Welcome to:
Chris Brand -- Psychorealist

There are 3 main offshoots from the homepage of the controversial Edinburgh psychologist who has fought for liberalism and realism:
1.  BRAND's BATTLES against political correctness as seen by others (see this page, below)
2.  ISSUES of scientific importance to differential psychology
3.  HISTORY OF C.B. versus P.C., by Chris Brand -- e.g. Wiley & Edinburgh University versus Brand.

FOR A RECENT INTERVIEW WITH BRAND,
GOT TO http://www.angryharry.com/tickertape140301.htm.

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1.  Chris BRAND's BATTLES against political correctness
-- as seen by other academics and the press

• How PC versus CB all began -- Nature's news item in May, 1996.
• How PC tries to suppress any psychologist who talks about race – notably Canadian professor Phil Rushton.

Reviews of The g Factor (Chichester, UK : Wiley, 1996)
(1)  The g Factor was reviewed in Nature (2 May 1996, p.33) by N. J. Mackintosh, Professor of Psychology, University of Cambridge, as a "radical libertarian" contribution to debates on education providing "spirited attacks on….Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Rose [and] the massed battalions of the politically correct…." Mackintosh said "[Brand] develops a strong argument for individual freedom of choice in education." The book said that children are not largely the creatures (let alone the victims) of their environments, except in so far as adults deny them serious choice; and that parents, after receiving advice about IQ, should be able to help children choose how fast they progress through school {cf. 'fast track learning', advocated by Mr Tony Blair in February, 1996}. Mackintosh condemned Wiley's "singularly cack-handed attempt at censorship" which, he said, raised doubts about the firm's "good sense, competence and integrity."
(2)  An Edinburgh Psychology Honours student wrote a Brief Summary / review of The g Factor for Student [Edinburgh University's student newspaper]. An extract:
"Brand thinks that once we are all comfortable and realistic about the notion of intelligence we can accept systems of education geared to our intelligence levels. He goes beyond the ideas of streaming and suggests that, given the choice, children would naturally select classes pitched at their own IQ levels: "Clever children would no longer be let down by a state educational system providing a cross between a child-minding service and a reformatory.""
(3)   Brand's non-PC book and 'Kids' Lib.' views quickly fell foul of the educational establishments of the UK and the USA. Yet a prize-winning postgraduate student of Animal Behaviour writes from the USA:
"My main advisor just finished reading TgF (he's the primate/comparative/animal personality guy) and he really enjoyed it a great deal. He has no clue as to why Wiley depublished the book seeing that there is nothing remotely offensive about it. (He'd be opposed to depublishing in any event of course; but he just does not see the logic in Wiley's decision!)"
(4)  New Scientist wrote in an editorial (May 1996):
"It is….a great pity that the book will not now be speedily published, for it is probably the best argued treatise from the general intelligence camp. For the many that will disagree violently with every step of its argument, this is the book to stimulate a true scientific debate."
(5)   A quasi-review by Kenan Malik in the Spectator ('An unintelligent debate', 2 May 1996) was critical of The g Factor but also of its suppression.Likewise the leftist Marek Kohn rejected the censorship.
(6) American Renaissance reviewed The g Factor in July, 1996, saying:
“The existence of g is still a hotly debated topic in psychology, but Christopher Brand has assembled some of the best evidence yet to show that it is real, can be measured, and is one of the most important determinants of success in life.”
(7) A substantial summary and review was published by economics professor Ed Miller (University of New Orleans) in the Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, 1996. Miller finds it surprising that such a 'mainstream' book which advocates more scholastic choice for parents and children (in line with children's abilities) should have caused such controversy.
(8) In 1997, my sceptical views on feminism were said to have ‘angered’ a South African feminist theologian, Denise Ackermann. Left-ish UK journalist Marek Kohn summarized the Brand affair at http://www.indexoncensorship.org/399/kohn.html.
(9) Another left-wing intellectual, Kenan Malik, (though deploring French constructivism) questioned the suppression of The g Factor: http://www.cinemaxs.co.uk/freethinker/page08.html. He wrote: "Brand's arguments sit squarely in an intellectual tradition that includes Hans Eysenck, Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray. To the post-war liberal generation, the arguments of these writers may seem unpalatable or misguided. But surely such writers have every right to raise questions about orthodox assumptions on race and intelligence, and to answer them in the way they think fit?"
(10)   The on-line bookstore, Amazon carries the following 'five-star' customer review (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471960705/102-9505282-7150403):
Excellent overview of debate
Reviewer: A reader from Houston, Texas; February 28, 1999
This is simply an excellent book. It is well written, the general interest is high, and the prose sparkles like champagne. As a book on the subject of psychometrics, it is superb writing, and Brand manages to capture the crux of the debate in clear, crisp informative style. An interesting point of the book is his tackling of the more difficult issues of intelligence, like the types of heritablility, the evidence marshalled indicating differences in group IQ, and discussions of the evidence given regarding the arguments against IQ as it is now being studied. This book is a different format than The Bell Curve, as it uses less correlative data for social impact of IQ, but it hits on the overall issues in much more depth than The Bell Curve gave, and it is not a policy recommendation book. Overall, a very good book. Buy it to anger the folks who would see it panned and because of its merits.
(11) "I just finished your splendid book. Frankly, I can't imagine what more could be said intelligently about intelligence. Bravo!" – Professor David Cohen, University of Texas at Austin, November 2000. (David Cohen is the author of Stranger in the Nest:Do Parents Really Shape Their Child's Personality, Intelligence or Character, New York : Wiley DePublisher, 1999.)

You would like to read The g Factor?
For the FREE on-line 2001 edition of Brand's book, THE g FACTOR, go to:
http://www.douance.org/qi/brandtgf.htm.

In the USA, copies of the original are held in Harvard University Library, the University of Arizona Library and the Library of Congress, Washington, and by quite a few of the psychologists who contribute to the journal Intelligence. In Belgium, there is a copy in the Library of the Psychology Faculty at the University of Ghent. In Australia, the Universities of Adelaide, Deakin, Melbourne, Monash, and Swinburne all have copies, as do the State Library of Victoria and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
In Britain, the book is kept in Edinburgh University (3 copies), in London University, in Cambridge University Library [from which it can be borrowed on request], in Warwick University and in Linlithgow; and it is obtainable more widely by Inter-Library Loans (e.g. isd@libhq.demon.co.uk or ILL@FSI.LI.MAN.AC.UK).
Reviews of The g Factor are published at Amazon Books. For author's own summary of The g Factor, see Upstream or [for the concluding section of Chapter 4, 'Intelligence in Society' -- containing policy recommendations] TgF NewsLetter 3 v '96. A summary of the book's practical proposals for education was published as 'Doing something about g' in the American journal Intelligence (22, 3, 311-326, 1996). The Bibliography for The g Factor (giving full coverage of IQ in the 1990's) is displayed at <http://travel.to/race>. A recent volume co-edited by Brand for the Galton Institute, Biological and Social Aspects of Intelligence (Cambridge University Press, 1996) can be loaned from the British Documents Supply Centre, tel.: (44) (0) 1937 843434. It contains a chapter by Brand on 'The importance of intelligence in Western societies.'

To write your own review of The g Factor for Amazon Books, go to: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471960705/ref=pd_rhf_p_1/107-7183034-5306149
To vote on The g Factor's main educational proposal ('track choice') and to see how others have voted, go to: http://www.newciv.org/GIB/diyfut/DIY-14.HTML

Press concerning the affair of The g Factor
SOME EARLY EXTRACTS:
Independent on Sunday [London] 14 April 1996:
"[Chris Brand is] convinced of the intellectual inequality of different races. For example, "Hong Kong is as advanced as many western cities. Africa, however, remains the utterly dark continent." ….Other psychologists find this not only repellent but misconceived."
(Scottish) Daily Express 15 April 1996:
"An academic storm broke out last night over a top psychologist's claim that black people are less intelligent than whites. Edinburgh University psychology lecturer Chris Brand [said]: "There are many problems that are presented by American blacks -- in terms of illiteracy, low achievement and births outside of wedlock. These problems are largely traceable to low average IQ." Angry Glasgow University professor Nigel Grant claimed Mr Brand was a fool and the book also sparked condemnation from politicians yesterday…. [Grant] said: "Chris Brand is a fool and his views are dangerous if believed. I have checked with physiologists and biologists and there is no difference. It is completely inaccurate to define it through race."
The Herald [Glasgow] 15 April 1996:
"….Mr Brand argues that acceptance of the reality of unequal intelligence would help millions escape the poverty trap. ….[But] Ms Sally Witcher, director of Child Poverty Action Group, said: "His whole idea is bizarre. ….He shows a complete misunderstanding of the nature of poverty. People aren't poor because they are stupid."
Daily Telegraph [London] 16 April 1996:
"Claims by an academic that black people are less intelligent than white, and that single women of limited intelligence should find men with higher IQs to father their children were described as "preposterous and dangerous" yesterday [by Michael Howe, a psychology professor at Exeter University who said "IQ is just a score on a test"]. {However,} Chris Brand, a lecturer at the department of psychology at Edinburgh University, denied that his ideas were controversial and said it was time people faced up to such difficult issues. ….[Brand] said his views on black intelligence were based on 30 years of research in America which many people had tried, and failed to discredit. "People say that when you talk about IQ that you will end up with gas chambers. But we simply have to make sure there is no slippery slope. The anti-racist movement tries to get as many people as possible feeling guilty. I do not mind being called a scientific racist. I want to help people with problems caused by low IQ. The way in which I would try to explain higher levels of crime and out of wedlock births would not be by referring to blackness or race, but to IQ which does most of the explanatory work." He added that the narrowing of socio-economic differences between the races, and attempts to improve the lot of black people, including better nutrition, better health care and more integration, had not made "a jot or a tittle of difference" to the IQ gap."
Times Educational Supplement, 19 April 1996 (James Montgomery)
Edinburgh University psychologist Christopher Brand follows in the footsteps of The Bell Curve, a book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray which caused a furore by linking race and intelligence. Citing studies of adopted children and twins raised apart, Brand argues that differences in intellectual ability are the result of a fixed and hereditary general intelligence. Genetic factors may account for up to 75 per cent of variation in intellectual ability and have an important bearing on academic ability as well as probable success in later life, he claims. Brand endorses Herrnstein and Murray's racist view that Afro-Caribbeans are less intelligent than Asians and whites, and discusses the possibility of encouraging low-IQ teenagers to choose partners of higher IQ to raise the intelligence of the next generation. However, his views are likely to be rejected by academics and educationists who increasingly view such theories as unreliable or irrelevant. Rejecting environmental explanations of IQ, Brand argues that general intelligence - or the "g factor" - has been denied by experts in Britain in the face of mounting empirical evidence, often for ideological reasons. A severe critic of comprehensive education, he defends Cyril Burt, the psychologist whose theories about inherited intelligence and testing lay behind the introduction of the 11-plus exam. Subsequent research has "entirely vindicated" Burt's conclusions, he says.
Brand, a former prison psychologist whose academic research has involved a particular measure of IQ known as inspection time testing, goes on to call for radical educational reform, including self-streaming, pupil empowerment and accelerated learning. "Instead of state schools providing a cross between a child-minding service and a reformatory, children should be allowed, at any time of day, a choice of classes of varying difficulty levels . . . streamed children of all ability levels have been found to be happier and to reach higher levels of attainment. " He adds: "The 25-year experiment with comprehensive schools in Britain has not even helped those who are so often put forward as the prime concern of the modern educator: children of working-class origins now provide a lower percentage of university students than they did in 1970. "Without special provision for the bright that streaming makes, secondary-school performance becomes mainly a matter of persistence with babyish exercises that are only tolerable to middle-class students who have extremely middle-class aspirations."
Sunday Times [London], 21 April 1996 (News Review p. 2):
"Like [Professor Richard] Lynn, Brand says low IQ is behind many of society's greatest problems, from violence to child abuse. "The more stupid boys like watching violent TV and, also at an early age, are recorded by their teachers as being more aggressive. It's not poverty that shows the really big link to child abuse, it's having a low IQ," says Brand. ….[But at University College London, Professor Steve] Jones suspects that psychologists such as Lynn and Brand have a political axe to grind and are misunderstanding the limitations of genetics in the process. ….For geneticists like Jones, books such as The Bell Curve and The g Factor illustrate the great divide between psychology and the science of the genes."
Evening News [Edinburgh] 23 April 1996
"[Melanist theorists] believe pigment makes blacks intellectual and spiritual. Black scientist Rick Kittles has studied melanin and claims black children, on average, walk and talk slightly earlier than whites. He says the pigment also allows them to cope with loud noises better. Professor Steve Jones -- [a geneticist] who has written a book to accompany [a TV series including melanist claims] -- makes clear he gives no more credence to the melanist theory than he does to the arguments of Mr Brand. But he said: "If you are going to adhere to any of these theories it is better to come down on the side of the underdog." He added: "There is no point in denying that IQ is heritable, but that doesn't mean that the differences cannot be changed.""
Guardian [London] 1 May 1996:
"[Brand's New York publishers, John Wiley & Sons] withdrew the book. "The management does not want to support these views by disseminating them or be associated with a book that makes assertions that we find repellent," said a spokesman. Shortly afterwards, students voted to have Brand removed from his teaching responsibilities. The next day, Edinburgh University's principal, Sir Stewart Sutherland, said he found Brand's views were "false and personally obnoxious." ….The central tenet that all race scientists [in North America, Arthur Jensen, Charles Murray and Jean Philippe Rushton] share is that the IQ of black people is 15 points lower than white people and that this cannot be explained away by social factors. "Almost the full Afro-American deficit could be detected in children as young as three years, born to black mothers who were themselves college educated, married and had no pregnancy complications or health problems," writes Brand in The g Factor. ….Psychologists of great repute are lining up to rubbish the theories expounded by the race scientists. Professor Steven Rose, a leading neuroscientist and director of the Brain and Behaviour Research group of the Open University [says]: "We have been over all this ground a very considerable time ago, along with questions of whether IQ measures anything at all." [However, Emeritus Professor] Richard Lynn said: "If we are talking about people who believe there are genetic differences between the races, then {like Chris Brand} I am definitely a scientific racist."
Science 3 May 1996:
"….Asked if he were a racist, Brand told….The Scotsman that he might be called a "scientific racist" because "I do think not only that there's a link between race and psychology, in particular between race and IQ, but of course I think and have the honesty to tell you -- other people wouldn't -- that the link is, shall I call it, deep-seated?" Such statements evoked outrage headlines, protests from members of Parliament, student boycotts of his lectures, calls for his resignation -- and a change of heart at [his publisher] Wiley. ….Many of Brand's colleagues have expressed dismay over Wiley's action. "I thought we were moving away from this political correctness sort of thing. It just boggles the mind," says psychologist Thomas Bouchard of the University of Minnesota. Psychologist James Flynn of the University of New Zealand sent an e-mail to colleagues supporting Brand even though he disagrees with his views on race differences in IQ. Says Flynn: "The cowardice of publishers is a real problem that makes progress toward understanding the real world…difficult."
Evening News [Edinburgh] 17 May 1996:
"Around 200 students packed a lecture theatre at the university to hear Mr Brand's controversial race theories denounced by Euro MP Glynn Ford, Professor Steven Rose and Anti-Nazi League national organizer Brian Richardson. ….Professor Rose said: "The g Factor is not science, it is madness."

• How Edinburgh students reacted -- Coverage in Student, May, 1996.
• Brand's right to free speech was defended in the New Statesman by Marek Kohn, 6 September, 1996:
  "Even previously "legitimate" academic debate is now often deemed offensive, as the Brand affair illustrates. Brand's arguments sit squarely in an intellectual tradition that includes Hans Eysenck, Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray. To the postwar liberal generation, the arguments of these writers may seem unpalatable or misguided. But surely such writers have every right to raise questions about orthodox assumptions on race and intelligence, and to answer them in the way they think fit?"
• Account by Right Now! editor Derek Turner, 1997 (The Individual, April – see http://ds.dial.pipex.com/hhe/ind97.htm):
  "….Although we in the West were lucky enough to escape living under Communism, it is nevertheless a depressing fact that massive censorship and harsh repression of academic inquiry unseen since the Middle Ages are now becoming an accepted part of life in Western societies. This censorship is of two kinds — the first a self-censorship so subtle in its operation, so habitual, and practised by so many diverse people that it cannot be regarded as a programme, but rather as a phenomenon. Where it differs from the type of self-censorship previously described is that it is not restraint based on good manners, but a restraint based on prudence — or fear of the consequences. For coupled with this self-censorship is a much more worrying active censorship, perpetrated by people who call themselves "liberals", but who are really illiberal in the extreme. This censorship is going on all the time, especially in the media and in universities, and not in respect of some arcane field of science, but in relation to the vast and vitally important topic of race relations, which encompasses the three main sub-headings of racial genetic differences, immigration and multiculturalism.
  The fleeting comparison between repression in the Marxist countries and repression here is not an entirely idle one. Marxist ideology is founded on the quasi-religious doctrines of human equality and internationalism — exactly the same principles which motivate "politically correct" opinion in liberal democracies. It is not coincidental that influential anthropologists and sociologists like Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Trofim Lysenko and the modern Leon Kamin all held, or hold, views far to the Left of New Labour. Conservatism depended for much of its historical legitimacy on the hereditarian argument, which has been the prevailing wisdom of the Western world for most of its history. "What is born of a hen will scrape" runs an Italian proverb. "Breed is stronger than pasture" George Eliot reminded us. "I am always environed by myself" said Emerson.
  This century, the hereditarians were finally defeated by the proponents of the environmentalist argument, who held that only create a level playing field, only move people from slums into new houses, only grant everyone equal rights, only teach everyone in the same way and a golden age of equality and peace would ensue. This belief, supported by post-Christian evangelist fervour and also now by the forces of inanition, still rules today, although it has been weakened by the grudging admission — borne of overwhelming evidence — that genes and heredity do have a part to play in sociology. Although it has had to concede partial defeat on this front, the environmentalist Establishment is fighting to retain its position of dominance, like any in-group threatened by obstreperous rebels. For the moment, sociobiology still has to shelter behind the euphemism of "evolutionary psychology". Dire consequences may still be visited upon anyone who has the temerity to speak out about race relations in any way other than the hushed and reverential tones favoured by the political Left. Those who even partly agree with Disraeli's dictum, that "No man will treat with indifference the principle of race" must perforce remain silent or expect to be at the receiving end of some rather nasty treatment.
      Take the most recent case, that of University of Edinburgh psychology lecturer Chris Brand. Respected academic publisher, John Wiley and Son, was about to release his book, The "g" Factor, a scholarly examination of the implications of general intelligence. At a pre-launch press conference, Brand, an enthusiastic, articulate man, was grilled by angst-filled reporters about the section of the book that dealt with black-white intelligence differences, which Brand, in common with many other academics, believes are genetically determined. One of the journalists asked Brand whether he was a "racist", to which he received the humorous but shocking reply that if he was going to be called a racist anyway, then he would like to be called a "scientific racist". The reply was plastered across the media (particularly in Scotland), some of the students and staff held outraged meetings calling for his dismissal, and Wiley forgot their earlier enthusiasm for the book and issued a hasty press statement, saying that they found it "repellent". They refused to proceed with the book, in an apparent breach of contract, and offered Brand money to go away quietly with the copyright and all the un-jacketed copies of his book. This he has so far refused to do. He is still trying to find another large publisher and, until recently, has kept the worldwide academic community informed through his Internet and e-mail sites. I say "until recently", because the University have just shut off his e-mail and Internet access, and suspended him from teaching and administration. This is a new, subtle form of censorship, where nobody desires to be called a "censor", but under which inconvenient people will simply not get their books published at all.
      This is not the first controversial work that Wiley has been too scared to print. In July 1996, after ten months, they finally declined to publish an 800-page work on the same subject by Arthur Jensen, author of the shattering 1969 Harvard Educational Review article called "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?" Wiley's American Manager of Corporate Communications finally admitted that the rejection of Jensen's book was a "very deliberate decision" and that Wiley does "not want to publish in this field" — a strange position, surely, for an ostensibly academic publisher to take.
  One could multiply examples of other academics who have experienced difficulties in the post-war years because of their anti-egalitarian beliefs. I shall name just a few, each of them traduced as "fascists" and often physically attacked — Professor Michael Levin, City College of New York; William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor; Charles Spearman, progenitor of the theory of general intelligence; Sir Cyril Burt, twin studies pioneer; Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, joint authors of The Bell Curve, the ground-breaking study of intelligence in the United States; Richard Lynn, formerly professor of psychology at the University of Ulster; Linda Gottfredson at the University of Delaware; Hans-Jurgen Eysenck, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of London, attacked by Maoist idealists at the LSE in 1973; Thomas Bouchard, head of the famous Minnesota Twin Study. The accusations of "fascism" are even more preposterous than usual in the cases of Hans Eysenck, who was a political refugee from Hitler's Germany and Michael Levin and (the deceased) Richard Herrnstein, both Jewish. In another case, that of Englishman Jean-Phillippe Rushton, professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, it grew particularly nasty, as detailed in his recent article in Right Now. After reading out a paper at the 1989 meeting at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the premier of Ontario called for Rushton's dismissal, the Attorney General's office carried out a six-month investigation as to whether he had contravened "hate laws", the Ontario Human Rights Commission carried out a four-year investigation as to whether he had "poisoned the learning environment", and he was compelled to teach classes by videotape…."
• Summary of censorship of race-realistic psychologists in American Psychological Association Monitor, August 1997
  Arthur Jensen, PhD, emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of California_Berkeley, was a frontier scientist in the area of intelligence. After publishing a 1969 article on the genetic basis of intelligence in the Harvard Educational Review he was likened to Hitler and received death threats. Today, it is relatively well-accepted that intelligence is partly inherited. But anyone trying to conduct research on—or even discuss—genetic bases of racial differences in IQ still risks being labelled racist, says Jensen.
  He recently had trouble finding a publisher for his 800-page tome 'The g Factor,' which details the evidence for general intelligence. Two of the book's 14 chapters discuss possible genetic and environmental explanations for racial differences in IQ. After 10 months of review and favorable comments by independent referees, John Wiley & Sons declined to publish the book.
  A year earlier, the same publisher dropped Edinburgh University psychologist Christopher Brand's book, 'The g Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications' two days before its publication date. Wiley pulled the book after Brand made comments to the press that he thought genetics may be responsible for racial differences in IQ.
  Because of similar assertions about racial differences, University of Western Ontario psychologist J. Philippe Rushton, PhD, faced criminal charges based on a Canadian hate crime law. His research explores the relation between intelligence and brain size and he claims that there is an evolutionary basis for racial differences in traits that include intelligence, aggression and criminality. He was investigated first by the police and then by the Ontario Human Rights Commission for five years before the charges were dropped for a lack of evidence. In several instances, after passing through peer review and being accepted for publication in professional journals, journal publishers pulled his articles on purely non-scientific grounds, says Rushton and others familiar with his work.
• Account in Index on Censorship by Iain S. Bruce:
  "….[In 1997/8/9, Scotland] witnessed the hounding out from the field of psychology research of the controversial former Edinburgh University lecturer Chris Brand. Dubbing himself a "scientific racist"* in 1996, Brand published a book, The g Factor, discussing the gap in average IQ scores between the black and white populations and favouring the view that there is a genetic component to these differences. As such, this was not a particularly hard-line argument and was not presented as part of some wider, white-supremacist manifesto, but a furore exploded nonetheless, the book was withdrawn by its publishers on the grounds that it made "assertions we find repellent," and the unpardonably impolite boffin lost his job."
  
  *  The leading social-anthropological writer, Ashley Montagu, defined scientific racism as "the belief that the variables of phenotype, intelligence, and ability to achieve civilizationally and/or culturally are not only genetically determined, but also genetically linked." Marxist and neuroscience professor Steven Rose says (e.g. http://www.carf.demon.co.uk/feat01.html): "Scientific racism has been around for a very long time. The last big wave began in 1969 and was tied up with people like Eysenck in this country and Jensen in the States."
• Account by Professor Norman Levitt <njlevitt@IDT.NET> in 1998 for the Science-as-Culture E-mail Discussion Group at St John's University, Newfoundland:
  "In regard to the Chris Brand case, here are the facts as best as I can make them out. If I am wrong in any material sense, I apologize and would appreciate being set right--with appropriate references. Brand is--or rather was--a psychologist at U. of Edinburgh, specializing in psychometrics. His woes began when he attempted to publish a book, based on his own research, on heritability of intelligence etc. The book was peer-reviewed favorably and a major American publisher took it on. However, among the propositions for which the book argued was the idea that "group differences" in intellectual capacity are real and genetically based--in other words, the thesis ntoriously popularized by Herrnstein and Murray in The Bell Curve.
      When the publishers took note of this, the book was put in limbo; that is to say, they refused to bring it out, and used certain legal technicalities to obstruct its being published elsewhere. Eventually, the fuss caught the attention of the Edinburgh academic community. Demonstrations ensued, with the result that Brand was summarily barred from lecturing.
      That set the stage for chapter 2 of the affair. To understand this, you must be familiar with the Nobel Prize laureate physiologist, Gajdusek who got his award for proving that the neurological condition "Kuru" (endemic to New Guinea) is, in fact, caused by an unusual kind of infectious agent (then called a "lentivirus", now thought to be a "prion".) Gajdusek 's work, by the way, led to such understanding as we now have of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy ("mad cow" disease), and, of course, laid the groundwork from the prion theory, which itself won a Nobel Prize.
      However, on a personal level, Gajdusek is an unconventional character--that is, he is homosexual, with a predilection for very young partners. On one of his visits to Micronesia, he acquired a young companion, and brought him back to the States as his "student." When the facts came to light, Gajdusek was tried as a sex offender for consorting with a boy under the age of consent. He was convicted and sentenced to prison for something over a year (a term which he completed just the other day.)
      Brand comes into the picture because he circulated an e-mail petition protesting the justice meted out to Gajdusek. Brand's arguments were twofold. First, he asserted that Gadjanek's prior and prospective service to humanity should be taken into account. Secondly, he claimed that the sort of relationship for which Gajdusek was punished does not, in most cases, do any severe damage to its purported victim. It is my understanding that Brand made these remarks without having any hidden agenda--in other words, he doesn't appear to share Gajdusek 's proclivities.
      However, the University of Edinburgh instantly decreed that Brand's remarks were beyond the pale and that he had dirtied Edinburgh's "good name" by uttering them (from a university e-mail adress!!, horror of horrors). Brand was suspended from all university connections and proceedings were begun to dismiss him outright. In due course, he was fired, and the propriety of his firing was then confirmed by an appellate tribunal of some sort.
      Here, a disclaimer: I'm very skeptical of Brand's theses concerning group differences in intellectual capacity. I don't really agree with him on the issue of sex with minors either--I think Gajdusek got what he deserved, frankly. The point, however, is that, so far as I am aware, Brand was given the bum's rush for merely making cogent, reasoned arguments for ideas that various people find it unpleasant to contemplate, even for arguments sake. He was, or so it seems to me, the victim of intolerable censorship on a number of occasions."
• Professor Glayde Whitney (Florida State University) puts the Brand affair in context as part of the "Fourth Inquisition" against IQ scholars and others who have said there are some deep-seated differences between the human races. Others attacked include:
  John R. Baker (Oxford University; author of Race
        [Oxford University Press, pp. 625, 1974])
  Thomas Bouchard
        (Minnesota; leading twin researcher [e.g. Science 250, 223-228, 1990])
  Sir Cyril Burt (London; author of The Factors of the Mind, 1940)
  Raymond B. Cattell (Illinois and Hawaii; author of Abilities: their Structure,
        Growth and Action, 1971)
  C. D. Darlington (Oxford; author of The Evolution of Man and Society
        [Simon & Schuster, pp. 753, 1969])
  Hans Eysenck (Institute of Psychiatry, London)
  Linda Gottfredson (Delaware)
  Richard Herrnstein (Harvard)
  Arthur R. Jensen (U. California, Berkeley)
  Travis Osborne (Georgia)
  J. Philippe Rushton (Western Ontario)
  Nancy Segal (Minnesota)
  William Shockley (Stanford; Nobel Prize Winner)
  Audrey Shuey (Randolph Macon Woman's College)
  Ernest Van den Haag (City University of New York) and
  Daniel Vining (Pennsylvania).
• From a critic whose writing was produced in testimony at Edinburgh University that Brand should be fired:
  BILLIG, Michael (1997). "Giving Academic Freedom a Brand Name." Feminism & Psychology 7, 2.
• From the 'Anti-Nazi' League [ANAL] et al.(e.g. Barry Mehler), Searchlight vii 1998 deplored the links of differential psychologists to the UK nationalist magazine, Right Now!

• Christopher Chabris (University of Harvard) and other academics considered the Brand affair in the American magazine Commentary 106, 5 (November, 1998) [http://www.psyc.uow.edu.au/subjects/GHMC976/iq1.htm].
  
  
• Commendation of Brand's work came in Annual Review of Psychology 2000 from Prof. David Lubinski:
  "A nice compilation of positive and negative correlates of g is Brand's (1987) Table 2, which documents a variety of modest correlations between general intelligence and altruism, sense of humor, practical knowledge, response to psychotherapy, social skills, supermarket shopping ability (positive correlates), and impulsivity, accident proneness, delinquency, smoking, racial prejudice, and obesity (negative correlates), among others. These outer-layer peripheral correlates are especially thought-provoking because they reveal how individual differences in g "pull" with them cascades of primary (direct) and secondary (indirect) effects (Gottfredson 1997)."
  REFS: Brand C. 1987. The importance of general intelligence. In Arthur Jensen: Consensus and Controversy, ed. S Magil, C Magil, pp. 251-65. NY: Falmer. Gottfredson LS. 1997. Intelligence and social policy. Intelligence 24:L-320. Special issue.
  
  
• Brand's pay-out from Edinburgh University was covered in the nationalist e-mail magazine Final Conflict ("FOR FAITH, FAMILY AND NATION, AGAINST THE NEW WORLD ORDER", "published under the patronage of St George), 4 March 2000.
  
  
• In January 2005, surprise was expressed at the big conservative website ‘Free Republic’ at the withdrawal by Wiley of a book which expressed ‘truths about race and IQ which had been known for a hundred years.’ [Actually, with regard to IQ test results, 90 years would be nearer the mark.]
  
  
• In January 2005, my book and related work received substantial discussion and commendation at the website ‘Questions on g and intelligence.’
  
  
• You suspect that Brand ( though age 58, and often a reviewer for Nature, Times Higher and Personality & Individual Differences) must somehow be 'too extreme' -- a weirdo? That he was surely 'asking for trouble'? That The g Factor simply must have been too naughty if Wiley and Edinburgh University condemned it and broke their contracts with Brand? After all, 'there is no smoke without fire'…. Well, you could read the opinion of the USA's National Association of Scholars (NAS) and Canada's Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship. Alternatively, here's how Emeritus Professor Hans Eysenck put the matter (Personality & Individual Differences 21, 1996): "Free speech is clearly not in favour any longer: we are clearly setting a pattern of intolerance, bigotry and dogmatism in Great Britain that surpasses similar anti-scientific activities in the United States where the first amendment protected the likes of Jensen, Rushton and Herrnstein/Murray. It is hardly surprising that the students at Edinburgh University boycotted Brand's lectures and called for his dismissal -- not having been able to read the book they so vociferously complained about! Quem deus vult perdere! Clearly social scientists are an endangered species in the modern world."

• Anyhow, you don't doubt that, after six months in the media for attempting realism about IQ, genes, single parent mothers and race, Brand had made some enemies? Finally, a way was found to bring him down. -- For Sussex University philosopher Glenn Newey's 1997 criticism in the Independent [London] of Edinburgh University's sacking of Chris Brand for his one page of e-mailed discussion of 'paedophilia',* defending a Nobel prizewinner, see: http://www.paranoia.com/~theslurp/news/news0007.html or http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/McDNLArch1.htm.
  *  For distinctions between paedophilia, pederasty and paedosadism, see Times Higher 5 ii '99, 'Crimes against humanity', Professor David Canter; and McDougall NewsLetter 23 ii '99.
• You think a university 'has to draw the line somewhere'? -- To decide when an exercise of 'academic freedom' has overstepped the mark into 'outright licence'? For a comparison of Chris Brand's treatment with the liberality of treatment for academics in the Germany of the last Kaiser, see the 1999 article by Professor John Furedy (University of Toronto):
  http://psych.utoronto.ca/~furedy/duhr5. Furedy writes:
  "In my experience, British academics have been rather complacent about the problems of PC, considering that such excesses are specific to North American institutions of higher education. What the Brand case suggests, however, is that PC is present across the Atlantic in a virulent form. That, at any rate, was the impression given by the science reporter Constance Holden's report that came out two weeks after the [Edinburgh] principal's August 8 press release (Holden, 1997, Science 22 viii). She quotes a Northwestern University psychologist Michael Bailey, saying that "I can't imagine a U.S. university acting as Edinburgh did." ….The fact that Principal Sutherland would actually characterize an opinion as "disgraceful conduct" in his university's only public statement on the matter is a testament to how conceptually weak his understanding of the concept of academic freedom is. ….the feelings (no matter how strong) of "anti-racist" and other anti-academic, political pressure groups should play no role, let alone any determinative roles as apparently occurred in Principal Sutherland's infamous and conceptually primitive press release."
  
  
• You think Brand’s case an isolated one – of a foolish lone exhibitionist etc? See ‘Free to speak out?’ in the Independent (Education), 20 v 2002. Journalist Clare Rudbeck concluded:
  At their annual meeting this month, AUT members called for a debate about admitting students with openly racist views, after concerns were raised about a Leeds University student who is an active member of the BNP. Should they extend that debate to racist lecturers? "Yes, certainly," says Mr Cotterell. "Where racism comes from is irrelevant. We would react in the same way whether it was students or staff." With tensions high on campuses across the country, the debate cannot happen soon enough. In the absence of clear precedents, universities are floundering.
  For example, Edinburgh University sacked Chris Brand in 1997 for embarrassing them and ended up paying £12,000 in an out-of-court settlement. The lecturer had claimed that paedophilia was acceptable as long as the child was over 12 and of above average intelligence. A year earlier, he had come under fire for writing a book containing the claim that black people are less intelligent than whites. His university defended him the first time, but fired him for gross misconduct after the second controversy. A university tribunal found that he had "courted further publicity and shown a desire to pursue his own goals at the expense of others". The effect was that he had "undermine[d] completely any of the remaining trust and confidence which members of the department might have had in Mr Brand as a colleague". In other words, he was sacked for bringing bad publicity to the university and embarrassing his colleagues. Brand sued Edinburgh for unfair dismissal, which concluded with the £12,000 compensation payment.
  
  
• For general coverage of censorship in academia (including the case of The g Factor) see Mark Humphrys’ site http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://humphrys.humanists.net/anti-censorship.html.
  Daniel Pipes has observed that “American universities are islands of repression in a sea of freedom” – a description that applies equally well to universities in the U.K.

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First published on the Web: viii 1997
Last substantial revision: iv 2000
Last modified: 12 i 2005