Fear and loathing at City College - City College of New York - controversy over racial attitudes of Michael Levin

National Review, June 11, 1990 by Richard Brookhiser

ANOTBER ONE of those racial controversies, tedious yet inflammatory, in which New York seems to specialize, has come to favor us-not, this time, from an outer-borough street, but from the campus of City College.

Michael Levin began teaching philosophy at City College in 1969. During the Seventies, he has told interviewers, he became "sick and tired" of affirmative action. City College, a once-quality institution reeling from the impact of open admissions, was certainly a good place to get sick and tired of it, and Professor Levin went on the attack.

In 1987, he and his wife, a philosophy professor at another college, wrote a letter to the New York Times defending shop-owners who barred their doors to suspicious-looking young black men. Was "discriminatory inconvenience for innocent blacks," the Levins asked, any worse than discrimination against innocent whites [in order to] ensur[e] jobs for blacks"? About the same time, Levin wrote an article for the Australian journal Quadrant about "The Trouble with American Education' which turned out to be "the staggering energy expended to bring American Negroes into the educational mainstream."

Levin, however, had added a wrinkle to the anti-quota argument. The reason the effort to bring blacks into the mainstream was staggering" was that, "on average, blacks are significantly less intelligent than whites." Levin cited IQ-test results, which showed blacks, on average, lagging 15 points behind whites. He also cited Arthur Jensen, the educational psychologist at Berkeley, who argues that only 20 per cent of a person's IQ is traceable to nurture.

The significance of IQ scores is of course a subject of acrid dispute. IQ tests do not measure all types of intelligence, though they do seem to be a good predictor of academic and job performance. The average scores of ethnic groups can also change over time: groups of European immigrants got lower IQ scores sixty years ago than their descendants do now. Levin, however, had the bit in his teeth. Black "underperformance," he concluded, "is not due to white oppression." Therefore, society had no obligation to act affirmatively in order to close the gap.

These opinions did not make him popular on campus. There were demonstrations in the fall of 1988, and his office door was covered with swastikas and the message, YOU F --- ING JEW. For a year, Levin agreed not to teach required courses. This year, however, a new chairman of the philosophy department gave Levin a basic course, whereupon, in March, the president of the student government led thirty kids into Levin's classroom, chanting: "Levin is a racist." Levin dismisses the charge. "It doesn't mean anything," he told the New York Post. "It's like saying, You're a 'pooh-pooh head."'

One of the ironies of the Levin affair is that he keeps his opinions on these subjects out of Philosophy 101. The newspapers, after what must have been strenuous searching, have failed to come up with a minority student who will say that Levin is an unfair teacher. "He doesn't bring it into class," a black student told the New York Observer. Levin, for his part, says that "when class starts, the door closes and we discuss philosophy."

Another irony is the campus reaction, or lack of reaction, to one of Levin's colleagues, Leonard Jeffries Jr. Jeffries, like Levin, has taught at City College for 21 years; he is now chairman of the Mricana Studies department. Jeffries tells his classes that whites are "ice people," greedy and aggressive, while blacks are "sun people," communitarian and humanistic. He also thinks that "rich Jews" financed the slave trade, and that "rich white folks" may well be behind the spread of AIEDS. Jeffries's ideas get around, even more than Levin's: he was one of the authors of a now-famous report to the New York State Education Commissioner, which criticized the curriculum for its unhealthy focus on "European-American Culture" and proposed in its place a "curriculum of inclusion"-a proposal the Board of Regents has embraced.

The president of City College, distressed at the attention his faculty has been getting, announced that he would set up a committee to review both cases. But only Levin has drawn campus protests-not just at City College either. Early in May, Levin was whisked out of a conference on Urban Ethics" at Long Island University (he had just spoken on the topic, %Wite Fear of Black Crime Is Morally and Epistemically Justified") when more than fifty chanting protestors stormed the auditorium. "They really have no arguments, because they resorted to brute force," Levin said afterward. "Intellectually, I win."

The Levin affair may tell us something interesting about the racial attitudes of intelligent whites. In the wake of Robert Caro's second book on LBJ, white liberals have rallied to the defense of the Great Society. Johnson was a good man after all, the argument runs, because he did so much to help blacks. Yet, as the economic figures show, blacks have not been helped as their would-be helpers expected. Few sophisticated whites will openly conclude, in the manner of Michael Levin, that this is because blacks are, on average, unhelpable. Some will covertly assume it; others will be forced by the logic of continued black failure to claim that American society is devoutly, structurally, and increasingly racist; and both groups the first concealing its reasoning, the second proclaiming it-will call for an increase in affirmative action. Those who believe that the programs of the Great Society were harmful, not helpful, however, can point to an external cause of black failure. Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich may be the last real egalitarians left.