In the spirit of academia, speakers from all disciplines and ideas come to universities and share their thoughts with students and faculty in public presentations. Usually, the speeches are open to the university community and occasionally they also welcome the surrounding residents.
Some speakers enjoy the anticipated praise of students and faculty and others receive jeers and anger. There are even cases when those in the audience prevent the person from speaking altogether.
In one case, a Nobel Laureate for physics came to a New England Ivy League University to speak to a mixed-race audience. Members of the black community stood and applauded him; some continued applauding him and refused to stop. They were not celebrating what they knew of his ideas, they were working to prevent him from speaking.
Cancel culture
This may sound like a scene familiar in our culture over the past several years — canceling. However, this moment occurred at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1969, long before the current faculty of our universities matriculated from their respective colleges. In most venues, he did not even make it that far. Often the leftist organizations such as the Students for a Democratic Society organized resistance to him.
The speaker was William Shockley and he invented the transistor for Bell Labs. Later, he was one of the early scientists in what is now called Silicon Valley. But Shockley was not there to speak about transistors or his experience of winning a Nobel Prize for Physics. Shockley came to speak in favor of eugenics and against dysgenics.
The black students stood to silence him because he taught that blacks had, in general, a lower IQ and the more children they had would consistently lower the mean IQ in the United States. Meanwhile, whites, he claimed, had generally higher IQs and the more children they had would increase the IQ of the general population. He not only came to present thoughts, which, according to Thomas Jackson in American Renaissance, he never proved but also his solution — sterilization of certain races in the population.
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University administrators disinvite him
Shockley actually made it to the podium at Dartmouth. Of course, the clapping students tried to silence him. Other universities’ students and faculty successfully pressured the administration to disinvite him.
His scheduled speaking engagement at Harvard in 1973 was canceled and some students, writing to the Crimson, accused the Black students of falling under the influence of leftist groups like the Students for a Democratic Society.
Harvard students writing in the Crimson against those accusations responded:
We oppose William Shockley because he is using unscientific assertions to suggest genocidal policy. His Nobel Prize in physics gives him no expertise in the field of genetics, although it makes his ideas more influential. If you are not convinced by our brief remarks here that Shockley’s ideas are racist, read his article, “Dysgenic, Geneticist and Raceology: A Challenge to the Intellectual Responsibility of Educators,” in Phi Delta Kappan, January 1972.
In an era where the word is to follow the science, William Shockley’s words were scarier than anything we heard in all of the pandemic.
Thomas Jackson:
The best known was the $1,000 Bonus Proposal. Anyone of childbearing age would be offered $1,000 for every IQ point under 100 if he agreed to be sterilized. Dr. Shockley even suggested that for people too stupid to learn about the bonus, “bounty hunters” could be rewarded for calling it to their attention.
This was to replace welfare. So instead of the welfare programs of the “Great Society”, Shockley believed in these payments essentially in lieu of having children —through a formal sterilization program nationwide.
Eugenics then in the not-so-distant past
As nightmarish as this sounds today, this was not long after twenty-nine states formally ended their respective eugenics programs that forced sterilization on “misfits.” The vast majority of university students, faculty and scientists rejected his ideas but America was still then not far from the programs that inspired the NAZIs own eugenics system.
The key to Shockley’s theories were that IQ was a trait passed down biologically and if those with low IQs reproduced more than those with higher numbers then this would lead to a dysgenically caused dystopia. Therefore, he saw his sterilization programs as urgent for the future of the country.
The Southern Poverty Law Center lists Shockley as an extremist for these teachings. The write-up explains that the genesis of his idea was the tragic story of a man who was blinded by a black man with a low IQ throwing acid in his face. He believed the cause of this whole incident was the 60 point IQ of the criminal.
Shockley worked to distance his ideas from the NAZI programs of extermination and even sued a reporter from the Atlantic Constitution for accusing him of embracing that ideology. He succeeded in his case but was awarded only one dollar. Clearly, neither the jury nor the court enjoyed his ideas either.
The highest IQs bring us to destruction
Today, we are living closer to nuclear war than any time in the past and, ironically, only the most intelligent men and women on the Earth are capable of bringing us to this disastrous moment. Shockley never proved his theories. Neither do they account for the nuclear threat we encounter today. They also do not account for the fact that few people with low IQ’s regardless of race are by nature a threat to their society.
However, it really leads us to look at the words “follow the science” in a more discerning way because some people follow their science to the most dystopian of worlds.
Shockley died in 1989.
photo: SBS arts media via BigStockPhoto.com
JayRoberts writes from New England, subscribe for more articles.