An Open Letter to the Kennedy School Faculty

Rarely does a Ph.D. dissertation provoke a media storm. Most of these scholarly productions, the culmination of years of course work, research and writing, gather dust on library shelves and are read, if anyone reads them at all, by a handful of academics in the author’s field of study. And with good reason: Most dissertations are dry, poorly written, deal with narrow topics, and contribute little, if anything, to the existing literature on the topic they address.

One Kennedy School dissertation, however, has not only drawn media attention over the past week, but also resulted last Friday in the resignation of its author, Jason Richwine, by his employer, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative and influential “think tank” in Washington, D.C. Richwine first drew critical scrutiny as the co-author of a Heritage Foundation paper that estimated the cost (over 50 years) of granting citizenship to “illegal” immigrants in the United States at $6.3 trillion dollars, as these newly minted citizens become eligible for government benefits such as welfare, health care, and higher education.

Critics of the study quickly pounced on its rather dubious assumptions and extrapolations, prompting a Washington Post reporter to dig out Richwine’s dissertation, completed in 2009 and titled “IQ and Immigration Policy.” The Post article, featuring quotes from the dissertation that focused on Hispanics, both undocumented immigrants and their American-born children, instantly convinced Heritage Foundation leaders to distance themselves from Richwine’s dissertation and push him out the door.

What was so disturbing in this dissertation that has created such a furor? After all, it was approved by a committee of three distinguished Harvard professors—George J. Borjas, Richard J. Zeckhauser, and Christopher Jencks—who attested to its scholarly competence as meriting a Harvard Ph.D. Presumably, they guided Richwine’s research on his pre-approved topic and were sufficiently knowledgeable to spot any flaws in Richwine’s work. None of these academics, however, possessed any expertise in the fields of biology, psychology, or neurology, from which Richwine drew the data on which he based his assertion that non-Caucasians are doomed by genetics to possess and pass on to their children significantly lower IQs (as measured by standardized tests of mental ability) than native-born American whites, and that “the low average IQ of Hispanics is effectively permanent.”

Richwine, who lacks any degrees in these fields himself, offered no data in his dissertation (or research of his own) to support this claim, relying instead on studies, most of them highly disputed, that purported to link below-average IQs to such “underclass” traits as criminality, out-of-wedlock births, welfare dependency, psychosis, alcoholism, and even obesity and smoking. Low-IQ immigrants have low-IQ children, live in neighborhoods (Richwine refers to Hispanic “barrios” as breeding grounds for these traits) populated largely by other low-IQ people, and create a “culture” that is inimical to the American economy, depressing the earnings of native-born whites. Additionally, “intractable cultural differences” are preventing Mexican assimilation into white society.

Turning to immigration policy in his final dissertation chapter, Richwine identified the “salient policy issue” as “the well-documented persistence of the IQ deficit” among non-Caucasians (excepting Asians, whose larger “brain size” gives them above-average IQs). Given the “strong case for IQ selection” in screening potential legal immigrants, Richwine proposed administering IQ tests to those seeking admission to the United States. However, undoubtedly aware that his proposal would never find a political sponsor, he suggested the euphemistic term “skills” as more palatable. “The tests would still be ordinary intelligence tests, but the emotional baggage that the term IQ sometimes carries with it would be much reduced.” Richwine suggested that such tests could be administered at American embassies or consulates, or perhaps even over the Internet, although he shrank from proposing a “passing” score on such a test.

How could any self-respecting Harvard professor, one might ask, approve a dissertation that contains such racist nonsense? Three did, as noted above. In doing so, they certified that Richwine’s work “represents a significant contribution to knowledge” in the field of public policy—which is, after all, the requirement for dissertations in that field as stated in Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Handbook. Doctoral candidates at the Kennedy School of Government, the Handbook adds, are required to “demonstrate his or her ability to perform original research in an area of public policy” in their dissertation.

Richwine’s dissertation, in fact, included no “original research” conducted by him. It was based solely on secondary sources, heavily weighted toward studies with a hereditarian bias, dismissing works such as The Mismeasure of Man, a scathing critique of IQ testing by the late Stephen Jay Gould, professor of biology, geology, and paleontology at Harvard. Whether the dissertation made a “significant contribution to knowledge” in public policy is a subjective matter of scholarly judgment, although I would argue that it did not. It might pass muster as a master’s thesis, for which reliance on secondary sources, or “a review of the literature,” is commonly allowed in most graduate schools, as a prelude to “original research” for a dissertation. The fact that Richwine addressed a controversial topic is not an issue; there should be no “taboo” topics in academic work. The issue, and the point of this Open Letter to the Kennedy School faculty, is that adherence to the standards of the graduate school’s official Handbook needs to be enforced more rigorously in the approval of dissertations. My own modest proposal is that the faculty consider appointing a “devil’s advocate” for each candidate, as the Catholic church does to examine and question the purported “miracles” required for candidates for sainthood. Such advocates could be anonymous, and perhaps from another school, to better allow for critical analysis, since dissertation committees like Richwine’s are normally composed of professors who have personal ties to the candidate. After all, Richwine cited favorably in his dissertation the work of Professors Borjas and Jencks, possibly giving them a stake in his work.

I’m not proposing that the graduate faculty revoke Richwine’s doctorate or publicly disavow his dissertation, although Professor Zeckhauser recently stated that “Richwine was too eager to extrapolate his empirical results to inferences for policy.” Good advice, but a tad late. And Professor Borjas, an economist, says, “I have never worked on anything even remotely related to IQ,” the main topic of Richwine’s dissertation, adding that “the focus on IQ is a bit misguided.” Again, a tad late to help Richwine rethink his dissertation proposal, which Borjas had approved.

The media storm over Jason Richwine’s dissertation will soon subside, as he looks for a new employer. But the issue for the Kennedy School faculty over this episode will remain until the standards for dissertations are more rigorously enforced.

Peter H. Irons is Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, at the University of California, San Diego. He earned a Ph.D. in that field from Boston University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.