Academic freedom protected racist geneticist claims while punishing their critics.

Evidence

As evidence, Davis’s terminators had cited, among other things, her rebuke of UC Berkeley educational psychologist Arthur Jensen, who represented the revival of segregationist scholars in the late 1960s. There was “an increasing realization” in psychology that the lower Black IQ scores could not be “completely or directly attributed to discrimination or inequalities in education,” Jensen had written in the Harvard Educational Review in 1969. “It seems not unreasonable … to hypothesize that genetic factors may play a part in this picture.” The Regents admonished Davis for not practicing the “appropriate restraint in the exercise of academic freedom” in soundly critiquing Jensen, who had engaged, according to the Regents, in “years of study” before publishing the “lengthy article.” Academics, apparently, were only truly free to espouse racist ideas. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1034

Categorization

• XREF: A textbook illustration of Kendi’s inversion: racist scholarship (Jensen) is defended as legitimate ‘years of study’ while the antiracist critique is policed. The reader can place Jensen in the segregationist bucket and Davis’s defenders in the antiracist one.
• SEED: Angle: ‘Academic freedom as a shield for racist ideas’ — how institutions invoke scholarly rigor to protect segregationist research while punishing antiracist pushback, useful against the reader’s stated discomfort. Also connects to contemporary IQ-genetics controversies.