1
JENSENISM

A New Word
in the Dictionary


In this chapter I ask Jensen to explain how in 1969 his name became inextricably linked with the controversial issue of intelligence, race, and genetics. At that time, America was as deeply divided over race relations as it was by the Vietnam War. Numerous studies financed by the federal government and leading foundations all documented that the average IQ of Black Americans (85) was 15 points below that of Whites (100). At first, Jensen agreed with other educators and psychologists— and just about every other social scientist—that environmental factors such as limited opportunities, lower average income, and the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation, were the cause. Academic research aimed at finding the best method to alleviate the 15-point Black-White IQ gap came to focus more and more on early intervention to circumvent environmental obstacles to cognitive development. Head Start remains the best known of the resultant programs for early cognitive stimulation of the disadvantaged.

Outside of academia, however, many White Americans—and not just those in the South—had become disenchanted with the Great Society programs. Aided by a political backlash among Whites opposing such programs, Richard Nixon was elected president on a law-and-order platform in 1968.

In 1969, the respected Harvard Educational Review (HER) commissioned Jensen to write an evaluation of educational intervention programs. The resulting 123-page article, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” remains one of the most cited works (either vilified or praised, depending on the reviewer’s point of view) in the social science literature.

Based on his review of the evidence, Jensen reached three conclusions that were diametrically opposite to the prevailing view:



The HER article became a major media event. Its three main points, dubbed “Jensenism,” entered our vocabulary. Jensen became the target of student protests, sit-ins, acts of violence, and even death threats. Academic criticism came in the form of resolutions from scholars and professional organizations condemning Jensenism. In May 1969, in a three-hour symposium held for security’s sake in a closed studio on the Berkeley campus (but broadcast to an outside audience), Jensen defended Jensenism before a panel of questioners who were among the most distinguished figures in their respective disciplines. They were geneticists Joshua Lederberg (1958 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine) and William J. Libby; mental testing expert Lee J. Cronbach; Arthur Stinchombe of the UC Berkeley Sociology Department; and Aaron Cicourel of UC Santa Barbara, an authority in the field of psycholinguistics. The distinguished geneticist Curt Stern acted as moderator. Obviously, the symposium failed to resolve the issue, but it showed that Jensen could go toe-to-toe with eminent critics and give at least as good as he got.

Jensen also gives us his firsthand observations and impressions of important people in science, music, and politics. Through Jensen’s eyes we meet Columbia University professors Henry E. Garrett and Otto Klineberg, who opposed each other vigorously in an earlier debate on race and IQ; anthropologist Margaret Mead, who would later lead a protest against Jensen’s election as a fellow of the Psychology Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) after his HER article appeared; Sir Cyril Burt, who years later, after his death, would be accused of faking his famous study of identical twins reared apart, which Jensen cited in the HER article (see Chapter 3 for a discussion of the Burt Affair and Jensen’s involvement in it); George H. W. Bush, then a Texas congressman; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose report to President Nixon on the Black family produced a race controversy of its own; and conductor Arturo Toscanini, whose concerts and rehearsals Jensen attended regularly while a graduate student at Columbia. Jensen reserves his greatest praise for his mentor, the late British psychologist Hans J. Eysenck, for having shaped fundamentally his attitudes about psychology and science.

Miele: Back in 1969 you were an educational psychologist in the Graduate School of Education and a research psychologist in the Institute of Human Learning at the University of California in Berkeley. Your work was well respected and you had no history of enjoying or even seeking controversy. If anything, the opposite was the case—you were best known for researching things like the serial position effect in learning.

Then your article “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” appeared in the Winter 1969 issue of the Harvard Educational Review. Most HER articles are read by professionals and graduate students in educational psychology and attract little outside notice. But yours produced a national controversy that was covered in the major news magazines as well as on TV and radio. It generated heated discussion in professional journals, resolutions condemning you and the article, student protests, sit-ins, acts of violence, and even death threats. Eventually, the word “Jensenism” even entered the dictionary.

What did you say in that lengthy, 123-page HER article that hadn’t been said before? After all, you’d given a talk with the same title two years earlier.

Jensen: Three things about the HER article combined synergistically to set off all the commotion. Each of them was quite contrary to the prevailing zeitgeist.

First, I examined the available research and concluded that compensatory educational programs had failed to show any strong or lasting effect in raising IQ or scholastic achievement. Second, I reviewed the existing evidence showing that genetic factors played a large part in individual differences in IQ. And third, I said the totality of evidence was most consistent with the hypothesis that genetic as well as environmental factors are involved in the average difference between Blacks and Whites in IQ and scholastic achievement. Although it was less than 5 percent of the whole article, this small part—hypothesizing a genetic component in the racial IQ difference— produced the most vehement vituperation.

The 15-point difference in average IQ between Blacks and Whites in the United States had been well established by the psychological research. But never before (including in the talk you just mentioned) had I suggested the plausible hypothesis that both environment and genes were involved. This hypothesis was plausible because research had not found any compelling explanation for all of the 15-point difference, and because genetic factors as well as environmental factors were responsible for individual differences in IQ within either racial group.


Miele: But claims about racial differences in brain size in fact go all the way back to Paul Broca, discoverer of one of the important speech centers in the brain. And there was Robert Bennett Bean’s study of Black-White differences in brain size, which was cited by Henry Garrett and others, such as W. C. George in his pamphlet The Biology of the Race Problem, issued by the Governor of Alabama (George Wallace’s predecessor, John Patterson). The mainstream trend in anthropology and psychology was to debunk those studies. Were you aware of all this?


Jensen: I’m chagrined to say that at the time I wrote my HER paper I wasn’t. A year or two later someone sent me a copy of George’s pamphlet. As he was a professor of anatomy, I thought it might be worth reading. At that time I was on a committee chaired by the late Professor Harry Harlow, the famous researcher on primate behavior. Harlow was quite knowledgeable about brain research, physiological psychology, and the like. I gave him a copy of George’s essay and asked for his opinion. Harlow believed that genetics played a part in racial differences and that there are racial differences in brain size. But he was unimpressed by George’s evidence. He thought it was antiquated and questionable and said he would put very little stock in it. So I ignored it.

The study by Bean doesn’t ring a bell. I can’t recall having come across it in my fairly extensive review of studies on brain correlates of intelligence. But if it’s a reputable piece of research, I should have it in my files. The fact that it was cited in an essay issued by the Governor of Alabama back around the time of federally enforced school desegregation in the South should lead one to examine it carefully to see if it actually has any scientific merit.

After the publicity surrounding my HER article, I did receive a number of letters from so-called citizens’ groups in various Southern states, asking if I would write letters to their local newspapers in support of racial segregation in public schools. I replied that I was, and always have been, absolutely opposed to racial segregation of any kind. One of these people wrote back calling me “just another Berkeley pinko!” He at least gave me the satisfaction of knowing that I had angered him.


Miele: Well, Sir Cyril Burt had already made the case for genetic factors in IQ and scholastic ability in a number of papers, including his Miele: famous 1957 Bingham Award Lecture sponsored by the American Psychological Association titled “The Inheritance of Mental Ability.” So did a 1963 review article by Nikki Erlenmeyer-Kimling and Lissy Jarvik in Science.

Jensen: I had heard of Burt as one of the preeminent figures in psychology since I was an undergraduate student in Berkeley. And so I attended his Bingham Award Lecture during the second year of my postdoctorate at London University, though I had no special interest in the topic at that time. I went simply because I wanted to see Britain’s most famous psychologist in person. He was then 75 years old, and I thought I might never get another chance to see the great man. Little did I imagine then that about 13 years later I would get to know him quite well personally and eventually become involved in the Burt Affair. [See Chapter 3 for a discussion of the Burt Affair and Jensen’s involvement in it.]

Miele: Did he live up to your expectations?

Jensen: His Bingham Lecture was the best lecture I had ever attended. Burt spoke entirely without a script and had the kind of eloquence, showmanship, and authority that really held his audience spellbound. A brilliant and impressive man.

Miele: The third and most controversial part of your HER article, the genetic role in racial differences in IQ , had been made by Audrey Shuey in the two editions of her lengthy 1966 book, The Testing of Negro Intelligence, which you cite in the HER article. And Henry Garrett, a past president of the American Psychological Association, had been carrying on a running debate with Otto Klineberg and others on the subject (though you do not cite those).

So was it really your novel combination of the themes that garnered all the headlines? Or was it the fact that you came to the race IQ debate with clean hands, so to speak, because you were a respected researcher in compensatory education who had never supported— and who, indeed, opposed—attempts to overturn the Brown v. Board school desegregation decision?

Jensen: What you’ve said is true, but I’d like to qualify it a bit.

By 1969, Shuey’s book and Garrett’s writings, if not Klineberg’s, were far in the background. Shuey got her Ph.D. under Garrett at Columbia University. They both wrote as if the fact that hundreds of studies consistently found a mean Black-White difference of about 15 IQ points constituted sufficient evidence that the difference was largely, if not entirely, genetic. Of course it is not sufficient evidence. Neither Shuey nor Garrett attempted to examine the issue in a way that could lead to any conclusion. That requires investigating a whole network of relationships and different lines of empirical evidence. A hundred or a thousand times as many IQ test comparisons as the three hundred or so that were compiled by Shuey could not have brought us any closer to understanding the causes of the Black-White IQ difference.


Miele: Then why did you cite Shuey’s work, if not Garrett’s?


Jensen: Because when I viewed the purely psychometric evidence presented by Shuey in relation to the fact that genetic and environmental factors play a part in individual variation in intelligence within either race, along with a number of other facts, I thought it was scientifically necessary to investigate the possibility of genetic as well as environmental factors in explaining the Black-White average-IQ difference.


Miele: Since you were all at Columbia University, did you ever meet Garrett, Shuey, or Klineberg? If so, what were your impressions of them?


Jensen: I met both Garrett and Klineberg when I was a grad student there. I even audited Klineberg’s course on social psychology, not because I was interested at that time in any of these topics we’re now discussing, but simply because he was one of the famous names in psychology. For the same reason, I audited an anthropology course given by Margaret Mead, and I became acquainted with the venerable dean of experimental psychology, Robert S. Woodworth, whose classic textbook I had used as an undergraduate psychology student at Berkeley. I was always interested in what people who had “made it” were like in person.


Miele: And Garrett?


Jensen: Yes. I wanted to take a course in factor analysis given by Professor Helen M. Walker. She was a noted statistician and one of the two or three best professors I ever had. Unfortunately she was on sabbatical that year. Since Garrett offered a less specialized course, I went to him to find out just what it covered. He asked about my previous courses in statistics and suggested I audit just the couple of lectures on factor analysis. They were very introductory and covered less than I had already picked up from the chapter on factor analysis in J. Paul Guilford’s famous textbook Psychometric Methods.

I found Garrett a rather lackadaisical and perfunctory lecturer, and I was glad that I hadn’t enrolled for his full course. He seemed friendly, but was quite impersonal and matter-of-fact. Nothing about him left me with any clear personal impression. In this respect, he was a rather typical professor.

Klineberg was a very precise and professorial fellow, short and compact, with very close-cropped gray hair. He was a good lecturer, though not very animated; he usually sat at a desk while lecturing but he nearly always had considerable enthusiasm for his subject. Personally, he was quite formal but very cordial and courtly, much as I later found to be more common among the older European professors. Sir Cyril Burt, for example, had a similar personal style.


Miele: While we’re strolling down memory lane, what were your impressions of Mead and Woodworth?


Jensen: Margaret Mead was truly an unforgettable character. I never met her personally, but audited her lectures at Columbia. She always came across as a woman of great energy, with boundless enthusiasm for whatever she was talking about. Her lectures were immensely colorful and entertaining. And it was clear that she thoroughly enjoyed her showmanship. I still vividly remember some of her anecdotes and descriptions, such as her telling, complete with hilarious arm-waving gestures—about the swinging pendulous breasts of the older Samoan women. It brought the house down. She was usually quite “earthy,” and never high-flown. As an entertaining lecturer, few college professors could compete with her.

I found many of her statements involving psychological matters highly provocative because they so completely contradicted what I had learned from other professors at Columbia. For example, she thought schizophrenia was a cultural condition, defined as a disease only in modern Western cultures. I mentioned this to Joseph Zubin, who, in his course on abnormal psychology, taught that schizophrenia is a genetic brain disorder. He was most annoyed that Margaret Mead was teaching “such blatant nonsense” to so many students. My major professor, Percival Symonds, was greatly amused when I told him I was auditing Mead’s course. He said something like, “I hope you’re not taking it seriously, because when it comes to psychology she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

Robert Woodworth was an impressive man and a most interesting lecturer. He personally knew every big name in the history of American and European psychology, from William James on. This wealth of personal, anecdotal knowledge, combined with his fantastic scholarly erudition, made his course on history and systems of psychology a memorable experience. It was also an inspiration to see someone in his late 80s who was so physically fit and mentally sharp.

The first time I met Woodworth personally, I took along one of his books for him to autograph, which he did. I asked him some questions about E. L. Thorndike, co-author of his famous study on the “transfer of training.” I wanted to get Woodworth’s personal impressions of Thorndike the man. But he rather dismissed my question, saying he would be discussing Thorndike in his course.

Then to my surprise, Woodworth proceeded to more or less interview me, saying, “Well, you already know about me. I’d like to know something about you.” He asked me about the other courses I was taking, which professors I had—he knew them all and commented knowingly about each one. Then he asked me a most interesting question to which I wasn’t prepared to give a very good answer: “What do you want to be doing ten years from now? That’s the way to think about what you’re doing now.” I frequently recall Woodworth’s good influence on me.


Miele: You said, “I was always interested in what people who had ‘made it’ were like in person.” Who were the most impressive people you’ve met? What did they have in common?


Jensen: I have already mentioned my major professor, Percival Symonds. I learned something about good work habits from him. He was also the first person who ever took the trouble to offer quite detailed criticisms of things I wrote. He emphasized that if I was ever to become what he called “a real professor,” it was essential that I “research and publish.” Symonds himself was a prolific and clear writer, and he knew all the ropes for getting published. Though he never tried to indoctrinate me in his own beliefs, he did want me to develop the habit of writing. I liked this and profited greatly from his mentoring.

By far the most important person in my career, of course, was Hans Eysenck. I spent two years with him as a postdoc and another year on my first sabbatical leave from Berkeley. From his writings, I had great expectations of Eysenck when I went to England to work in his department, and they were more than fulfilled. Eysenck was a kind of genius, or at least a person of very unusual talents, and the only person of that unusual caliber that I have come across in the field of psychology. I have known a number of very capable and truly outstanding persons in psychology, and persons whose scientific contributions are on a par with, or may even exceed, Eysenck’s, but none who were what I would think of as some kind of phenomenon.

I got perhaps as much as 90 percent of my attitudes about psychology and science from Eysenck. The three years I spent in his department have been a lasting source of inspiration. I dread to think where my own career might have gone had I never made the Eysenck connection. I think Eysenck was a great man and have written in detail about my impressions of him.


Miele: What about people outside of psychology?


Jensen: I’ve never really gotten to know any politicians personally. Once after testifying in Congress I met former president George H. W. Bush—at that time a congressman from Texas—and chatted with him for a few minutes. He knew something about my 1969 HER article but seemed more interested in my personal background—where I was born, where I grew up, where I went to college, things like that. He acted rather amazed by my answers, especially the fact that up to that time I had never set foot in the Deep South. When he said, “Isn’t that interesting, you’ve never been in the South?” I assumed he was testing my credentials for my discussing the nature of the Black-White difference in IQ. But that topic never came up in our brief conversation.

The one really great politician that I observed at close hand was Jawaharlal Nehru, the then prime minister of India. I had read Nehru’s autobiography Toward Freedom and his The Discovery of India, both beautifully written books, so I enjoyed the opportunity of seeing him in person. So many people were in line to shake hands with him that I got out of the line and went up to where I could observe him up close for longer than if I had remained in line and waited my turn to shake hands. He was shorter than I had imagined (five feet, six and a half inches, to be exact), but he was surprisingly handsome. Even at age 65, Nehru had a dynamic and charismatic quality, fitting for a prime minister.


Miele: And Gandhi? Briefly.


Jensen: I’ll try to be brief. Mahatma Gandhi has been my number one hero since I was 14 years old. I never saw him in person, of course, but up until perhaps 20 years ago I thought I had read everything written about him in English, certainly more than I have ever read on any other person or subject. Then, in 1980, when I visited the Gandhi Library at the Punjab University in Chandigarh, India, I discovered that I had read only a fraction of the nearly 500 books and several thousand articles then written about Gandhi, not to mention the handsome 90-volume set of his own writings published by the Indian government.


Miele: Why Gandhi? He wasn’t a scientist.


Jensen: The greatest thing about Gandhi was his truly great and moving life. When a newspaper reporter asked him, “What is your message?” Gandhi replied, “My life is my message.” And an absolutely extraordinary life it was! One of those rare individuals who, as they say, is larger than life. He was also one of the few people I know of who lived nearly his whole adult life by principle, entirely by principle. And they were difficult principles to live up to. Even to have made the attempt and to have succeeded to the extent that Gandhi did is, I think, awesome. As Life magazine wrote, one has to go back in history to the Buddha and Jesus for comparisons. Gandhi’s greatness far overshadowed his personal idiosyncrasies and eccentricities.


One wonders how many people could possibly follow Gandhi’s example. Yet, properly studied, his well-documented life can be a continual source of example and inspiration. He is the one who first comes to mind whenever I feel puzzled as to the right course of action.


Miele: And in your other love, the world of music?


Jensen: The one who impressed me the most was the great maestro Arturo Toscanini. During my three years in New York I rarely missed one of the concerts he conducted with the NBC Symphony. I even attended his rehearsals. Toscanini, too, was a charismatic figure, emitting electricity, and performing magic with his orchestra. His rehearsals were rather terrifying, even when several rows back from the stage and not directly in the line of fire as were the musicians in the orchestra. Sparks flew. They had to become inured to his sudden explosions of temper. There must have been some very good musicians who could not play under him.

I last saw Toscanini in rehearsal when he was 87. What seemed so interesting was the phenomenal passion and the extreme care he had for the quality of the performance. I have never seen such a high degree of concentration and effort brought to any task by anyone else. At times his tremendous concentration and mental energy struck me as abnormal and a bit frightening—like the sun being brought to a white-hot focus by a great magnifying glass. It’s clear why all other conductors, famous and obscure alike, were in awe of him. On the podium he was an elemental force of nature.


Miele: And what qualities did all these exceptional people have in common?


Jensen: Three things: An exceptional level of ability or talent, unstinting energy, and an intensely concentrated, sustained interest in what they were doing.


Miele: Couldn’t your interest in “people who had made it” reflect a certain underlying elitism on the one hand and almost clinical coldness towards those who haven’t on the other? Could that have affected your whole approach to the question of IQ, genetics, and race?


Jensen: A colleague who knew me quite well once accused me of having an unusual interest in people who were in some way exceptional. I can’t deny that; but what I will deny is the implied corollary of what you call elitism, some “clinical coldness,” towards people who aren’t known for any conspicuous achievement.

I do believe that the factors that cause some individuals to be exceptional are largely genetic. Of course, they also need opportunities and environments that favor the expression or development of their exceptional traits. I believe that people of really exceptional achievement are examples of emergenesis—a term in behavioral genetics. It means that exceptional achievement depends upon a particular, rare combination of genetic traits that act multiplicatively, not additively. If any one of the traits is lacking, the exceptional achievement will not occur.

According to Sir Francis Galton, the three traits that are essential for outstanding achievement are a high level of ability, drive or zeal, and persistence of effort. Real genius also requires creativity.


Miele: Let’s get back to Jensenism. In the 67-page preface to your 1972 book, Genetics and Education, and in other places, you describe how this controversy just “burst around you” and how you’ve acted as a scholar just going where the evidence took you. Some critics say you deliberately courted controversy as a path toward advancement. In that preface you describe how you gave your manuscript to a reporter for U.S. News & World Report, a conservative news magazine, especially at that time, which had in 1965 run a controversial article along similar lines by William Shockley, “Is the Quality of the U.S. Population Declining?”

So weren’t you looking for a chance to get into the fray in those tumultuous times?


Jensen: Not at all, but I don’t think it would be in the least reprehensible if that were the case. I did think that the issues dealt with in my HER article were very important. And I suppose I must accept my late colleague Lee Cronbach’s claim that I had a certain “missionary zeal,” and I wanted to get my message out. All true. But I wasn’t seeking the commotion that ensued, nor did I do anything to promote it. It was unfortunate, but as I view it all in retrospect, I think it was necessary if discussion of the issues was to be brought into the open.


Miele: Then how did your manuscript get into the hands of the reporter from U.S. News & World Report?

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Jensen with a graduate assistant at the University of California, Berkeley, about the time of the publication of his HER article in 1969, which led to the term Jensenism becoming part of our vocabulary.

Jensen: It was a curious happenstance. The reporter was on the Berkeley campus to cover the student unrest going on at that time. He came to my office to get my opinion. I don’t know why he picked me, because I wasn’t very interested in the matter. I had been away in Europe during the height of the so-called Free Speech Movement that seemed to dominate the Berkeley campus at that time.

I told the reporter I was involved with something I thought far more important and was about to have an article on it come out in the Harvard Educational Review. He seemed interested so I told him the gist of the article. He asked for a copy of my 200-page typescript, which I gave to him. He followed up with the editors of the HER. They sent him copies of the seven commentaries on my article they had solicited and said they intended to hold a press conference about it. Within a week or so, the article was published and the controversy was reported in U.S. News & World Report, the New York Times, Time, Life, Newsweek, and other places. Some accounts were superficial or inaccurate. Only U.S. News & World Report and Fortune, both of which have interviewed me from time to time over the years, have consistently taken pains to check everything with me for factual and technical accuracy before going to press.


Miele: But why did you jump into the race-IQ issue at that time?


Jensen: Because educational psychologists were trying to discover and to ameliorate the conditions that caused the large average shortfall in Blacks’ scholastic performance. They were investigating a host of supposed environmental causes and hypothesizing others. In the 1960s it was quite taboo to mention genetic factors in connection with IQ differences, except perhaps only to completely dismiss them even as a possibility. But I could find no scientific basis for dismissing the plausibility of a genetic hypothesis, which of course always allows for environmental influences as well. So I thought it was important to put it on the table along with all the social-cultural-psychological hypotheses being investigated. Moreover, there was already sufficient evidence to disconfirm some of these hypotheses.

I still feel confident that I was right in what I did in 1969. And if you read my HER article carefully, you’ll see that I stated a hypothesis. I made no claims that weren’t at least as justified scientifically as any of the purely environmental hypotheses that were so popular at that time.


Miele: So that’s all there is to the origin of Jensenism? There’s no “rest of the story”?


Jensen: If you are looking for some deeper or hidden motive on my part, I’m afraid I can’t be of much help. If anything, my attitudes are based on a rather lifelong antipathy to believing anything without evidence. As a kid I was more or less kicked out of Sunday school because of my argumentativeness and resistance to accepting things on faith. Scientific ways of thinking about things, however, have always appealed to me, and I feel no need to believe much of anything. Belief is really irrelevant to science. Its truth status doesn’t consist of belief and doesn’t depend on belief.

Any certitude I enjoy in my life is based on what could be called aesthetic experiences, particularly music, and also nature. The things I know and like at this direct sensory and subjective level are good and right, for me, without need of any evidence or argument beyond the experience itself. But I don’t confuse them with the understanding of objective reality, which, in my opinion, should lie entirely within the purview of science.


Miele: Even in science, things don’t happen in a vacuum. Let’s recall what America was like back in 1969. Richard Nixon had just been elected president in a close election, helped by Governor George Wallace of Alabama, whose candidacy had been supported by a White backlash against programs of racial equalization. Nixon himself benefited directly from a demand for law and order and a feeling among the White majority that Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society had been a failure or even counterproductive.

Did you have any involvement or even interest in the Civil Rights Movement, school desegregation, or the hope that intervention programs like Head Start could boost the academic achievement and IQ of disadvantaged children that motivated so many of your colleagues in the social sciences at that time? Hadn’t you been the beneficiary of Great Society research grants?


Jensen: In fact, I voted for Johnson in the 1964 presidential election. I felt strongly enough about it that I voted by absentee ballot because I was in London on a sabbatical leave working as a Guggenheim Fellow in Eysenck’s department.

I believed in the Great Society proposals, particularly with respect to education and Head Start. When I returned to California I gave talks at schools, PTA meetings, and conferences and conventions explaining why these things were important and should be promoted. I have always been opposed to racial segregation and discrimination. They go against everything in my personal philosophy, which includes maximizing individual liberties and regarding every individual in terms of his or her own characteristics rather than the person’s racial or ethnic background. How could I think otherwise when at that time I had been steeped in Gandhian philosophy for over 20 years?

And yes, I did apply for and receive research grants and contracts from government agencies such as the Office of Education, National Science Foundation, Office of Economic Opportunity, and National Institute of Mental Health for research on individual differences in learning abilities and its possible applications to the education of pupils who at that time were called the “culturally disadvantaged.” I met many of the prominent leaders in this effort, and attended meetings in the nation’s capital. At that time I was quite enthusiastic about its promise. I considered it a socially valuable enterprise for educational psychology research.


Miele: Well, one of those colleagues, Martin Deutsch, with whom you had edited a book on the culturally disadvantaged, claimed your HER article contained a tremendous number of errors and misstatements. His exact words were, “Perhaps so large a number of errors would not be remarkable were it not for the fact that Jensen’s previous work contained so few, and more malignant, all errors referred to are in the same direction: maximizing differences between Blacks and Whites and maximizing the possibility that such differences are attributable to hereditary factors.” Others accused you of doctoring figures taken from well-known articles just to bolster your case. Thirty years have passed since your HER article: Is there anything in it you were forced to correct or that you would like to correct now, or clarify in the light of additional information?


Jensen: I did edit a book with Martin Deutsch and Irwin Katz, in 1968. Later, Deutsch, a professor at New York University, had recklessly claimed in a lecture at Michigan State University that there were 53 errors in my HER article, “all of them unidimensional and all of them anti-Black.” I was shocked by such an outlandish accusation, and I wrote to him asking for a list of these purported errors, so I could correct them in subsequent printings of the article, which, incidentally, is still being reprinted and sold by Harvard. Two or three requests from me failed to elicit a reply from Deutsch. I urged him to publish any and all errors he claimed to find, but nothing of the kind was ever published.

Considering how hard some people were trying to put down this article, I was amazed at how little they could actually find wrong with it! A geneticist friend did inform me of one quite obscure technical error that only a very sharp-eyed expert would have caught, but it would take longer to explain than it’s worth in this context. The idea that I had “doctored” figures or did anything at all like that to make a point is scurrilous nonsense, the last resort of a frustrated critic.


Miele: The other criticism I’ve heard is that you had your finger in the political wind. When the Nixon administration came in you decided to provide them with the scientific ammunition they needed to justify slashing all of those Great Society programs. Any comment?


Jensen: Absolutely false! That way of thinking is completely foreign to me. I am almost embarrassed by my lack of interest in politics and I was even less interested in those days than I am now. The idea of providing any kind of “ammunition,” scientific or otherwise, to help any political regime promote its political agenda is anathema in my philosophy. One always hopes, of course, that politicians will pay attention to scientific findings and take them into consideration in formulating public policy. But I absolutely condemn the idea of doing science for any political reasons.

I have only contempt for people who let their politics or religion influence their science. And I rather dread the approval of people who agree with me only for political reasons. People sometimes ask me how I have withstood the opposition and vilification and demonstrations over the years. That hasn’t worried me half as much as the thought that there may be people out there who agree with some of my findings and views for entirely the wrong reasons—political reasons, prejudice, ignorance, whatever. It is never the bottom line that I consider important, but the route by which one reaches it. The only route of interest to me is that of science and reason. I have no use for political or religious thinking when it comes to trying to understand real phenomena.


Miele: For the record, then, who first coined the term “Jensenism”? Was it you? Science writer Lee Edson in his article in The New York Times Magazine? Your arch-critic Leon Kamin? Wasn’t it in fact Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then adviser on domestic affairs to Richard Nixon, and later Democratic senior senator from New York (now retired)?


Jensen: It has been my understanding that this term first appeared in the Wall Street Journal, which was quoting Moynihan. He made a statement in an interview that went something like “The winds of Jensenism are blowing through the nation’s capital with gale force.” Other media then began using the term. It is also in Lee Edson’s New York Times article, which was one of the few balanced and accurate reports at that time.


Miele: Moynihan had already gotten into some controversy over his remarks about the Black family and “benign neglect.” And John Ehrlichman claims Nixon said some very “Jensenist” things about Head Start. If you weren’t interested in the policies of the Nixon administration, it certainly sounds as if they were interested in your article. What was your involvement with Moynihan back when he was a Nixon advisor?


Jensen: One day when I was in Washington to attend a council meeting of the AERA [American Educational Research Association], I received a message from Moynihan’s secretary asking if I could come to his office while I was in town. So I met him in the White House at about 4:00 that afternoon. He was a very open and cordial fellow, quite jolly and immediately likable. He offered me a drink from the bar in his office and asked if I minded if he invited his “assistant on Jensenism” to come over from the Old Executive Office Building across the street and sit in on our conversation. He buzzed his secretary to call this assistant, explaining to me that one of this young fellow’s assignments was to read my stuff and keep him [Moynihan] informed about it. Moynihan in turn forwarded this information to President Nixon, who was keenly interested in Jensenism. We talked about many things during the hour or so that I was there, including Moynihan’s then forthcoming trip to India as ambassador. I had noticed Erik Erikson’s biography of Gandhi on his desk, and of course I couldn’t resist getting into a conversation about that, since I was an aficionado of the Gandhi literature and had met Erikson, the famous psychoanalyst, at the very time he was writing his book on Gandhi.


Miele: And regarding race?


Jensen: We compared notes on our treatment, or mistreatment, for having stuck our necks out on certain aspects of the race issue, even though we had each written quite different things from entirely different perspectives.

Moynihan was also interested in hearing about my directing a large-scale study of the effects of complete desegregation of the Berkeley public schools by means of two-way busing. The research design was rather ingenious and promised some quite definitive answers, but he thought it unlikely that it could ever be carried out, because of political pressures. I had already completed what we called the baseline testing the year before, when the Berkeley schools were quite de facto segregated. Moynihan was politically much less naive than I, and it turned out he was right.

The testing that was intended to assess the first year’s effects of integration had no sooner begun than I received a phone call from the assistant superintendent telling me that they had halted the testing program, and that my research assistants should not return to the schools. I asked him “Why?” and I still remember his exact words: “Because the Berkeley School District is a political unit, not a research institute.” The dean of the School of Education in the University tried to save the situation by offering to assume directorship of the project I had designed, but the school authorities wouldn’t buy it, and so my research project was ended. I learned that the public protests against the project at school board meetings were based largely on my HER article, which had gotten considerable coverage in the local newspapers.


Miele: And was that the end?


Jensen: No, Moynihan later wrote to me asking if I knew why a much higher percentage of Black women than Black men passed the Federal Civil Service exams. At the time I didn’t know this was a fact, so I looked into it and found the same thing was true for college entrance exams and aptitude exams used for hiring in the private sector. I told Moynihan that I would do some research on this matter.

I wrote a fairly technical book chapter about my findings, titled “The Race × Sex × Ability Interaction.” I sent a copy to Moynihan, but by then he was no longer in the White House and I’ve not since had any contact with him. Subsequent studies have not consistently found the mean sex difference in IQ , so I no longer put much confidence in the theory.


Miele: At some point, however, you must have changed your point of view. Did the scientific evidence lead you to a new political philosophy or did a change in political philosophy lead you to reexamine the science?


Jensen: Changed my point of view about what? I did at one time believe that an individual’s family and social environment and socioeconomic status were by far the most influential factors in determining individual and especially group differences in intelligence and every other psychological trait. Certainly I hold a rather different position today, because the scientific evidence that I have studied shows overwhelmingly that my previous belief was wrong. The evidence shows that genetic factors and also environmental factors that have biological effects are much more potent influences on mental development than the effects of family environment. The best evidence for this is based on monozygotic twins who were separated in infancy and reared apart in different families, and on genetically unrelated children adopted into the same family. If anyone wants to read an excellent introduction to this evidence, I suggest David Rowe’s book The Limits of Family Influence.

You keep harping on politics. Over the years, I have become increasingly disillusioned about politics and increasingly suspicious of it. What I see of partisan politics and government’s interference in people’s lives these days lends considerable appeal to the philosophy of libertarianism, although I am not a libertarian with a capital L.


Miele: Then let’s return to science. Take the three points that made your HER article so controversial: (1) the failure of compensatory education, (2) the evidence for a genetic basis to IQ , and (3) the likelihood of some genetic component to the Black-White IQ difference. Would you say that’s a fair and accurate definition of “Jensenism”?


Jensen: I think that is a fair statement so long as no one views it as some kind of dogma but simply conclusions I have reached for the time being based on my studies of these matters.


Miele: Suppose the Harvard Educational Review now asked you to come out with a new and revised edition. What have 30 years of research told you that you didn’t know then?


Jensen: That’s a big order! I have answered it at length in my latest book, The g Factor, but here are a few key points.

First, we have learned that the family environment per se has exceedingly little—practically zero—effect in creating individual differences in mental development by the time children reach early maturity. This is true at least throughout the range of the normal, humane home environments that are typical of the vast majority of Whites and of Blacks in the present-day United States.

Second, I am even less optimistic today than I was in 1969 about the ability of compensatory educational programs to markedly or permanently raise either the IQ or school achievement for the vast majority of children who score below the national average. I now believe that quite radical innovations in education are needed to deal with the very wide range of individual differences in potential for academic achievement, regardless of race. Our schools must become much more diversified in their curricula, the pacing of instruction, and their educational goals for pupils in every segment of the bell curve. I have expressed these ideas in more detail in a book edited by Robert J. Sternberg, the noted psychologist at Yale University.

Third, I now believe, more strongly than I did earlier, that most of the environmental causes of individual differences in IQ , particularly in the g factor, are biological, rather than social-psychological.


Miele: We’ll examine those strong assertions on intelligence, genetics, and race in depth in the chapters that follow. For now, let me ask whether the three heretical Jensenist theses have now become accepted?


Jensen: The only hard evidence I know of comes from the survey made by Snyderman and Rothman in their 1988 book The IQ Controversy, in which over 600 psychologists responded to a long list of questions related to my 1969 HER article. The majority were in agreement with my own position on every one of the major points, including the race question. Three times as many said they believed that both genetic and environmental factors are involved in the average Black-White difference as said the difference is entirely environmental.


Miele: If you could write the final word on the career of Arthur Jensen and how he became one of the most controversial figures in contemporary science, what would it be?


Jensen: That’s simple: At some future point in time neither I nor Jensenism will any longer be seen as controversial. If scientific research is allowed to advance without political interference, the three parts of Jensenism will have proved either mostly right or mostly wrong.

I have faith in science as an ongoing and self-correcting process, not in some final conclusion. If that process finally puts me and Jensenism down, so be it.


Miele: And if someone else writes that final word, and it’s “Arthur Jensen returned discussion of a genetic component for racial differences in IQ to academic respectability”?


Jensen: I’d think the inevitable had finally happened. It should have always been the case. I believe progress toward this inevitability is rapidly accelerating.


Further Reading

For Jensen’s own account of his 1969 Harvard Educational Review article, the origin of “Jensenism,” and the reaction to it, see the 67-page preface to: Jensen, A. R. (1972). Genetics and education. New York: Harper and Row.

For more on Jensen’s work, see the bibliography of his publications in Appendix A.