Racialism at Heritage, suckitude at Hahvard

People following politics and think tanks closely have heard of Jason Richwine, until earlier this week employed by the Heritage Foundation, and his claim, in his PhD dissertation, that Hispanics are dumber than whites and condemned to stay that way.

Sounds like Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, doesn't it?

Well, per The Nation, Richwine is a fanboy of them and their racialist ideas.

But that's a secondary issue.

Secondary, in a sense, to the issue of how such craptacular writing got approved by a Harvard dissertation committee.

Here's how:

The dissertation was approved, as all dissertations are, by a committee of three. The chair was George Borjas, an conservative economist who writes about immigration for  National Reviewand The Wall Street Journal. Borjas told Slate’s David Weigel, “I have never worked on anything even remotely related to IQ, so don't really know what to think about the relation between IQ, immigration, etc.… In fact, as I know I told Jason early on since I've long believed this, I don't find the IQ academic work all that interesting.”—not exactly an endorsement of the dissertation.

The second person on the committee was Richard Zeckhauser. He studies investing, not immigration, and his Harvard faculty website describes him as “a senior principal at Equity Resource Investments (ERI), a special situations real estate firm.” He told Wiegel that “Jason’s empirical work was careful,” but that he was “too eager to extrapolate his empirical results to inferences for policy.”

The third member of the committee is the big surprise, and the big problem: Christopher Jencks, for decades a leading figure among liberals who did serious research on inequality—a contributor to The New York Review of Books, the author of important books, including Inequality: Who Gets Ahead?, The Homeless and The Black White Test Score Gap. Christopher Jencks knows exactly what’s wrong with the studies purporting to link “race” with “IQ.”

OK, so one of the three admits that he knows nothing about IQ research in this issue, and that he finds the question boring. And, while he may write about immigration, that doesn't mean he knows anything academic about it. The second admits Richwine overstretched, while also indicating he doesn't study either immigration or IQ. 

And the third is an alleged librul who clearly knows what racialism is.And refused to answer questions from The Nation about why he signed off on this shite.

Jencks, unlike the other two profs, also refused to answer Slate's questions, apparently. Slate shows that Richwine's in thick with the racialists, like Steve Sailer. 

Meanwhile, proof again that a Hahvard education is worth no more than that at State U., other than the right name on a resume. And, proof again that, despite the lies of both conservatives and neoliberals, class issues, and class divisions, are alive and well in America. And, add the names of a coward, a coward-lite and a hypocrite to those of Larry Summers and Niall Ferguson as among the teaching excellence at Hahvard, eh?

And, assuming Jencks isn't a traitor to previous political stances, why did he sign off on this? Pure laziness? Overwhelmed with too many theses to read? Again, neither one bodes well for the actual educational value of a Hahvard "education." Ditto on the failure to man up and answer the media.

And, in an interesting sidebar, I'll bet you didn't know Steve Pinker had this many toes dipped in the racialist cesspool. Still, should it surprise you? No.