On 29 Feb 2004, Mike Scoles wrote: > Thank you for this bit of history Christopher. It is ironic that we > psychologists have endured the random diatribes of a historian, but > have not had the opportunity to present history in the context of > psychology. I would recommend the following URLs for additional > examples. These were found by searching Google for "Leon Kamin Joe > McCarthy." Please, Louis, put down your Tootsie-Pop and take some > time to read them.
I was interested to see that someone remembered the Leon Kamin incident. Leon Kamin was the chairperson of the psychology department at McMaster University when I was there. I had been accepted as a qualifying student, a Schroedinger state in which I was simultaneously a graduate student and not a graduate student. To correct my deficiency in psychology (the cause of that peculiar state), I was assigned to do penance in various laboratories of the department. The first one I was assigned to was that of Leon Kamin. I happily helped run his rats in the first experiments on blocking, and mastered the art of wiring up electromechanical devices with snap leads to control the Skinner boxes, a primitive form of computer programming. I also got to run my first experiment in psychology in his lab, an overly-complicated investigation of some aspect of blocking which led nowhere. I was rather awed by Kamin, whom I deduced (correctly) that he was very, very sharp. At the time, there were rumours around the department that Kamin's presence at McMaster had to do with a run-in with McCarthy, but I never got the real story. I only found out in 2002 when an obituary appeared in the Boston Globe on the death of Judge Bailey Aldrich at age 95. It turned out that one of his most celebrated cases was, according to the obituary, "when he acquitted Leon J. Kamin, a research assistant at Harvard University of contempt of Congress charges. Kamin had confessed to being a former commmunist but refused to give the names of other communists." That doesn't explain why Kamin was subsequently in Canada, but I would guess that job opportunities for a confessed communist were not exactly plentiful in the US at that time. When the climate improved, he returned to the US (to Princeton) and initiated his famous critique of Cyril Burt's data. I was mildly surprised by this, because my impression when he supervised me was that his knowledge of statistics was limited, as we analyzed every experiment with the same simple method, the non-parametric Mann-Whitney test. But, in fact, his analysis of Burt's data was based on observing simple inconsistencies and anomalies no one else had noticed. The last news I have of him was that he accepted an appointment in 2000 as an Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Concerning these urls from Mike Scoles' post, this one > http://www.thecrimson.com/fmarchives/fm_02_15_2001/article2A.html has further interesting details of the Kamin affair but this one > http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/mccarthy/hearingsvol5.pdf is 619 pages long! Stephen ___________________________________________________ Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. tel: (819) 822-9600 ext 2470 Department of Psychology fax: (819) 822-9661 Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lennoxville, QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Dept web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy TIPS discussion list for psychology teachers at http://faculty.frostburg.edu/psyc/southerly/tips/index.htm _______________________________________________ --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
