What Makes Shockley Run?

I had to get special permission from William Shockley to get admitted to his debate at Princeton this week, because the debate was closed to the non-Princeton press. So I called Shockley at his New Jersey hotel and asked him to let me in to the debate. He said he would get back to me.

The next day, I got a call from Shockley. "Hello," he said, "Shockley here. Of course you know I'm tape-recording this conversations: I tape-record all my telephone conversations. Now before I let you in to this debate, I want to find out a few things about you. First of all, could you tell me what's 60 per cent of 60 per cent?"

"Why do you want to know?" I said.

"I just want to see if you have the basic intelligence to understand my theories before I let you in to my debate."

I stammered a little and said it was 36 per cent, which turned out to be right and won me Shockley's approval. I later learned, in fact, that he had gone relatively easy on me; other reporters had to figure out 16 per cent of 300 per cent.

Shockley then announced that he would be holding what he called a "tutorial" prior to the debate in order to acquaint the press with his theories so they could understand him better.

The tutorial did not, however, turn out as Shockley had hoped it would. It was more of a press conference, with a lot of reporters and television lights.

Shockley sat calmly behind a table during the press conference looking unperturbed. He is 63 years old, short, gray-haired and innocent looking. He never gets excited or raises his voice. He looks gentle and unimportant. People wonder what he ever did to raise any furor. And then he says things--very calmly always--like "I'd like to talk about the way we can trace the intelligence of Negroes to their percentage of Caucasian blood."

Throughout the press conference, Shockley would keep dropping bombshells like this, and new reporters would come in and make him repeat all his earlier statements, and everyone would roll their eyes and try not to laugh.

The whole scene--which must be repeated for Shockley everywhere he goes--raised a lot of questions about what motivates him. Shockley's life appears to be a series of recurring, completely unproductive patterns.

It goes something like this: someone invites Shockley to speak, usually a college or a television show, often planning to have him debate a black or a white liberal. He always accepts. As the date of the speech approaches, people start putting pressure on the sponsoring college or station to cancel Shockley, on the grounds that his views don't deserve to be aired.

Often the speech is canceled--Shockley says this has happened about a dozen times in the last few years. And if it goes on, students protest, reporters write him off as a nut, and his audiences are always hostile. He always speaks in the Northeast or on the West Coast, and never has any visible support. Students burn him in effigy, academics condemn him, blacks hate him, and his own university, Stanford, won't let him teach genetics.

So why does Shockley do it? Why doesn't this start to bother him? Doesn't he ever lie awake at night and think, in his heart of hearts that maybe, just perhaps, he isn't right?

No; none of this seems ever to occur to him. The most telling remark he made during his Princeton press conference was: "My critics are just like the people who tried to stifle Galileo." Shockley hastened to add that he wasn't trying to say he was another Galileo, but his heart wasn't in it; the thing about Shockley is that he really does think he is another Galileo. He, like Galileo, thinks in big terms. He wants to redefine the universe, so set into operation a world-wide plan of unnatural selection by sterilizing people who aren't intelligent.

Shockley is also, besides being a megalomaniac, undeniably a racist. He claims he doesn't hate blacks, that he wants to make society better. Since blacks are less intelligent than whites, he says, they should be sterilized. Leaving aside the huge mass of questions that come up about his theories--Who says I.Q. tests are accurate? Are all the world's problems caused by unintelligent people?--the fact remains that he spends the vast majority of his time talking about the inferiority of blacks and skips over his world-view very quickly. His main goal in life, then, seems to be to tell white liberals that blacks are unintelligent.

Shockley could, if he had picked a different cause, have been just an amusing nut. All of his crazy side effects--the incessant tape-recording, the impromptu I.Q. tests given over the phone--might have been funny. But because of his racism, he has to be seen in a far different light. He's not harmless. He's not just "controversial" or "provoking". He is, instead, a destructive force who should not be lent respectability by colleges and television stations that allow him to speak. His Nobel prize and pseudo-scientific trappings don't make him any different from a Ku Klux klan chieftain--and KKK members don't get many speaking invitations on the Ivy League circuit.