Author - SftP Archives

Herrnstein Buffs Rebuff Herrnstein’s Ideological Bluff

Each year, sandwiched between Christmas and New Year's days, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) holds its annual meeting in a major American city, with its headquarters in a towering hotel of a major American hotel chain. Invariably, not very far away is a major American ghetto, and of...

A Public Statement on the Herrnstein Controversy

Psychology professor Richard Herrnstein of Harvard University published an article titled "I.Q." in the September issue of the Atlantic. In it he says, " ... data on I.Q. and social-class differences show that we have been living with an inherited stratification of our society for some time." In what he calls our...

The Strange Procedures of Science Magazine’s Editor

AAAS attendees bought many copies of a little salmon colored pamphlet entitled CENSORED. The pamphlet describes the censoring of an article with the title, Science for the People, that four members of SESPA from N.Y. and Chicago had submitted for publication. The article is a modified and extended development of the...

Using Pregnancy Tests in Hiring Discrimination Against Women

One of the films that Steve gave me was called "Pregnancy testing in the 70's". It was a panel discussion between six members of the medical profession. The trend of the discussion was how important routine early pregnancy tests are, since women could go into X-ray therapy, for instance, unaware of their pregnancy...

Perception, Learning and Science Education

In a recent issue of Science for the People, the Science Teaching Group offered a critique of science courses in the schools1 The critique emphasized the role of traditional science education in maintaining the economic and social status quo. This is accomplished by fostering the myth of an apolitical, benevolent...

Report from the China Collective

People all over the world have been led to confront these questions. China, as a revolutionary socialist society, is one place where concrete solutions are being tested. Seeing what "revolutionary change" actually means to a people can be very important to Americans who only discuss such change theoretically or read...

Our Bodies, Our Selves: A Review

The oppressive set of myths that make up a large part of this ideology can survive only so long as women remain ignorant of their physiology, of the commonness of their psychological suffering, and of the role that the ideology itself plays in influencing them to accept their oppression (indeed in often preventing...

Harvard Loses Pete Barrer

I am writing to announce my withdrawal from the Public Policy Program. This letter is being made public because the other students, professors and secretaries in the program also deserve to know why I am leaving. There are many reasons and events that have led me to this decision, but they sum to the simple facts that...

Industrial Health and the Chemical Worker

When reaching for a fresh bottle of chemicals on the laboratory shelf, how often do we as chemists think about how the chemicals got there? Who actually made the chemicals? Who put them in the bottle? When we open the bottle and place it under a ventilating hood to avoid breathing the fumes, do we ever ask ourselves...