanic immigrants lack “raw cognitive ability or intelligence,” this week urged the university to investigate how the thesis came to be approved and to ban future research on racial superiority. students presented 1,200 signatures to president Drew Faust and the dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, David Ellwood.
“Academic freedom and a reasoned debate are essential to our academic community,’’ the petition said. “However, the Harvard Kennedy School cannot ethically stand behind academic work advocating a national policy of exclusion and advancing an agenda of discrimination.”
The thesis – “IQ and Immigration Policy,’’ by Jason Richwine, a former doctoral candidate at the Kennedy School — compared IQ scores of US residents, including immigrants from a variety of countries, and concluded that the scores of Hispanic immigrants were substantially lower than those of native whites. The paper argued that the United States should allow only immigrants with high IQs.
This controversy essentially re-hashes the controversy over Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve back in the 1990s. And the problem is that the facts are the facts. You can explain the facts or interpret the facts however you wish. You can use the facts as arguments for one policy or another, or you can even argue that the facts have no relevance in terms of policy. What you cannot do — at least if you have any regard for intellectual integrity — is to attempt to suppress the facts as politically incorrect.
Why not? I mean, after all, these kids have been told their whole lives that Truth is merely a personal preference, that what is ‘true’ for one person is not necessarily ‘true’ for another. A is A, but with the swing of the Magic Ideological Wand, it can be transformed in B and no longer be A [of course, Reality — which is a real bitch — tends to kick-back rather violently when you do this].
Do take the time to click here and read the rest of Stacy’s post wherein he demolishes the arguments of these Intelligentsia-In-Training fools.
Oh, and by the way Harvard students: Nemesis is an ever bigger bitch.
I really fear for our future when I think of just how deeply the last two generations [call them 'pilating Pilates'] have been propagandized.
