The New York Times reported in 1991:
A Federal judge has ruled that City College of New York may not punish a professor for writing that “on average, blacks are significantly less intelligent than whites.”
The professor, Dr. Michael Levin, who is tenured in the philosophy department, had sued the college president and dean, charging violations of his civil and constitutional rights.
According to the ruling, college officials abrogated Dr. Levin’s rights to free speech and due process when they formed a committee last year to investigate Dr. Levin, failed to discipline protesters who broke school rules by disrupting his classes and departed from tradition by establishing separate sections of his courses for students who might have been offended by his views, which he never expressed in class.
The ruling by Judge Kenneth Conboy of Federal District in Manhattan, reached after a three-day trial in May, blocks the school from continuing to arrange the special sections and from disciplining or investigating Dr. Levin “predicated solely upon his protected expression of ideas.” The judge also ordered the college to take “reasonable steps” to prevent further disruption of Dr. Levin’s classes.
Mises.org posts this book review: “Given the radical nature of Professor Levin’s conclusions, the question of course arises: Is he correct? I shall say only this. Anyone who proposes to challenge Levin had better be well versed in statistics, intelligence testing, and evolutionary biology, all of which our author appears to have mastered. I venture to suggest that the so-called Flynn effect poses the sharpest challenge to our author’s case. The mean IQ of Western populations has risen over the past sixty years, but surely people are not more intelligent than their parents and grandparents. Does this not suggest that IQ tests do not adequately measure intelligence? I shall leave it to readers to judge the adequacy of our author’s ingenious answer (pp. 128 ff).”
“Most notably, he offers the best noncognitivist account of moral values that I have read. In his view, values are not objective properties, that we intuit, as states of affairs; they are the results of biological adaptation. People do indeed believe their values to be objectively correct; but their belief is a conceptual blind spot. We must, if Levin is right, entertain at the time of action a false belief in value-objectivity at the time of action.”
