Mensa

Sixteen years ago a wealthy, eccentric English barrister name Roland Berrill organized Mensa, a club to be composed of men and women with an intelligence quotient higher than that of 99.9 per cent of the population. Berrill envisaged a round-table society (hence the same Mensa, Latin for table) of eggheads gathered together to exchange good talk and to serve as an advisory group in government policy-making.

Mensa's membership grew slowly, for obvious reasons, and the Berrill recruits became increasingly lonely in their Olympian solitude, finally deciding to open the club to the rest of the top one per cent of the English people. Galled by this latitudinarian admissions policy, Berrill retired from the scene muttering about declining standards of excellence.

Mensa has continued to retreat from the grandiose conception of 1945. But if the club has thrown overboard Berrill's dream that it might chart England's future, intellectual democracy has had its compensations. After a long period of stagnancy, membership has boomed tenfold since 1958, so that today there are 2,000 members. In the last year, a small platoon of advance guards have infiltrated this country and have already set up a flourishing chapter in New York, and are organizing a new group in the Boston area.

Industrially striving to gather some of Harvard's eggheads into their basket, local M's, as they call themselves, ran this ad in the classified section of the CRIMSON a few days ago: "ARE YOU UNUSUALLY INTELLIGENT? Existing members wish to enlarge group for diverse discussions, social activities, and studies. Apply Mensa, 74 Tudor St., Waltham, Mass."

The Big M, as it were, around Boston is a bearded, 23-year-old Englishman who now lives in Revere named Laurie van Someren. Van Someren directed the 30-member Mensa chapter at Cambridge University while an undergraduate there is Trinity College. Already, he told me, there is a nucleus of 12 M's in the Boston area, and the hopes to attract 20 or 30 more, including undergraduates, to make possible fairly regular meetings. What does Mensa do, I wondered?

Talk mostly, it seems. The main purpose of the club is to promote contact between highly intelligent people. The typical meeting in England take place in a restaurant of pub, and often includes the reading of a paper and discussion afterward. Frequently there is no planned program for a meeting, and talk will swirl freely over the beer bottles. The Mensa chapter from Leeds spent a recent weekend cooking and camping out in the Lake Country. But true to the spirit of Mensa, the outing took the form of a conference; and the theme, as their notice expressed it, "will be appropriate to the more or less primal scene in which it is staged: Is our local civilization making life too complicated and artificial and what, of anything, ought or can we do about it." I am left wondering what Wordsworth could have thought of all this.

In England the frequency of meetings varies with the group. In London there are five or six meetings a month, a couple of which are purely social. When van Someren was at Cambridge, the M's gathered together only three times a year. He hopes, however, to set up at least one meeting a month in this area, if enough people are interested.

Besides the meetings, Mensa collects information about high-I.Q. people by means of questionnaires circulated periodically among the members. The Research Committee has made surveys of members' attitudes in such matters as capital punishment, politics, and sex.

Applicants must score about 150 on the self-administered Cattell Intelligence Test to be admitted into Mensa. For $3 the Selection Committee sends the result of the test, whether you are of the one of the 99.