COURAGEOUS FACULTY

To the Editors of the Crimson:

The Faculty petition on the subject of Professor Herrnstein is an encouraging if belated sign in the continuing and increasingly acrimonious debate over the I.Q. test. Not only is the behavior of the SDS reprehensible in its own right, but it is essentially irrelevant to the issue. To allow this subject to be fought out at this level is to accept the proposition that the substantive issues involved are unimportant or meaningless, and, whoever "wins." this would further weaken the position of the forces of legitimate scholarship and intellectual freedom. It is, as I say, encouraging to find that there are 107 courageous members of the academic community who recognize the paramount importance of the substantive issues involved and their implications for public policy and who are demanding that this issue be publicly debated on its merits.

It is high time: the position of the forces of legitimate scholarship and intellectual freedom has already been seriously eroded by the almost total abdication of responsibility in this matter over the two years since Dr. Jensen raised it to general prominence with his paper, published here in Cambridge. For these forces to now let the matter go by default would surely be to accept the coup de grace.

The question is not--as apparently the SDS and the American Anthropological Association see it--whether Professor Herrnstein is a bigot: the question is, is he right? If there is any virtue in our system of intellectual freedom, any value for the society at large, any justification on the grounds that it contributes to rather than detracts from the viability of that society, it lies precisely here: under in the truth will out, or at least it stands a chance. Professor Herrnstein: to his credit, has recognized his responsibility for this ideal by exposing the subject in the marketplace, however irresponsible his scholarship may be. But it would represent a dereliction and perhaps as grievous a blow to intellectual freedom as any the SDS could deliver if the Professor's arguments and prescriptions were to be let stand, by default, as the last word of legitimate scholarship on the subject. Where have the historians been who might have challenged Professor Herrnstein's remarkably naive historical generalizations, or the sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists those on human behavior? Where the statisticians and geneticists to comment on his turning their subjects on their heads in support of conclusions not only wrong but very likely disastrous to the society if taken as the basis of public policy?

The petitioners now assure us that the seriousness of the situation has been recognized and this dereliction will not continue. Let the issue be joined and the subject debated publicly on its merits by those uniquely competent to do no. T.R. Crowder A.M. '51   Charlestown