(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) An over-sensitive university professor reportedly forced the cancellation of a controversial scientific paper after researchers from Canada’s Mount Royal University suggested that college undergraduates might not be as intellectually gifted as they thought, RealClearScience reported.
The journal Frontiers in Psychology had accepted the paper, titled “Meta-analysis: On average, undergraduate students’ intelligence is merely average,” and had announced plans in January to publish the final and formatted version.
The study argued that because of a massive increase in access to college “education” over the past 80 years, the average IQ of college undergraduates had dropped from around 120 to 102.
The decline in students’ IQ was “a necessary consequence of increasing educational attainment,” the researchers concluded. “Today, graduating from university is more common than completing high school in the 1940s.”
They also noted that teachers—whose ranks had likely dumbed down with the rest of the population, creating a vicious cycle of stupidity—“need to realize that students are no longer extraordinary but merely average.”
The declining cognitive abilities of college graduates also affected employers, who “can no longer rely on applicants with university degrees to be more capable or smarter than those without degrees,” the researchers added.
Ultimately, they argued that the long-held perception of colleges as a breeding ground for intellectualism “needs to be dispelled.”
After word of the research went viral on social media and in the mainstream media, garnering some 54,000 views, researchers were notified that their paper was no longer acceptable for publication.
Specialty Chief Editor Eddy Davelaar, a psychology professor at the University of London, reportedly overrode other peer-reviewers to censor the scientists.
Specifically, Davelaar complained about the tone of the writing, which he called “demeaning,” while reprimanding researchers for not being more sensitive in their presentation.
The journal removed the link.
Bob Uttl, Victoria Violo and Lacey Gibson—the three authors of the report—said that they wished they could get an honest explanation for why their research was so suddenly rejected.
“I think an editor or whoever owes it to us to tell us what the issues are, allows us to respond, before rejection,” Uttl noted in an email to RealClearScience.
