What Is Taboo?

Does "academic freedom" mean that a university professor has the right to say anything he chooses? Even if he strays outside his field of expert knowledge? Even if what he teaches is generally considered wrong? Or if it leads to extremism and violence?

The Stanford University authorities struggled with these questions last fall during their protracted investigation of radical Professor of Literature H. Bruce Franklin; they concluded that he had "urged others to violence" during an outbreak of student demonstrations, and so they dismissed him (TIME, Jan. 17). Last week they had to deal with the no less touchy case of William Shockley, 62, a Nobel prizewinner and distinguished professor of engineering science. Once again, they decided that academic freedom must have limits.

Shockley won his Nobel Prize in 1956 as a co-inventor of the transistor, but what he wants to teach is a subject that he calls "dysgenics." He defines the term as "retrogressive evolution through the disproportionate reproduction of the genetically disadvantaged." More simply stated, Shockley's argument is that blacks are genetically inferior to whites in intellectual capacity, and that in violation of the law of survival of the fittest, society encourages blacks to pass on their inferiority to their children. In a series of writings over the past decade, Shockley has called this process "downbreeding the poor" and warned that it will lead to "genetic enslavement." He has even proposed that bonuses be paid for the voluntary sterilization of those with less than average IQs.

Protests. Virtually all scientists reject these views, of course, arguing that there is no sound evidence of intellectual differences based on race or of intellectual decline based on genetics. Nor has Shockley, a physicist, done any important research in biology or genetics. Presumably nobody would object very strongly if a noted physicist wanted to teach heretical theories about the origins of Shakespeare's plays, but the racist implications of Shockley's views have aroused fierce protests (as have the similar but more scholarly views of Psychologists Richard Herrnstein at Harvard and Arthur Jensen at Berkeley). Graffiti on Stanford walls have urged, "Sterilize Shockley." He has been burned in effigy. On two occasions his classes were broken up by hostile students, some flaunting the sheets of the Ku Klux Klan.

To settle the matter, Graduate School Dean Lincoln Moses asked the advice of a five-man faculty committee, including experts in biology, physiology, psychology, statistics and communications. After much agonizing over both Shockley's qualifications and his views--which one committeeman called "essentially genocidal [and] abhorrent to all decent people"--a majority of 3-2 urged that he be permitted to teach his course for only one quarter and without credit.

Dean Moses then overruled his own committee. Although he declared that the university had an "obligation to encourage . . . heterodox 'dangerous' thoughts," he decided that Shockley's course would be "polemical" and his qualifications to teach it "subject to doubts." Moses therefore ruled: "I will not authorize the course."

But universities have wondrously diplomatic ways of achieving compromises. Although Stanford would not authorize Shockley's teaching, Moses observed that if the professor wanted to give his lectures anyway, "you may do so without special permission from anyone." Shockley declined to say whether he would go ahead, but, in contrast to his troubled colleagues, he declared that the whole issue of academic freedom was "trivial" compared with the subject he wanted to teach--namely, the "illusion" of human equality.

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