On Tuesday, ThinkProgress ran a story by Zack Beauchamp on Dr. Jason Richwine’s graduate dissertation on Hispanic IQ and immigration titled “The Inside Story Of The Harvard Dissertation That Became Too Racist For Heritage.” Thursday night, Dr. Richwine reached out to provide his side of the story. What follows is Richwine’s letter and Beauchamp’s response.

Jason Richwine writes:

This may disappoint some people, but there is no fascinating inside story of how I was awarded a PhD. The simple, boring explanation is that my dissertation is a solid piece of research. The “errors and omissions” that Zack Beauchamp claims to have uncovered exist only in a caricature of my dissertation. He knocks down a lot of straw men, but he doesn’t land any blows on my actual work.

Two factual corrections: First, my wife is not an immigrant. Second, I took the normal five years to complete my degree, not four, so readers can forget all that innuendo about sacrificing quality and depth for the sake of rushing.

Now for the substantive critiques. The extent to which self-identified Hispanics share a common genetic heritage is not important to my argument. As I explain on pages 76 and 77, the average IQ difference between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites should be of concern because it is persistent over generations. Whether that persistence is due to genetics, environment, culture, or some other factor does not change the fact that the difference exists. It would be necessary to explore the biological basis for Hispanic identity only if my argument depended on a genetic transmission of IQ differences. It doesn’t.

I understand that Professor von Vacano has written extensively on the topic of Hispanic identity. And I also understand that scholars have a tendency to think their own specialty is hugely relevant to what everyone else studies. But, in reality, a long discussion of Professor von Vacano’s research interest would add little value to my dissertation.

I’m a bit bewildered by the rest of the critiques because they aren’t really critiques at all. The environment’s role in shaping IQ, the limits of IQ as a predictor of individual success, and the importance of non-cognitive abilities are all mentioned in my dissertation, sometimes in considerable detail. It’s difficult not to conclude that Beauchamp has intentionally ignored or downplayed my coverage of these issues in order to falsely portray my work as “sloppy.”

Take, for example, my conclusion regarding attempts to raise IQ. Beauchamp eventually acknowledges that I’m correct—that is, it is very difficult and perhaps impossible to permanently and substantially raise IQ through intervention programs. However, in what is supposed to be a devastating rebuttal of me, Beauchamp says these programs may still provide non-cognitive benefits. Strange—that sounds a lot like me! Page 70, footnote 20 of my dissertation:

This is not to say that Head Start or any other intervention inherently lacks value. Some programs may help children make non-cognitive gains in educational achievement and reduce their chances of committing crimes. These programs should be evaluated, using proper cost-benefit analysis, with all their strengths in mind, even if IQ enhancement is not one of them.

Or how about page 84:

When comparing individuals, the effect of IQ differences is often small. A large number of personality attributes, many of which are unrelated to IQ, affect a person’s ability to succeed in life. For that reason, an individual’s IQ score is merely a probability of future success, not a prediction from a crystal ball. For example, a person’s IQ affects his likelihood of completing college, but some college graduates are not very smart. Betting that an individual person with an IQ of 100 will complete more years of schooling than a person with an IQ of 95 is a risky gamble. The less intelligent person may be a very hard worker, while the smarter person could be lazy and unmotivated.

Does this look like the writing of, in Beauchamp’s words, an “IQ fundamentalist” who thinks IQ is “an almost-perfect guide to someone’s prospects for success in life”?

IQ is not the only important human trait—not by a long shot. Nevertheless, it remains an important predictor, on average, of many socioeconomic outcomes we care about. There can be no denying this. I continue:

However, if presented with two groups of 100 random Americans, one group with average IQ 95, the other group at 100, it is a virtual certainty that the smarter group will have higher educational attainment. In this way, IQ scores can be thought of as individual probabilities that aggregate into certainties in large groups.

That’s the crux of the issue.

The general claim that I ignored contrary evidence simply can’t be supported by a fair reading of the text. For example, much is made of my prominent citation of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. But I also discussed two major critiques of that book. On pages 82 and 83 of the dissertation, I even draw this conclusion: “It appears that Herrnstein and Murray’s critics have succeeded in establishing a larger role for the environment, without proving a lesser role for [IQ].” Is that something that a blind follower of Charles Murray would write?

Beauchamp seems to have decided a priori that my dissertation is one-sided, then viewed the entire work through that mental filter. He says I was “forced to concede” that environmental deprivation can adversely affect IQ. I did include environmental influences in my long discussion of what factors impact IQ differences, as any careful scholar would. Why Beauchamp characterizes this as a forced concession is not clear.

Regarding the quality of the datasets, that’s discussed in depth in chapter 2. The samples vary in size, but they all yield results pointing in the same direction. Furthermore, Beauchamp seems to think I haven’t noticed the critiques of Lynn and Vanhanen’s national IQ data. See pages 27 and 28 for a full discussion, in which I cite eight different academic references on that topic.

I could go on, but I’m already getting repetitive. Beauchamp ignores what’s actually in my dissertation so that he can say it’s full of omissions.

Substantive issues aside, another disappointing element in the article is the treatment of the quote from Christopher Jencks, who was my third committee member. The article uses the quote to imply that I ignored important parts of Jencks’ critique of my dissertation.

That never happened. In reality, my interaction with Professor Jencks was as normal as the rest of the process I followed in producing my dissertation. Like my other advisors, he gave me extensive written comments and suggestions. I revised the dissertation accordingly. I then sent Professor Jencks a 33-page document that detailed exactly how I revised the text in response to every single concern that he had expressed. In no case did I ignore a comment or fail to make revisions as I thought appropriate.

In response, Professor Jencks wrote to me in an email: “I think you have done a thorough and conscientious job of dealing with my comments, criticisms, and suggestions, and I am happy to approve it as it stands.” This didn’t mean he agreed with everything. He went on to say that he continued to be concerned with my use of ethnic categories like “Asian” and “Hispanic,” which he believes are inappropriately broad when talking about culture, and he felt that I left too little room for the differential effects of IQ on culture within ethnic groups. “That said,” he concluded, “I’m not asking for more revisions, just making suggestions for you to think about in the future.”

May I suggest that this is a completely normal situation in PhD programs? It would be a rare committee indeed if every member agreed with every data interpretation and policy judgment in the dissertation that they approved. My interactions with all my dissertation advisors, including Professor Jencks as the third reader, followed normal protocol from beginning to end.

Here is the truth about my dissertation: It’s a careful empirical analysis, firmly grounded in the mainstream of psychological science, vetted by a team of respected scholars, well researched, fully sourced, and a valuable contribution to policy discussions. I know, I know—what a boring reason to be awarded a PhD!

Beauchamp responds:

My thanks to Dr. Richwine for the factual clarifications. If only his treatment of my article, and his own dissertation, had been so forthright.

On the issue of his incomplete definition of the term “Hispanic,” Richwine suggests the only thing that matters is that the persistence of low Hispanic IQ on tests over generations. As it happens, I addressed this potential rebuttal at length in my original piece. The reason the definition matters, even if some pattern can be shown inside a group, is that it’s impossible to identify what that pattern means about the group and whether that pattern will continue unless you know what makes that group unique. As I put it:

Why do definitions matter if Richwine succeeds in showing a deep, persistent difference between so-called “Hispanics” and “whites?” Aside from the fact that it makes it impossible to figure out the scope of the dissertation (are Mexicans of largely European descent likely to have low IQs? What about African-descendent Brazilians?)…Without a proper definition of what he means when he says Hispanic, we have no way of evaluating the role that immigrants’ “Hispanicness” — whether that means shared genes, culture, or national background — plays in determining their IQ. Put differently, in order to know whether and how being Hispanic matters for IQ, we need to know what it means to be Hispanic. That, in turn, makes it impossible to evaluate how meaningful Richwine’s conclusions about the persistence of the IQ gap are or how they apply to any particular group of immigrants.

The purportedly exculpatory email from Professor Jencks he provides makes this point for me. In Richwine’s own summary, Jencks “continued to be concerned with my use of ethnic categories like ‘Asian’ and ‘Hispanic,’ which he believes are inappropriately broad when talking about culture.” This inappropriate broadness is precisely the point — they are so broad, I argue, as to make generalization about them meaningless without ample defense of why such a generalization is appropriate in this case. Richwine provides none, choosing to ignore the overwhelming literature on the social construction of race.

Similarly, Richwine misses my point on early childhood interventions and non-cognitive skills. The argument does not depend on whether Richwine mentions these factors occasionally in his dissertation — as Richwine points out above, I address his arguments on interventions specifically. Rather, my point was that he ignores the way in which such factors fatally frustrate his attempt to make broad predictions about immigrants based on their IQ. As I put it, “there’s simply no reason to think IQ matters enough to provide the juice for sweeping theories about the life prospects of entire groups of immigrants.” The proof of IQ fundamentalism is in the pudding.

For instance, on the issue of early childhood interventions, he does not attempt to explain whether or not the non-IQ related gains they produce (gains he consigns to a footnote) might be able to make up for any of the costs he associates with low-IQ immigration. For instance, on page 93, he argues that “Hispanics become less willing to play by the rules of the middle class when their low average IQ prevents them from joining it,” thus explaining why Hispanic immigration will produce more “underclass” behavior like dropping out of school and criminality. However, early childhood interventions can improve educational attainment and reduce criminality down the line — as he notes in his own footnote! Richwine pays lip service to factors other than IQ scores being important, yet edits them out of his substantive analysis.

This pattern repeats itself on the broader issue of non-cognitive traits. Richwine argues that (p. 100) “IQ has been linked to possessing middle class values, having a future time orientation, and cooperating in competitive games” in order to make his argument that Hispanic immigration will further lower social capital and “trust” inside the United States. These qualities bear intimate resemblance to non-cognitive traits like Conscientiousness or Agreeableness that either aren’t all that closely linked to IQ or, on some accounts, actually explain certain levels of performance on IQ tests. Yet Richwine never attempts to explore the connection between social trust and non-cognitive traits, or even establish that Hispanics lack the relevant non-cognitive qualities.

Essentially, Richwine suggests the supposedly lower Hispanic IQ will predict bad behavior without bothering to establish whether the immigrant populations might have or be able (with education) to get to higher levels of other traits that would counterbalance any IQ deficit. That sounds pretty “one-sided” to me.

I could go point-by-point on the other, lesser charges — for instance, his discussion of the flaws in the Lynn and Vanhanen data is hardly “full,” and he doesn’t consider criticisms of The Bell Curve in each case where it might be warranted. But, in Richwine’s words, “I’m already getting repetitive.”

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.

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Jason Richwine. (Credit: The Heritage Foundation.)

We are deeply concerned with the academic integrity and the reputation of Harvard Kennedy School and the University as a whole. It has been recently made public by the Washington Post and the New York Times that in 2009 the Kennedy School accepted a dissertation written by Jason Richwine which claims that “Immigrants living in the US today do not have the same level of cognitive ability as natives” (Richwine Dissertation, 26). Richwine goes on to state that “the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against” (Richwine Dissertation, 66) and argues for an immigration policy based on IQ. Central to his claim is the idea that certain groups are genetically predisposed to be more intelligent than others. In his troubling worldview Asians are generally at the top, with whites in the middle, Hispanics follow, and African Americans at the bottom (Richwine Dissetation, 74). To justify his assertions he cites largely discredited sources such as J. Philippe Rushton whose work enshrines the idea that there are geneticallyrooted differences in cognitive ability between racial groups.

We condemn in unequivocal terms these racist claims as unfit for Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard University as a whole. Granting permission for such a dissertation to be published debases all of our degrees and hurts the University’s reputation.

In his own statement on the Richwine incident, Kennedy School Dean David Ellwood defended the academic process’ ability to weed out bad ideas, and noted that “the views and conclusions of any graduate of this school are theirs alone, and do not represent the views of Harvard or the Kennedy School.” The statement also notes that Richwine’s dissertation was “reviewed by a committee of scholars” and it does not question the school’s decision to accept it.

(HT: Scott Jaschik)

Jason Richwine, the former Heritage Foundation staffer who wrote a PhD dissertation claiming that “new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren,” told the Washington Examiner’s Byron York that such quasi-eugenic ideas have fascinated him for a long time. Indeed, Richwine identified Charles Murray, co-author of the Bell Curve, as a “childhood hero.” Murray’s Bell Curve posits that black people are less intelligent than whites, and that this disparity is due, at least in part, to genetics.

As York’s piece explains, Murray played a crucial role in shaping Richwine’s dissertation:

I began by asking about his interest in the topic of race and IQ. How had that started? He had read Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve” when he was a student at American University in Washington, Richwine said, and was fascinated by the author’s approach to a complex topic. . . . While Richwine was at Harvard, Murray visited Cambridge and Richwine told him about his research project. The result was a two-year fellowship at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where Murray has long been a scholar. The fellowship gave Richwine the opportunity to finish his doctoral work while also getting a start in the world of Washington think tanks. “It was wonderful,” Richwine recalled. “Few grad students get that kind of support and get to work with their childhood hero.” Indeed, Richwine’s dissertation acknowledgements make special note of Murray. “The substance of my work was positively influenced by many people, but no one was more influential than Charles Murray, whose detailed editing and relentless constructive criticism have made the final draft vastly superior to the first,” Richwine wrote. “I could not have asked for a better primary advisor.”

In addition to paving the road Richwine traveled in his scholarship, Murray more recently suggested that “benevolent sexism” may be “healthy” and “grounded in the nature of Homo sapiens.” During the most recent GOP presidential primaries, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) cited Murray’s work to defend Santorum’s views on “the dangers of contraception.” Shortly after news broke that Richwine was no longer employed by Heritage, Murray suggested that Richwine’s former employer did not stick up for him in part because Heritage President Jim DeMint does not possess testicles:

Richwine left Heritage shortly after news of his views on race broke. Charles Murray, by contrast, is still employed by AEI.

(Credit: AP)

Late in the day Friday, the Heritage Foundation announced that Jason Richwine, the co-author of their widely criticized immigration report, was no longer employed by the conservative think tank. Shortly after the immigration report was released, the Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews reported that Richwine’s PhD dissertation claimed that “new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren.”

Heritage’s decision to hire Richwine was not a momentary lapse in judgement that was quickly rectified. To the contrary, Richwine was employed by the Heritage foundation for more than three years before reports of his quasi-eugenic views forced him to leave. As it turns out, this is not an isolated incident. Although evidence has not yet emerged suggesting that Richwine’s racist views are common among Heritage employees, here are seven examples of radical, offensive or just downright weird beliefs held by current Heritage staffers:

• Children of undocumented immigrants should be allowed to starve. When news of Richwine’s racist dissertation broke, Heritage initially attempted to rehabilitate its immigration report by claiming that Richwine’s co-author, Heritage Senior Research Fellow Robert Rector, took the lead in designing the study’s methodology and Richwine merely “provided quantitative support to lead author Robert Rector.” Rector, however, is hardly a picture of moderation. Among other things, Rector co-authored a 2012 report arguing that we should “prohibit food stamp payments to illegal immigrant families.” Notably, because all nearly all children born in the United States are automatically U.S. citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, one impact of Rector’s proposal would be starving American children in order to spite their parents.
• Gay people and sexually active unmarried women should be banned from teaching. In 2010, Heritage President Jim DeMint told a rally at a South Carolina church that “if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who’s sleeping with her boyfriend — she shouldn’t be in the classroom.”
• The Voting Rights Act is a “racial entitlement.” Defending Justice Scalia’s statement that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” Heritage Senior Legal Fellow Hans von Spakovsky endorses Scalia’s view and writes that “the only thing certain about talking honestly about the current benefits and burdens of Section 5 (or voting against its renewal) is the very type of venomous attacks and false claims of racism and Jim Crow to which Scalia has been subjected.” Spakovsky’s disregard for the Voting Rights Act is not surprising, as he is one of the nation’s top proponents of voter suppression laws. Indeed, a panel of Virginia judges recently refused to reappoint Spakovsky to an election board in Fairfax, Virginia in the wake of allegations that he used his seat on the board to crusade against voting rights.
• Todd Akin can save America from an “economic abyss.” At a time when former Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) found himself friendless due to his “legitimate rape” comment, DeMint tried to throw Akin a lifeline in his Senate race against Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO). In a joint statement with former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), DeMint said that they “support Todd Akin and hope freedom-loving Americans in Missouri and around the country will join us so we can save our country from fiscal collapse.” As a bonus, Heritage published a column by Akin in 2011 where the former congressman claimed that “the constitutionality of much entitlement spending is debatable.”
• Poor people aren’t really poor if they own refrigerators. In 2011, Rector and Heritage Policy Analyst Rachel Sheffield published a report arguing that “Congress should reorient the massive welfare state to promote self-sufficient prosperity rather than expanded dependence” in part because most impoverished households own appliances and do not send their kids to bed hungry. Among the report’s claims are that nearly all poor people have “kitchens equipped with an oven, stove, and refrigerator,” that “[n]early three-fourths have a car or truck” and that “70 percent have a VCR.” Of course, as Matt Yglesias points out, many of the common household amenities Rector and Sheffield dismiss as luxuries are actually signs of thrift — “[b]uying food at the grocery store and saving it thanks to the miracles of modern refrigeration is sound household budgeting.” Similarly, poor people in parts of the country without adequate public transportation would find it very difficult to hold a job if they did not have a car or truck. As Melissa Boteach and Donna Cooper explain, a particularly well-equipped poor household could sell all of their household appliances and electronics and still only wind up with two and a half months rent.
• Accused terrorists shouldn’t have legal representation and their lawyers should be punished. According to at least one former Bush Administration official, the “vast majority” of the 742 original Guantanamo Bay detainees were innocent of terrorism, which only emphasizes the importance of providing these detainees with due process and adequate legal representation. Yet, in a 2007 radio interview, then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles “Cully” Stimson made a thinly veiled attempt to punish lawyers who represent Gitmo detainees by encouraging their law firms’ corporate clients to drop them. Stimson listed the names of over a dozen firms with attorneys representing detainees, and then said “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms.” Within a month, Stimson resigned from the Bush Administration (he also apologized for his comments and claimed they did not reflect his “core beliefs”). Yet, while Stimson’s comments were too disgraceful for him to remain in Bush’s Defense Department, they were not too disgraceful for the Heritage Foundation. Stimson is now a Senior Legal Fellow at Heritage.
• A J.J. Abrams TV show should guide America’s defense policy. The plot of J.J. Abrams’ show “Revolution” focuses around a new weapon technology that disables electronic devices and returns the world to the pre-industrial era. Most TV viewers understand that this show is science fiction. Heritage thinks it is a warning about the future. According to Heritage, the future world depicted in this show, “is not as unlikely as it might appear.” Heritage national security Research Fellow Baker Spring warns that America’s enemies could detonate “a nuclear weapon at a high altitude over the earth” triggering an “electromagnetic pulse” (EMP) that would disable American technology. Another Heritage paper calls for a “National EMP Awareness Day.” In reality, of course, the idea of an EMP attack belongs in science fiction. Among other things, if someone who wished us harm possessed both a nuclear warhead and the technology required to detonate such a weapon in US airspace, there are plenty of other much more destructive things they could do — such as setting off the nuke in the middle of Manhattan.