January 2013
John Philippe (“Phil”) Rushton, age 68, passed
away on October 2, 2012 after a courageous battle with cancer,
characteristically publishing papers even during his illness. Phil was born in
Bournemouth, England but lived his early years and took his early education in
several countries including Canada. Returning to England in the 1960s, he earned
a B.Sc. in psychology from the University of London in 1970 and a Ph.D. (1973)
from the London School of Economics. After a post-doctoral fellowship at Oxford,
Phil returned to Canada, teaching at York University (1974-1976) and the
University of Toronto until 1977, in which year he accepted an appointment in
the Psychology Department at the University of Western Ontario where he remained
until his death. He was promoted to full professor in 1985. Phil published more
than 200 articles, six books, including a co-authored introductory psychology
textbook and was a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
(1988).
Phil’s early work followed from his PhD
dissertation on altruism in children, resulting in highly cited papers based on
social learning theory, and a well-received book, “Altruism, socialization and
society (1980)”. Phil had wide interests centered on the understanding of
individual differences. In addition to his research on altruism, he worked on
personality traits, such as those expressed by professors in the classroom and
by community health volunteers, he published on scientific excellence and on
mainline methodological issues, such as data aggregation.
However, Phil’s career to a large extent was
defined by work that first hit the news in 1989, in a paper he gave to a meeting
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. By this time, Phil
had started to consider biological explanations for altruistic behaviors, such
as genetic similarity theory and arguments popularized by E.O. Wilson’s 1975
book on Sociobiology. In his AAAS talk and subsequently, Phil argued that racial
groups systematically differed on a set of personality and intellectual
characteristics and he claimed that these differences were genetically based.
These ideas were immediately criticized and led to a firestorm of opposition
both across Canada and worldwide. Phil persevered always in defending and
elaborating on those controversial ideas, including in his 1995 book, “Race,
Evolution, and Behavior”. He was to the end willing to engage his critics, often
by looking for additional supportive evidence of his theory.
It is not the place in an obituary to debate the
logic, methodology or data Phil presented. That is the place and domain of the
scientific community. What did become clear in 1989 and beyond was that the
discussion of race from a biological perspective in which some groups were
ranked lower on intellectual and moral dimensions was repugnant to many and
would not be constrained nor contained in scholarly journals or debates.
Phil’s ideas posed a challenge to the basic
tenets of academic freedom and led to debate at Western and beyond. Community
groups, politicians (including the then-Premier of Ontario, David Peterson), and
students who perceived the work as scientific racism voiced their opposition,
often calling for his dismissal from the university. The Ontario Provincial
Police conducted an investigation to see if there were grounds for charges
(there were not), and 19 individuals initiated human rights violation cases with
the Ontario Human Rights Commission (but after years of stress for Phil, these
cases were considered abandoned when the complainants failed to respond). There
were demonstrations that disrupted Phil’s classes, and vandalized parts of the
psychology department. Distressingly, many interested parties, even faculty
members themselves, seemed oblivious to the essential role that academic freedom
plays in the life of scholarly work in general. As noted by the Canadian
Association of University Teachers, academic freedom is the “right to teach,
learn, study and publish free of orthodoxy or threat of reprisal and
discrimination”, calling it “the life blood of the modern university”.
Ultimately, in defiance of the barrage of criticism that Western was facing- and
showcasing the university at its best–the President of the University of Western
Ontario (George Pederson) came out with a strong statement in defense of the
precedence of upholding the concept of academic freedom. Although these events
led to his isolation and reclusiveness within the Western professoriate, Phil
Rushton remained at Western, continued to submit his papers to peer-reviewed
journals and allowed his ideas to face the crucible of the scientific community.
J. Philippe Rushton is survived by his children
Stephen and Katherine, granddaughters Jasmine and Aundreia and
great-granddaughter Paige. Also survived by his brother Peter. Those wishing to
make a donation in memory of Phil are asked to consider the London Regional
Cancer Program – Research.
Albert Katz is Chair of the
Psychology Department at The University of Western Ontario, and a SAFS member.
Philippe
Rushton, professor who pushed limits with race studies, dead at 68
John Allemang
Race is a dangerous and difficult
topic to broach in academic circles, and there was always a suspicion that
Philippe Rushton was attracted to a subject most wise people avoid precisely
because of the do-not- enter signs an egalitarian society placed in his path.
“I do enjoy intellectual
excitement,” he confessed to a colleague, who questioned whether Rushton
actively sought the sensationalism that came his way after he unveiled his
theories of racial differences at a major American science conference in 1989.
They ended up being denounced by Ontario Premier David Peterson, investigated by
the Ontario Provincial Police, derided by geneticist David Suzuki in a public
debate, and booed as a guest on the Geraldo tabloid-TV show.
But for the studiously formal and
emotionally controlled psychology professor at Western University, who has died
of cancer at the age of 68, the motivation for ranking racial groups by methods
that presented blacks as intellectually inferior and sexually unrestrained came
from the purer intentions of science: to take the evidence of research to its
most logical and unavoidable conclusion.
“If the differences between groups
are not just cultural but somehow hooked up to biological factors,” says Danish
researcher Helmuth Nyborg, a long-time friend, “then we are talking against
nature if we say everybody’s equal. It tried his patience to see people arguing
against Darwinism by means of ideology – that’s not a fair match, he would say.”
Rushton saw himself as a lonely
empiricist in a world of mental make-believe: Data determined his views, or so
he maintained. His less charitable critics suggested that he went searching far
and wide for studies that would support his thesis – his investigations into the
race-based variability of cranium size and penis length prompted then Ontario
attorney-general Ian Scott to declare that his theories were “loony but not
criminal.” He was censured by Western for conducting a paid survey at Toronto’s
Eaton Centre mall on sexual matters without getting permission from the
university’s ethics board.
For Rushton, it was all part of
pushing the limits of an academic discourse that he found to be too polite and
sentimental.
“Rushton knew a great deal about
human intelligence and he made his case by marshalling rational arguments based
on empirical data,” says Eric Turkheimer, professor of psychology at University
of Virginia. “His knowledge and his empiricism earned him a legitimate place at
the scientific table. He was no crank. Nevertheless, there is no escaping the
fact that the case he made was literally racist, and in my view no appeal to
empirical data can rescue his hypotheses from their dubious origins and
destructive consequences.”
His research provided source
material for white-pride groups and supplied academic heft to the racially
charged culture wars that erupted in the United States in the 1990s. The authors
of the controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve, were heavily influenced
by Rushton’s work on the genetic determination of intelligence in their
assertion that social programs and political correctness cannot resolve
inequalities bequeathed by heredity.
His earliest academic work was on
altruism among children, which surprised his antagonists, who wondered whether
this interest was evidence of a gentler side that was later repressed. The
mature Rushton prided himself on a tough-minded willingness to see truths that a
soft-hearted world ignored for reasons he thought were more political than
scientific.
A dogged devotee of Darwin who was fascinated by theories of scientific eminence, he
hoped that his wide-ranging synthesis of behavioural genetics, evolutionary
psychology, studies of group differences and measurements of intelligence would
place him among the world’s great discoverers. His supporters thought he
deserved a Nobel Prize for his willingness to abandon the prevailing scientific
view on the universality of the human species to describe the ways human groups
were designed to diverge, divide and seek out their “own kind.”
What made Rushton stand out from
his peers was the utter confidence with which he talked about huge differences
he said had arisen among Asians, whites and blacks in a very short period of
evolutionary history. Most scientists would hesitate and equivocate at every
stage of his argument, denying the existence of race as he defines it,
quarrelling with his arbitrary creation of three groupings, questioning his
capacity to draw socially divisive conclusions from apparent genetic differences
among groups that are not yet understood by experts in the field.
“The field of modern genetics is
really exciting but you have to proceed with caution,” says Fred Weizmann, a
psychology professor at York University. “It’s so far removed from this crude
genetic reductionism. There are genetic differences between groups, so you might
have Ashkenazi Jews more subject to a variety of genetic diseases. But that’s
not enough to define a race.”
Rushton’s views on racial
differences achieved notoriety in part because he seemed like such a throwback,
a 19th-century cranium-measurer who invoked the charged language of racial
superiority and eugenics in a culture that had taught itself not to hear such
views. Yet he was also a reminder that race-based judgments remain inescapable
in the modern world: His research gave them legitimacy through the revolution in
DNA studies that suddenly made arguments for genetic determinism look more
credible.
Science supplied much of his
confidence – the data-don’t-lie serenity that deflected almost any attack.
“Phil was wonderful for TV,” says
Prof. Weizmann. “He was cool and dispassionate and steady.”
He was often compared to Clark
Kent, with the understanding that the glasses, formal dress sense and carefully
composed manner hid a different Philippe Rushton underneath. Many colleagues
found him to be aloof and private, and his isolation became more acute after the
1989 controversy when his academic freedom was under attack and defenders
weren’t exactly rallying round. He essentially stopped teaching, buying out his
classroom time with grants from the controversial Pioneer Fund, a backer of
race-based research which he headed from 2002 to his death.
But he didn’t hide or shy away from
his subject matter even after he was investigated by the Ontario police and the
Ontario Human Rights Commission. In 1995, he published Race, Evolution and
Behaviour, which linked racial differences in parental care to degrees of
evolutionary development, placing blacks and Asians at the two extremes of the
continuum. In 2000, he brought out an abridged version intended for a wider
audience.
It says something about Rushton’s
bravado that he accepted an invitation from The Globe’s Jan Wong to have an
on-the-record lunch that year. He chose the Royal Canadian Military Institute in
Toronto as the venue, an old-fashioned private club that suited his blue blazer,
grey flannels and polished loafers better than Wong’s journalistic backpack. She
described him as charming, offered him a ruler so he could measure his own penis
in the interests of celebrity-profile science, and persuaded him to admit that
his three wives were all white-skinned, contrary to rumours that even he had
heard.
Rushton took it surprisingly well.
When asked for his reactions by The Globe a year later, he declared that “Jan
Wong was like an ungovernable teenager.” He liked her opinionated side, while
suggesting impishly that she shared many of his views. He even supplied his own
Lunch With riposte: “Every now and again, Jan would delicately skewer a morsel
of food on the end of her fork, flutter it in a refined manner and demurely
throw out a softly curved question. Some seemed contrived to throw me
off-balance, as when she asked what I liked sexually or temperamentally in a
wife. Nonetheless, I think she overstated it when she characterized me as a man
of ‘unlimited paranoia.’ When it was time to leave, I felt I hadn’t done so
badly. She seemed slightly more worn out than I was.”
The indefatigable Philippe
(pronounced “Philip”) Rushton was born in 1943 in Bournemouth, England, where
his building-contractor father was repairing Spitfire planes that had been
damaged in dogfights. In an interview with Nyborg, he made it sound like his
contrarian career was preordained.
Most of his ancestors were
dissenters and anti-establishment types, he said. The most famous ancestor he
knew of was Samuel Crompton, inventor of a spinning machine that transformed the
English textile industry but threatened the original Luddites – workers who
smashed new inventions because they preferred the existing order. Crompton,
Rushton noted, was ultimately hailed as a benefactor.
The election of the Labour Party in
1945, Rushton said, made the family’s future look bleak – a small businessman
such as his father couldn’t compete in a nationalized economy with state-run
housing projects. So they moved to South Africa in 1948, only to return to
Britain. In 1956, his father found his dream job as a designer for the CBC in
Toronto, where Rushton continued his education before returning to Britain for
university studies in the 1960s.
Even as a teenager, he was actively
reading psychology books written by Hans Eysenck, an eminent but controversial
academic commentator who linked race and IQ levels and was famously beaten up by
angry demonstrators during a lecture at the London School of Economics in 1973.
Rushton, then a 29-year-old researcher studying generosity in children, was in
the audience.
The visceral nature of the attack
heightened Rushton’s perception of a lingering Luddite society where scientific
truths were taboo – and only hard-nosed thinkers could withstand the official
fantasies of social harmony and equality.
The
publication a few years later of E.O. Wilson’s book Sociobiology supplied
a theoretical template for his shifting worldview by describing the biological
roots of behaviours previously thought to be determined by cultural influences.
In any analysis of life forms, evolution now became the beginning of
understanding. Well-meant social programs, in this deterministic analysis,
weren’t likely to change or challenge more deep-seated genetic influences.
Rushton became fascinated with the
idea of genetic causation, even though he recognized the race-related dangers
that went with the theory. In 1981, he met educational psychologist Arthur
Jensen, another eminent controversialist on the race/IQ connection, and as he
describes it, “we hit it off.” Jensen exerted a powerful influence on his
Canadian protégé for the rest of his career: He was nicknamed “Jensen’s bulldog”
for his willingness to argue anyone, anywhere.
This is the Philippe Rushton that
emerged in the 1989 controversy. But there was once a different Philippe Rushton,
to judge from blog entries and photos posted by a girlfriend from his London
days and now being recirculated by his amazed supporters: A 1970s rocker, hair
down to his shoulders, fringed hippie bag brushing against his bell-bottomed
trousers as he poses amid the tourists in St. Mark’s Square.
In those far-off student days,
Rushton had been living in near-poverty and was raising his son on his own after
a breakup. “He was incredibly romantic,” wrote the blogger. “…The love between
father and son, the caring, was amazing.”
What the blogger may not have
known, and what Rushton’s colleagues were surprised to find out at his funeral,
was that he also had a daughter, who’d been taken back to Canada by her mother,
only to disappear into the foster care and adoption systems. Because of a name
change, she remained out of touch from her father for decades: The two only
reconnected in 2001.
Rushton, when accused of racism,
always maintained that he wasn’t talking about individuals, only groups. Any one
person could be quite different from the preconceptions associated with them.
The outspoken Philippe Rushton somehow contrived to remain enigmatic to the end.
The Globe and Mail, November 2, 2012.
REMEMBERING PHIL RUSHTON’S
CONTRIBUTION TO ACADEMIC FREEDOM
John J. Furedy
When I took over from SAFS’ founding president, Doreen Kimura in 1993, there
were many occasions when I reflected on the indirect, but important, role that
Phil Rushton played in SAFS’ development. Phil, I think, was a significant
catalyst in the formation of SAFS in 1992,
because his case at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) alerted at least
some of its faculty members to the importance of defending academic freedom.
Even those who disagreed with Phil’s ideas on the relation of race to
intelligence and crime could recognize that the comment by the premier of
Ontario, David Peterson in 1989, following Phil’s presentation of his views on
race differences at the annual meeting of the Association for the American
Association for the Advancement of Science in January 1989, was a significant
potential threat to the academic freedom of all Canadian faculty and students.
The premier said that, while he was in favor of academic freedom, nevertheless,
if he had the power, he would fire Rushton.
The president of UWO, George Pederson, strongly upheld academic freedom
throughout the controversy, dismissed external calls for Rushton to be fired,
maintained that the university should operate free of public pressures, and that
Rushton should be allowed to continue his research and teaching. The stance of
the top administrators of the university was important in explaining the concept
of academic freedom to the wider public, as well as stimulating discussion of
academic freedom in Canadian universities.
And at least some students were led to think about academic freedom. I was
interested to read after Phil’s death an article by Tod Pettigrew (now associate
professor of English at Cape Breton U.) who entered UWO the year after the
controversy erupted. He recalls the atmosphere vividly:
Immediately, I was troubled by the atmosphere around the debate, for,
frequently, it was barely a debate at all. Indeed, it often devolved into
little more than shouting matches—or would have if Rushton had been shouting
back. I recall people saying quite seriously that Rushton’s words were as bad or
worse than physical violence, that his rights to free speech did not extend to
the “slander” of millions of people, or that, if it did, Western was not bound
to give him a “platform” for his hateful views. Tempers flared at public
meetings.
In his piece entitled ‘A hated professor’s lesson in academic freedom.”
Pettigrew says that the treatment of Rushton was his induction into caring about
academic freedom.
But there was an action within the psychology department to penalize Phil and
damage his academic reputation. The committee that decided on merit increases
gave him a zero percent merit raise for the following academic year, and rated
his research performance as “unsatisfactory”. Ironically, this was the same
year that Phil was made a fellow of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim
Society.
Rushton’s publications (in the area of developmental psychology, with altruism
as his main focus of interest) had yielded annual merit increases that were
above the departmental average over a period of years. The UWO was known to
base its merit increases on the relatively objective criteria of number of
publications in refereed journals (in contrast to more subjective, expert-based,
criteria). Moreover, the zero-increase decision was not only a financial and
reputational penalty. It was also a significant signal because UWO had a policy
that three consecutive zero annual merit increases were sufficient grounds for
firing even a tenured faculty member. (This was part of UWO’s policy of getting
rid of tenured “deadwood” who, following the granting of tenure, retired from
research).
It seems to me that this decision was designed to pressure Phil to give up
research on race differences. Beyond the particular case, once this
(confidential) decision leaked out, it may have sent a negative message to those
academics who wished to exercise their academic freedom to assert unpopular or
“offensive” views. However, Rushton appealed (twice) to higher grievance
committees, and the unfair rating was overturned. (For Phil’s account of moves
against him, without and within the university, see
http://chechar.wordpress.com/category/philippe-rushton/)
It is worth mentioning, though, as Clive Seligman has recently reminded me, that
attacks on Rushton did not comprise all the discussion at the university:
"There were also months of good debate in the pages of the weekly Western
News, debating the issues and not just Rushton’s character.”
I recall that quite early in
the controversy, one could get a measure of how vehemently many intellectuals
and students were against him during the televised debate between him and the
David Suzuki at the UWO in February 1989. (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9FGHtfnYWY).
It is a debate which clearly illustrates the difference between ad res
and ad hominemmodes of argument. David Suzuki called Rushton’s ideas
‘monstrous’ and argued that academic freedom should not protect him, that he
should not be permitted and funded to do any of his research, and indeed, that
his position “must be terminated at this university”.
“There will always be Rushtons,” he said
emphatically, “and we must be prepared to root them out and not hide behind
academic freedom.” (The audience enthusiastically applauded this).
Perhaps Phil’s English academic background played a part in his usual coolness
under fire, which contrasts with the heat shown by his opponent. It may also
have helped that, at least in those days, Rushton bore a striking resemblance to
the mild-mannered Clark Kent.
The concept of “academic mobbing” researched by another member of SAFS,
University of Waterloo emeritus professor of sociology, Ken Westhues (see, e.g.,
http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/mobbing.htm), is appropriate here. I think
that anyone who watches this 1989 debate at UWO, whether or not he or she
agrees with Rushton’s views, will agree that Suzuki was an instigator of such
academic mobbing during this debate.
Phil himself, of course, did not back away in the face of mobbing, but rather
continued to offend until the end of his life. He
continued to publish in top flight journals, and to be a fellow of several
psychological associations.
One can get a feeling for how important the academic freedom implications of
‘the Philippe Rushton case’ were to SAFS by noting the number of references to
it in SAFS’ newsletters in the 1990sonwards–by the SAFS’ board, and individuals
such as Ken Westhues, Ken Hilborn, Jack Granastein, John Mueller and others.
The continuing harassment of Phil and protests against his views
led me personally to think closely about the distinction between acts and
opinions (see, e.g., http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/furedy/Papers/af/Academic%20Freedom.doc)
which I think is fundamental for understanding academic freedom and freedom of
speech in general.
Phil Sullivan, professor of Aerospace Studies at University of Toronto, a SAFS
member, and I, tried to educate readers of The Toronto Star on the
difference between overall scientific status and the validity of a particular
scientific theory (see http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/furedy/Papers/ra/Race_stud_ra.doc),
responding to criticisms of Rushton’s book Race Evolution and Behaviour.
But I fear our arguments made little impact at the time.
As to Phil Ruston himself, I think he was committed to psychology as a
scientific endeavour. He saw himself as an empiricist and answered arguments
put to him thoughtfully, an ad res debater, as against the ad hominem
approach of many who denounced him. He was a
courteous and determined person, who bore the sustained vituperation against him
with calmness and dignity. We welcomed his participation in SAFS’ meetings and
regret his premature death.
John Furedy is
professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Toronto, who lives in
Sydney, Australia. John is a former president of SAFS.
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