February 3, 1995

Andrew Hacker, professor of political science at Queens College of the City University of New York, gave a lecture entitled “Bell Curves and Bigger Prisons: White America’s Agenda?” The author of Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (1992), Hacker referred in his title to the controversial book by Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), that posited a growing and dangerous separation in American life between a highly intelligent “cognitive elite” and those of average or below average intelligence. Herrnstein and Murray’s book also implied that genetic differences might well be stronger influences on personal traits like intelligence than such cultural agencies as parental income or education.