News

Progressive Labor Party Organizes Solidarity March With Harvard Yard Encampment

News

Encampment Protesters Briefly Raise 3 Palestinian Flags Over Harvard Yard

News

Mayor Wu Cancels Harvard Event After Affinity Groups Withdraw Over Emerson Encampment Police Response

News

Harvard Yard To Remain Indefinitely Closed Amid Encampment

News

HUPD Chief Says Harvard Yard Encampment is Peaceful, Defends Students’ Right to Protest

Shockley Finally Has His Debate

RACEOLOGISTS:

By Nicholas Lemann

William B. Shockley, the controversial Stanford engineering professor who says blacks are less intelligent than whites, sparked the largest demonstration in the Ivy League so far this year when he spoke at Princeton this week.

While Shockley debated Ashley Montague, a retired Rutgers professor of anthropology, inside Princeton's McCosh Hall, 400 protesters marched outside and hanged and burned him in effigy.

Roy Innis, national director of the Congress on Racial Equality, was originally scheduled to debate Shockley, but backed off at the last minute, he said, because the debate was open only to Princeton students and faculty.

Shockley, a Nobel laureate in physics and self-proclaimed geneticist, said in the debate that intelligence in blacks is directly proportional to their percentage of "Caucasian blood," and that the U.S. government should give cash bonuses to people of below-average intelligence who submit to sterilization.

Montagu called Shockley a racist--a charge Shockley denied, saying he is a "raceologist"--because "a racist is one who believes that there are significant biological differences in race that should determine sociological differences."

Shockley was especially interested in press coverage of the debate; he held what he called a "tutorial" beforehand, at which he urged reporters to familiarize themselves with his theories so they could "go out and do an uncover job just like Watergate, because the coverup going on is of greater significance than Watergate."

Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter.

Tags