Heritage Foundation Scholar Resigns Over Hispanic Low-IQ Dissertation

Jason Richwine, a Heritage Foundation researcher, has decided to resign his position with the conservative think tank over a 2009 dissertation which alleged that Hispanics do not have “IQ parity with whites.”

Controversy hit Heritage this week when Richwine’s dissertation was released online. In it, he seemed to make an argument that Hispanics have lower IQ’s than white people, and that Hispanic immigrants to the United States will have “low-IQ children and grandchildren.”

Richwine’s Harvard University dissertation was written before his employment at Heritage. In it, he wrote that “low-IQ” Hispanic immigrants would cause “a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market.”

The silver bullet in the dissertation seemed to be this:

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

Naturally, the dissertation caused quite a bit of controversy this week, causing Richwine to resign from the foundation.

“Jason Richwine let us know he’s decided to resign from his position,” Heritage said in a statement. “He’s no longer employed by Heritage.”

However, Jon Wiener of The Nation theorizes that Richwine was actually fired after his dissertation went public. The dissertation was uncovered by Dylan Matthews of The Washington Post, but the real question in Wiener’s mind is how Richwine was granted a PhD from Harvard for it in the first place.

Dissertations must be approved by a review board of three. Of the three, two were conservative-to-moderate immigration and economics academics who expressed doubt and concern over the paper’s conclusions. The third was Christopher Jencks, a well-known leftist academic. He would not comment on his approval of Richwine’s dissertation.

Do you think Jason Richwine quit the Heritage Foundation over his dissertation flap, or was he fired?

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