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Students and faculty rally to remove CSU East Bay Professor Emeritus over his discredited racist theories on intelligence

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As of Monday morning, the change.org petition to strip Gregory Christainsen off his standing as Professor Emeritus within the Economics Department of California State University, East Bay (CSUEB) has now a stronghold of 1,420 signatures which eagerly began out with 900 final Friday, October 30.

Christainsen who formally retired in 2016 is retained as an emeritus faculty at CSUEB with college privileges and the choice to return to train once more. Now, he’s educating financial and administration programs on a component time foundation. According to the college, this Fall semester, he handles Principles of Macroeconomics (ECON 205), Intro to Urban Economics (ECON 225), and Managerial Economics and Business Strategy (ECON 380). 

The uproar is merited to the revealed works of Christainsen’s racist theories on intelligence. Quoting from one in all his publications in 2012 “Biology, Immigration, and Public Policy”, he famous that the common intelligence degree is low in sub-Saharan Africa. He additionally wrote that within the US, 

Hispanics (primarily mestizos)… score poorly on intelligence tests (on average), tend to have less massive brains than whites… and have a high rate of dependency.

Over the previous ten years, the main focus of his analysis had been makes an attempt to justify racial and gender stereotypes using statistics which he additionally taught inside his classroom. In a press release by fellow economist throughout the Economics Department in CSUEB quoted from the San Francisco Chronicles, Christian Roessler stated that, 

There is a difference between academic freedom and academic malpractice. Citing and interpreting statistics selectively to align with personal biases is expression, but it’s not academic expression.” 

Christainsen and different researchers in the identical discipline argue that race and IQ are interrelated ideas based upon organic realities asserting that IQ is an innate high quality and will not be merely social or cultural ideas. Moreover, in addition they cite genetic research carried out to help and increase their case. On that observe, it not solely discredits types of social spending to contribute to intelligence but additionally labels some sorts of discrimination as rational and additional propagates stereotypes amongst races such because the inherent violence of Black folks and that Asians are good in math. 

Experts in genetics together with those that are main figures in neuroscience and psychology have debunked these ideas and conclusions of who’re referred to as as “race realists”. Furthermore, these consultants say that these works “rely on faulty assumptions and dubious statistics”. 

A British science journalist, Angela Saini, stated that race realism is a “rebranded form of eugenics”. Eugenics is outlined as socio-political philosophy which goals to affect and enhance the human species by way of selective mating and breeding out undesirable traits like ailments and disabilities. This idea has been closely used as a device to rationalize racial oppression just like the Jim Crows legislation enacted within the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to implement racial segregation within the US to genocides and to discriminatory insurance policies corresponding to immigration bans emplaced by the Trump administration. 

Saini who can be the creator of the 2019 e book “Superior: The Return of Race Science” additionally stated, “They set up their own journals, and then they cite each other. So they give the veneer of respectability.” 

Christainsen has additionally revealed different a number of works nonetheless rooted on the identical idea corresponding to “IQ and the Wealth of Nations” (2013), “Admixture in the Americas: Social Differences as a Reflection of Human Biodiversity” (2016), and Rushton, Jensen, and the Wealth of Nations: Biogeography and Public Policy as Determinants of Economic Growth” (2020). Alarmingly, these journals and publications have been funded by the CSUEB College of Business and Economics (CBE). 

In his emailed statements to The Chronicle, Christainsen maintained that his work is uncontroversial and falls inside “the mainstream of contemporary intelligence research.” The college has already issued its assertion defending Christainsen on the grounds of educational freedom by recognizing his First Amendment Rights. In mild of the Black Lives Matter Movement and the declared allyship of CSUEB to the trigger, the college’s place can be now being questioned. 

CSUEB is without doubt one of the most various public universities with a majority of its college students as Latinx at 37.1% and 22.6% constituted by Asians whereas solely 14.1% are whites in accordance to current statistics. Students and faculty are actively calling out the college to reevaluate their workforce and put a cease to institutionalized racism. The first step to that’s the termination of Prof. Gregory Christainsen’s emeritus standing with the CSUEB. 

If you need to know extra in regards to the petition, click on here for the hyperlink. 

Thomas Lake

Resident tech nerd for the SF Times.