Arthur Jensen

Arthur Robert Jensen (August 24, 1923, to October 22, 2012) was an educational psychologist who joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley in 1958. His 123-page article "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?" appeared in the Winter 1969 issue of the Harvard Educational Review and was entered in full in the Congressional Record by Representative John Rarick on May 28, 1969. The Pioneer Fund's own web page lists him among its grantees.¹²³

Education and Berkeley Appointment

Jensen was born in San Diego, took a bachelor's degree in psychology at Berkeley and a master's at San Diego State College, and received his doctorate from Columbia University in 1956. He then spent two postdoctoral years in Hans Eysenck's laboratory in London. His first academic appointment at Berkeley, in the Department of Educational Psychology, dated from 1958. In 1966 and 1967 he spent a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto. He died at his home in Kelseyville, California, and was then professor emeritus.¹

In October 1967 he was professor of educational psychology and research psychologist in the Institute of Human Learning of the University of California, Berkeley, and gave a speech to the California Advisory Council of Educational Research in San Diego.⁴

The Berkeley Desegregation Evaluation

Jensen described the following sequence in a paper printed in the Senate committee compilation of 1972. In 1967 the Berkeley Board of Education voted to desegregate its elementary schools by two-way busing, approved in January 1968 and put into effect the following September, with about 3,500 of 9,000 elementary pupils bused each day. Chancellor Roger Heyns formed an advisory committee at the school officials' request; Jensen was first called to confer in November 1967, and in late December Heyns asked him to direct the evaluation. Jensen wrote the proposal in January 1968, trained 15 testers, half white and half Negro, and had them test the district's 9,000 elementary pupils in April and May 1968 to obtain baseline data. He wrote that he insisted on outside testers and that his continuing as director was contingent on it.⁵

He wrote that a group called the Community for New Politics protested the study at the board meeting of May 7, 1968, alleging racist bias, and that he rebutted at the meeting of May 21. He also wrote that local newspapers publicized his views on race differences "quite luridly," including once with a red two-inch banner headline, and that it was agreed that the dean of the School of Education would become principal investigator, with Jensen "far into the background" as research psychologist.⁵ In his account the Harvard Educational Review published his article in the first week of March 1969. A spokesman for one group proposed at a board meeting that the evaluation be halted and the baseline data destroyed; at the next meeting the board announced that the district would dissociate itself from the university's project, about two weeks after the spring 1969 testing had begun. Jensen wrote that the testers completed the testing, that the school administration kept the results, and that a school official explained that "the schools were not a research institute, but a political unit."⁵

Jensen's report on the spring 1968 questionnaires, published in May 1970 as Research Resume No. 43 of the California Advisory Council on Educational Research of the California Teachers Association, covers 337 Berkeley elementary teachers and the parents of over 8,000 pupils. Its abstract states that the vast majority of teachers favored integration and busing, that a majority of parents favored integration but approved busing less as a means of achieving it, and that a majority of every racial group favored ability grouping.⁶

Federal Contract Research

The final report of July 1970, "An Experimental Analysis of Learning Abilities in Culturally Disadvantaged Children," records that it resulted from a contract between the Office of Economic Opportunity and the University of California, Contract Number OEO 2404, with Jensen and William D. Rohwer Jr. as principal investigators; the acknowledgments name Douglas Penfield as project director and describe studies in three school districts.⁷ A paper of 1970, "Can We and Should We Study Race Differences?", is registered in ERIC with an abstract that begins: "We need to find out the extent to which individual differences, social class differences and race differences in rates of cognitive development, and differential patterns of relative strength and weakness are attributable to genetically conditioned biological growth factors."⁸

The 1967 Speech and the 1969 Article

The October 1967 speech carries the title the article later used.⁴ The article opens: "Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed." In the text Jensen wrote that "such an hypothesis is anathema to many social scientists," meaning an hypothesis that genetic factors play a part in the lower average intelligence and scholastic performance of Negroes, and then: "The fact that a reasonable hypothesis has not been rigorously proved does not mean that it should be summarily dismissed." He concluded that the evidence made it "a not unreasonable hypothesis that genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white intelligence difference," adding that "the preponderance of the evidence is, in my opinion, less consistent with a strictly environmental hypothesis than with a genetic hypothesis, which, of course, does not exclude the influence of environment or its interaction with genetic factors."²

The editors' note printed with the article announced that the Spring 1969 issue would carry a discussion by five psychologists: Carl Bereiter, Lee Cronbach, James Crow, David Elkind and J. McVicker Hunt.² The article's text cites "Shuey (1966), whose 578 page review is the most comprehensive, covering 382 studies," and its reference list includes Kuttner's "Biochemical anthropology" in Race and Modern Science (Social Science Press, 1967) and a Kuttner letter in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine of 1968.² Radical groups disrupted his lectures, students chanted "Dr. Jensen is inside. He is teaching genocide," his car tires were slashed, he received death threats, the university gave him a pair of bodyguards, and police X-rayed his mail.¹

Congressional Record Insertion

On May 28, 1969, Representative John Rarick of Louisiana, recognized by the House for 30 minutes, stated: "because of the significant findings of Dr. Arthur L. [sic] Jensen of the Institute for Human Learning at the University of California, Berkeley, Calif., in the field of environment, heredity, and behavior, I include his work." The article and its references occupy pages 14190 to 14217 of the Congressional Record for that day.²

Senate Select Committee, 1972

The Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, chaired by Walter Mondale, scheduled a hearing on "Environment, Intelligence and Scholastic Achievement" for February 24, 1972. The hearing could not be held as planned, and in June 1972 the committee printed the statements of the scheduled witnesses with research papers on the same topic. Jensen's statement runs pages 55 to 68, followed by reprints of the 1969 article and six other papers by him, among them "Can We and Should We Study Race Differences?" and "Do Schools Cheat Minority Children?"⁹

The print also contains Richard Herrnstein's "IQ" from The Atlantic Monthly of September 1971, an article by Eysenck, and two papers by William B. Shockley, "Dysgenics: A Social Problem Reality Evaded by the Illusion of Infinite Plasticity of Human Intelligence" and "Dysgenics, Geneticity, Raceology: A Challenge to the Intellectual Responsibility of Educators." It reproduces the Harvard Educational Review's reprint series on the controversy, including a Black Student Union statement and "The SPSSI statement."⁹

In his statement Jensen wrote that he had been on the Berkeley faculty for 14 years, that no one taking the contrary position had had to endure "personal threats, prolonged harassment, invasion of his college classes by disruptive demonstrations," or two plainclothes police bodyguards, and that a newsletter of the American Anthropological Association had proposed that members burn copies of the Review. He stated: "My position is that there is now sufficient evidence to seriously question the 100-percent environmental theories of the mean white-black intelligence difference."⁹

The statement gave empirically determined heritabilities of IQ as "usually of the order of .70 to .80," said that in European and North American Caucasian populations genetic factors were "roughly twice as important as environmental variation" as a cause of individual differences, and put the average white-black difference in the United States at approximately one standard deviation, or 15 IQ points. It offered as an hypothesis that the heritability of IQ is the same within the white and black populations as between them and that the genetic variance involved in IQ is about one-fifth less in the black than in the white population. It proposed three educational approaches, the pursuit of aptitude-by-training interactions, greater attention to learning readiness, and greater diversity of curricula and goals, and stated that none of them was "based on the expectation of the schools' significantly changing children's basic intelligence."⁹

Pioneer Fund Money

The Institute for the Study of Educational Differences appears in the ledger of Pioneer Fund grants that Barry Mehler compiled from the fund's returns, which lists grantees by institution. Its nominal payments were 10,000 dollars in each of 1973, 1974 and 1975; 20,000 dollars in 1976; 30,000 in 1977 and 1978; 47,000 in 1979; 63,000 in 1980; 70,000 in 1981; 50,000 in 1982; 6,000 in 1983; 90,000 in 1984; 96,000 in 1985; 134,500 in 1986; 107,000 in 1987; 98,000 in 1988; and 100,000 in 1989 and 1990. The total is 1,071,500 dollars, about 10 percent of the 10,670,040.55 dollars the ledger records for all grantees from 1971 to 1996, and no payment to the institute appears after 1990.¹⁰

The Internal Revenue Service listed "Institute for the Study of Educational Differences, Orinda, Ca." among organizations eligible to receive deductible gifts in the editions of its Publication 78 revised to October 31, 1982, and October 31, 1985.¹¹ A report by Philip A. Vernon and Jensen, dated 1983 in the ERIC catalog, states: "This study was supported by the Institute for the Study of Educational Differences."¹² The ledger's entries for the University of California total 221,600 dollars from 1971 to 1996, of which 218,000 dollars were paid from 1991 to 1996; the ledger does not state whom these grants supported.¹⁰

The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that Jensen "got more than $1 million in Pioneer grants over three decades."¹³ The fund's grantees page of February 2003 describes Jensen as "Professor Emeritus Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley" and "todays leading exponent of the position that all mental tasks, even simple reaction time tests, reflect a unitary general factor termed g," and names him again among grantees who "significantly extended the scope of the debate about racial differences" with The g Factor (1998).³ The fund's page headed "Controversies" poses the question "But the Pioneer Fund has supported researchers such as Audrey Shuey, Henry Garrett, Arthur Jensen, Richard Lynn, and J. Philippe Rushton? Didnt they all set out to prove that Blacks are inferior?" and answers: "Pioneer grantees are not interested in proving that any one group has a particular average IQ or anything else."¹⁴

Mankind Quarterly and Social Science Press

The issue of Mankind Quarterly for January to March 1973, edited in Edinburgh by Robert Gayre with Henry Garrett as honorary associate editor, Robert Kuttner as an assistant editor and Audrey Shuey on the honorary advisory board, printed Dale C. Adams's "Farewell to Behaviourism," which begins by comparing Copernicus with Jensen: "some credit for the world henceforth admitting that human life revolves around heredity may be given to Arthur Jensen."¹⁵ The issue of January to March 1972 advertised, under the imprint Social Science Press, Kuttner's Race and Modern Science and Shuey's The Testing of Negro Intelligence, described as "578 pages" summarizing "382 studies."¹⁶ An article by Nathaniel Weyl in the same issue names Jensen, William B. Shockley and R. Travis Osborne as having presented evidence that the Negro-white intelligence gap was widening.¹⁷

The issue of Summer 1990, published in Washington by The Cliveden Press, carried J. W. Jamieson's "Arthur Jensen and the Heritability of I.Q.: A Case Study in the Violation of Academic Freedom." Jamieson's affiliation is given as the Institute for the Study of Man, which the Pioneer ledger lists at 944,000 dollars for 1971 to 1996.¹⁰¹⁸