Jason Richwine Redux: Fatal Flaws to Fix in Doctoral Education

Jason Richwine was no accident.  He represents problems with doctoral education, even at Harvard.

In Three Magic Letters: Getting to PhD (2006) which was the largest survey of doctoral students ever conducted at the time of its publication, the authors note:

The dissertation-the culminating experience of a doctoral degree program- is the only research product for which there is stable and comprehensive documentation, and analysis of who completes the dissertation and the quality of it are missing from the public record. (Nettles & Millet, p. 105)

Just like juries sometimes get verdicts wrong, examining committees, even those made up of the esteemed professors who sat in Jason Richwine’s oral defense, get it wrong too.

No standard expectation of research productivity beyond the dissertation… has emerged in the disciplines or fields of study in the century and a half of doctoral education.  Consequently whatever doctoral students produce by way of research appears to be by happenstance or through unofficial or informal networks in academic departments rather because of formal requirements or stated expectations in the curriculum. (Nettles & Millet, p. 105).

When the examiners fail, the quality of doctoral education suffers.

Harvard failed Richwine, in qualifying him for a PhD.  Harvard, like all doctoral institutions,  followed the standard steps of doctoral programs, the same steps that contain the fatal flaws; no back-up process to catch mistakes by the examining committee and no clear standards for oral exams.  How is the examination of one document a representative sample? How is an exam without robust criteria for validity going to catch the work of a Jason Richwine, which one committee member considered careful?

Doctoral education needs change to catch mistakes by examining committees and insure that oral examiners follow robust criteria for assessment in the oral exam.

 

Actors in the Oral: These Characters Need an Author & Audience

Students enter their doctoral program with trust.  Students trust that the ministrations, trials and tasks they undertake at great expense of time and effort serve some legitimate learning, teaching or assessment function. Yet the indifference to the plight of students in the department in terms of minimizing time to completion, minimizing attrition or keeping statistics for same, sends a message of indifference, even hostility toward student success in the program.  Ergo, information of program requirements, including the big high stakes pass or fail test, the oral defense, trickles down to students via a student grapevine.

These amusing lines, which are framed in terms of what not to say during the defense, beg the question; how do students learn the standards examined in the oral defense?  The cartoon shows that what you miss out on, you make up in fantasy.  Neither side has a clear idea, that is a valid and reliable idea, about what counts as evidence for a minimal acceptable research achievement in the program during the exam.

In the absence of rigour, exam takers stand-in for standards that come down through the student grapevine.

A similar cartoon could be penned for the examiners’ side.   The examiners fantasize their role as gatekeeper and play a game of keep-away.  Examiners ought not to say that they don’t know the minimally acceptable standard, haven’t done inter-rater reliability tests, understand that no one checks their work, haven’t read the dissertation closely, are reprising lines from their last 27 oral defenses etc. Until students and examiners know what counts, the exam remains more a hazing than bona fide assessment instrument.  The examiners play keep away and can take license with it.

Right now, oral exams fit the definition of pornography by the US supreme court judge: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.” Also oral exams fit to ‘if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, smells like a duck, then it is a duck’.  If it looks like a gang-up from the middle ages and can get side-lined by the ego needs of an examiner, you’ve got  a religious investiture, an oral exam.

All that very serious toil, tension,and trouble on the candidate’s behalf concludes with a silly piece of theater.   A book reviewer in the Harvard Education Review said doctoral ‘students deserve better’ (2006).  Advocates of graduate school reform call for a student-consumer to demand better and stop paying for this nonsense (Golde 2007, The Responsive PhD, 2008).  Doctoral programs need a consumer audience.

While the Harvard Education Review asserts that students deserve better, Harvard its self recently came under fire for the PhD it awarded to Jason Richwine.   His dissertation concluded that Latinos will never be as smart on IQ tests and used articles by discredited, racist academics like Rushton. Such dissertations get passed by esteemed professors.

Even though Richwine’s dissertation with its racist, ignorant conclusion erupted angry protests on Ivy League campuses, brought in news coverage and earned a spot on The Colbert Show, Harvard still took no responsibility and offered no real explanation or inquiry, aside from appeals for calm and to academic freedom.  One would hope that at Harvard, such a lapse in quality would prompt reflection.  Getting a doctorate from the foremost university in the world for a bad dissertation shows the weaknesses in doctoral programs.  Doctoral programs don’t get fixed.  There is no system of ongoing renewal, although sometimes changes are undertaken, to cave to long decades of neglect.  As noted in the literature on doctoral education (Nettles and Millet, 2006), doctoral education also has no system for quality control.  As a consumer of PhD training, Richwine might have thought that by virtue of completing his dissertation at Harvard, his PhD program would have quality controls.

If Harvard doesn’t control for quality, and this is bizarre, a student consumer group at Harvard ought to demand a system of quality control to prevent another Richwine episode.  Richwine’s degree devalues the Harvard PhD brand and therefore every doctorate earned at Harvard.  Richwine’s degree devalues PhDs.   Doctoral work at Harvard, or elsewhere, can not come down to simplistic statements regarding racial inferiority.  Fix the system of doctoral education.  Without a system to control for quality, beyond the charade of the oral defense, all doctoral programs suffer from the same weakness.

Too bad Western Governor’s University doesn’t provide PhDs.  Western Governor’s University anchors its degrees to discernible competencies.  Imagine a doctoral program with clear criteria for assessment and that would be a WGU PhD.   The department wouldn’t need the student to make up standards, or improvise, and sub-standards like Richwine would be detected.  The characters involved in the degree get an author.

Until then, Watts (2012) has written about how to prepare for a romp in the wild west the viva.   Adding to Watts’ advice, students must not be so stupid as to ask what makes the exam a reliable and valid assessment.  Students are well served to remember that even if the assessment is quackery, hold your nose, suppress the urge to vomit and quack.  The hard-earned degree and personal sacrifice is not at all diminished by the bogus exam, the decades of neglect, inaction, and lack of attention or the lack of quality control.

Even though roughly only 30% of PhDs work in the academy, and even in ‘professional’ doctorates like the EdD which aim outside the ivory tower, the exam focuses on scholarship.   Changes to shorten doctoral programs in the humanities at the University of California, Irvine resulted in greater consumer demand (that is more applicants) even early on.  Yet these programs aren’t fixed; they still end in an oral defense for all their lofty ambition.  Consumer-group action can send a message to doctoral program providers that shortening the program is no substitute for considering the function of every aspect.  The characters need the attention of an author and an audience.

Does Jason Richwine’s Offensive Screed Mean Sophistry Works in a Ph. D.?

In Fabrication Nation Land, you can fool some of the people some of the time, even in the most hallowed of academic institutions. So the fabrications of doctoral student, Jason Richwine’s in his 2009 dissertation, for which he received a Ph. D. from The John. F. Kennedy School of Government, which is housed within the most reputable of universities, Harvard, escaped capture.

Below is the conclusion which tied together of Dr. Richwine’s research.

As the previous chapters have discussed, today’s immigrants are not as intelligent on average as white natives. The IQ difference between the two is large enough to have substantial negative effects on the economy and on American society. The deficit cannot be dismissed as meaningless or transient. It is transferred across generations – whether via genes, environment, or both – in a manner that we do not yet know how to prevent. Although this is a depressing conclusion, it does not help us focus on a new opportunity. On trying to reverse the cognitive decline of immigrants, we could begin to seek out underprivileged people who have the raw mental ability to achieve personal success, while still helping ourselves at the same time. (The Nation of Change Blog, excerpt from Jason Richwine’s dissertation “Immigrations and IQ” p. 134)

Notice the generalizations which support racism. White natives? Who are white natives?

In the May 14, 2013 (in segment 1 @ the 8:00minute mark) broadcast of The Colbert Report, the doofus news anchor Colbert spoofs the term ‘white natives’ saying there are none. His logic? All ‘natives’ to America are Indigenous people, none of whom are ‘white.’

Colbert exposes alarming statements in the dissertation like:

“The average IQ of immigrants is the US is substantially lower than that of the while native population and is likely to persist for several generations.”

“No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have love IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”

Aren’t doctoral dissertations supposed to avoid broad brush generalizations? Notice the broad brush terms, today’s immigrant’s, white natives, intelligence, genes, environment; all of which support a thesis that takes the long discredited ideas of a scientific basis for racism out of the closet, dresses them up and pulls out a bona fide Ph. D., from Harvard.

“Some critics say that the thesis’ suggestion of a long-term gap in the IQs of Hispanic immigrants and their descendants and the IQs of other groups is based on discredited theories that have been used to justify many forms of discrimination over the years. And they question how Harvard could award a PhD based on such a thesis… Twenty-three student organisations at Harvard issued a joint letter questioning the legitimacy of the thesis that awarded Dr Richwine [ a Ph. D].” (Times Higher Education, May 13, 2013).

“I most certainly understand that this issue, as reported, troubles many people,” said a statement released by David T. Ellwood, dean of The Kennedy School. “First, the views and conclusions of any graduate of this school are theirs alone, and do not represent the views of Harvard or the Kennedy School. ” (THE)

Does David T. Ellwood expect us to believe that as a doctoral student, Mr. Richwine, developed his research project without input from a supervisor or committee before he sat his oral? My doctoral advisor nixes my ideas. She gives me feedback and guidance but also admits my new evidence into consideration to change her opinions. If I succeed in this doctoral project, she and Athabasca University, Centre for Distance Education, may take credit. I ain’t doing nuttin’ they don’t like. Isn’t the point of the Harvard brand, which enjoys a truly awesome, towering intellectual stature globally, that work which it endorses, not only meets the highest standard, but pushes the frontier of knowledge further?

Harvard Dean, David Ellwood then steps in it even further with point number two.

“Second, all PhD dissertations are reviewed by a committee of scholars. In this case, the committee consisted of three highly respected and discerning faculty members who come from diverse intellectual traditions.”

So the dissertation passed the sniff test. One of the examiners, a professor of political economy, Richard Zeckhauser says, “Jason’s empirical work was careful. Moreover, my view is that none of his advisors would have accepted his thesis had he thought that his empirical work was tilted or in error.” Yeah but Jason’s sources for his ‘careful’ empirical investigation included discredited academics, Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) and J. Phillip Rushton, the ignominious academic who revived the pseudo-science associated to Nazi Germany.

Isn’t one of the litmus tests of doctorate- worthy scholarly work, the ability to read the literature, put it into context, and above all discern its credibility? Hey Jason you fail the literature review if you include Rushton and Murray as a credible sources. Hey Jason’s committee you fail the test as examiners. How could this kind of sourcing in a literature review get by you?

It sounds like committee member Richard Zeckhauser assumed Jason’s advisors held Jason to account before allowing the dissertation to proceed to examination, instead of doing his job. Where was Dr. Zeckhauser’s thoughtful analysis when he examined Jason’s dissertation?

A second examiner, George Borjas, a professor of economics and social policy, distances himself from responsibility by saying, “I have never worked on anything even remotely related to IQ, so don’t really know what to think about the relation between IQ, immigration, etc…In fact, as I know I told Jason early on since I’ve long believed this, I don’t find the IQ academic work all that interesting. Economic outcomes and IQ are only weakly related, and IQ only measures one kind of ability.” Yeah well if he told Jason this early on, why did he give Jason a pass? Why did he let Jason proceed? Why didn’t he recuse himself?

The Kennedy School Dean finishes off his defense of the granting of Jason’s Ph. D., with a reminder of academic freedom.

“Finally and most importantly, it is vital that an active and open debate of ideas occur in universities and beyond them. Scholars and others who disagree with particular ideas or methods or who are unhappy with conclusions can and must openly engage in reasoned discussion and criticism, after looking fully and carefully at the work. It is through ongoing vigorous give and take that good ideas will ultimately emerge and weaker ones can be displaced.”

How ironic. Weaker ideas like Rushton’s and Murray’s, have been displaced through vigorous give and take that occurred in the 90s, save in Jason’s dissertation, where weak ideas were allowed to go on unchecked.

If scholarship evolves from the process the Dean describes and I think we doctoral students want to believe that it does, then Jason’s dissertation should have been stopped dead at the proposal stage.

Once these ideas were given the go ahead what kinda phoney academic discourse occurred at Jason’s oral defense and all along?

“Mr. Richwine, elaborate on your methodology to discern the pattern of standard deviational variance in favour of white natives on Stanford-Binet IQ tests and the possible genetic correlates and phrenological measurements for this finding?”

“Mr. Richwine please speak to the need for immigration screening on the basis of successive-generational, longitudinal patterns that fail show a regression toward the norm in Hispanic immigration between say 1929 and 1987?”

Discuss your literature review Mr. Richwine. How would you tell the story of scholarship on immigration and IQ as taken up in the scholarly work? Oops this question seems too authentic and could have unraveled the entire project.

In rock ‘n roll the line “The things that pass for knowledge, I don’t Understand.” (Burton Cummings) sums up my incredulity. The problem is that I’m a doctoral student, studying doctoral pedagogy and I need to understand. Maybe sophistry worked for Jason Richwine. After all, his committee thought he had careful methodology, even though one member of it now confesses to never having worked on anything remotely connected to IQ.

The good news is that for all the worry which keeps doctoral students awake at night, agonizing to reconcile every contradiction in an argument, preparing to show a catholic sweep through a literature, and finally positing original answers to penetrating questions, there is no need to worry. If Jason could fool his Harvard committee with this “offensive screed with no credibility,” (Colbert) they might too.

The bad news is that Jason’s dissertation and doctoral education undermines the value of the Ph. D, the scrutiny of scholarship and the reputation of Harvard. If mighty Harvard falters, such disgrace casts a pall on all of academia. I actually considered quitting my doctoral program when I learned this story.

Do you think that Jason’s dissertation undermines the value of a Ph. D.? Academics? Universities? Doctoral education? How was Harvard University able to give Jason Richwine a Ph. D.?

If anyone reading this is looking for an dissertation subject, how about an autopsy of Jason Richwine’s successful completion of the requirements for a Ph. D. at Harvard, or how the doctoral program, examining committee, school, and advisors at Harvard came to approve this dissertation. Maybe there are other such dubious dissertations, which may be unearthed.

For those of us studying doctoral education, such knowledge may prevent future fabrication fiascos.

Sources

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/inside-higher-ed-should-his-phd-have-been-granted/2003804.article

http://www.nationofchange.org/blogs/michael-matthew-bloomer/will-jason-richwine-s-retrograde-harvard-ph-d-dissertation-iq-and-immi

The Colbert Report, episode broadcast on May 14, 2013 segment one @ the 8 minute mark.

Charles Murray

J. Phillip Rushton

Follow-Up

May 14, 2013 – Dan Brown

Central