The ghost of Philippe Rushton is rattling chains at Western University.
A disgraced and discredited psychology professor — definitely not a geneticist by professional bona fides, though he made his bones off worthless assertions linking race with intelligence, criminality and unrestrained sexuality — Rushton’s spectre has long haunted the university.
Three decades after his flash of fame — at one point he was arguably the most well-known academic in Canada, appearing on “Geraldo” and “Donahue” — more than apology is being demanded by the university’s Black students, past and present.
“We’ve asked that they actually repudiate his research and disassociate itself,” says Michael Williams, a member of Black at Western Alumni. “Completely disavowing the research as being a crock of s—t.’
The damage Rushton caused, particularly to students who attended the university while he taught there but also the institution’s reputation, is immeasurable.
As faculty he was protected under the rubric of academic freedom; he enjoyed tenure, got published in respected scientific journals and had his work defended by Oxford, Harvard and Cambridge universities, even as they disapproved of his theories and research. Rushton received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Pioneer Fund, a New York-based endowment outfit with ties to eugenics and racist groups. Rushton eventually became the latter body’s president, a position he held until his death in 2012.
Those of us who were there and documented his career often fell into the trap of inadvertently furthering his celebrity — he basked in the notoriety — simply by expanding his media platform, even if ridiculing his concepts. He once said: “Most people in Canada seem to treat what I’ve done as not very good. I’d like to think that I’m being acknowledged.”
Among Rushton’s contentions: Black people were more susceptible to HIV than white people and Asian people because evolution had given them less sexual restraint (a declaration that earned him an invitation to join an international delegation visiting China to discuss AIDS research); Black people were intellectually inferior to whites who were intellectual inferior to Asian people, based on the size of their brains and evolution; men had an intellectual advantage over women.
His bad science “research” included asking student “volunteers” to describe their genitalia and how far they could ejaculate, after which he was temporarily banned from teaching. His slapdash “investigations” included conducting interviews at the Eaton Centre, paying 50 Black people, 50 Asian people and 50 white people $5 each to answer a questionnaire on their sexual habits. His clinical analysis including taking a tape measure to the cranium and the penis.
The nutty professor revelled in drawing scientists into his whack-job world. Tickets to a televised debate with David Suzuki at the London, Ont., campus theatre in 1989 were scalped for 20 times their face value as 2,000 people crammed into the venue, most (but not all) jeering Rushton.
“There will always be Rushtons in the world,” Suzuki, who really is a geneticist, told the audience in that emotional charged confrontation. “We must be prepared to root them out. This isn’t science. His claims must be rejected, his research grants revoked and his position terminated.”
The most poignant episode that evening was when a Black United Church minister stepped to the microphone. “My son is the only Black boy in his class. Because of you, he asked me: ‘Daddy, am I the dumbest boy in class?’”
Rushton repeatedly insisted: “I am not a racist.”
He most certainly was.
The British-born professor and author who claimed to be a dogged devotee of Darwin and empirical data was investigated by police and the Ontario Human Rights Commission (that petered out), and then-premier David Peterson called for him to be fired, while attorney-general Ian Scott declared his theories were “loony but not criminal.”
And he had the backing of the university’s administration, with only mealy-mouthed qualifiers, doubling down in the face of controversy and protests. “There is no relationship between Prof. Rushton’s conclusions and any position which the university itself might take on the issues involved,” then-president George Pederson said.
Rushton never lost his tenure, never lost his job, never had his research papers expunged from the archives.
Of course, there’s an overriding legitimacy to academic freedom, which should be kept in mind during the present cancel culture. But surely that should apply only to the humanities, not to the quantifiable and irrefutable hard sciences.
The harm attributable to Rushton and the alleged broader culture of racism at Western is evident in hundreds of postings on the Instagram account blackatwestern: “The University of Western Ontario assaulted me and left me broken,” “I left Western full of hate,” “I took a criminology course that spewed racist ideology,” “There was a tweet from Western weight room that stated ‘f—k all n——-s.’”
That toxic legacy can’t be ascribed to just one bigoted professor.
Last month, the university released a report from the Anti-Racism Working Group, a committee struck after a series of racist social-media attacks against a Black student who called out a professor for using the N-word in class.
That report made 23 recommendations to combat systemic racism on campus, while stating the school’s commitment to acknowledging and apologizing for the wounds caused to minorities on campus by Rushton’s work. The recommendations are being reviewed, as will be the Ethics Review Board system, which scrutinizes research to eliminate flawed work through peer review.
“I do apologize sincerely for that deep harm that has been experienced,” said Western president Alan Shephard, who’s held the position for less than a year. As well, the psychology department released a statement acknowledging that Rushton’s work is “deeply flawed from a scientific standpoint” and that his legacy “shows that the impact of flawed science lingers on, even after qualified scholars have condemned its scientific integrity.”
It was junk science. Yet it’s still seized upon by white supremacists today.
Apologies aren’t enough, says the Black at Western Alumni group, which met with student leaders and the university’s board of governors on July 8 to discuss the “ongoing crisis” of racism. The group on Monday released its own set of 13 recommendations aimed at amending hurt caused by Rushton’s teachings, preventing any such thing from happening again and addressing allegations of current racism on campus.
“His protected status as a tenured professor placed us in a position of defending our intelligence and right to study at Western,” the group’s statement said. “The trauma some of us experienced while at Western continues to negatively impact our lives to this day.”
The statement further argues that Western’s response to the Anti-Racism Working Group’s recommendations “do not account for the university’s abdication of its social responsibilities or the profits it made from Rushton’s disproven research.” Western failed to mitigate Rushton’s harm over many years. “It is failing again now by not acknowledging the impact the university’s policies and cultures have had” — and continue to have, the alumni say — “on Black students, and by not presenting clear and concrete actions to prevent this racist and unscientific work from continuing to be used as a foundational source.”
Among the group’s counterproposals:
- An endowed multidisciplinary research chair focusing on the study of systemic, scientific and anti-Black racism.
- Establishing a “robust first-generation curriculum” for Black students with resources and networks to support them through the college experience and beyond.
- Black presence on the board of directors.
- Increasing the hiring of more Black faculty and other underrepresented minorities.
Crucially, the group requires the “unequivocal public repudiation” of Rushton’s work. Yet the group has not asked for that body of work to be erased from the archival record.
“We used the term repudiated, which is a very strong term,” says Michael Williams. “Not just discredit it from an academic perspective but repudiate it. That’s as strong as saying that you have to completely disassociate (from) it and see it as 100 per cent invalid.”
Williams also points to vows by the corporate world in the wake of massive protests over systemic racism. “They’re citing specific, measurable objectives and numbers in terms of how they’re going to increase diversity, particularly as it relates to Black people, in programs but also boards and in executive ranks.”
The Western graduate allowed that the university’s Working Group recommendations are “noble.” But they fall severely short.
“They don’t provide for concrete action. We’re concerned about the legacy of Rushton because we lived it, we were there. We’re coming from a place of experience, alumni and current students. The legacy at Western is that acceptance of that still continues.”
