Professor James R Flynn

Otago University Library - as it is now, but the tables are from the original building. I could comment further, but I think I have left enough clues today.

I was taught political philosphy by Jim Flynn at Otago university in the late 1970s, when he was first researching and writing about Race and IQ. He is Chicago trained, one of the brightest people I know, and went on the Freedom Rides down in the American South in the 1960s. It is easy to guess why he was hiding out in a New Zealand University - and has remained there, and he is not the only one from the Cold War period.

Flynn taught our Honours class to do statistical analysis, which as Political Studies students in the days when real money was still spent on large scale social science research about voters actions, was a skill we were thought to require. As we were mostly word orientated arty types, maths scared us, and he was incredibly patient, so the Standard Deviations have never scared me since. His first year Political Philosophy class in contrast, was a baptism of reading the original philosphical writers from Aristotle to R M Hare, and writing essays every week, marked by a post-graduate tutor. I loved it, and carried on, most of the 300 strong class did not survive. Flynn was recently on Channel 4 in a series about race and discrimination talking about just how far the research which he was starting then has gone to counter the crazy racial prejudices of the inherently selfish. The idea that discussing ethical issues as the 'ideal' or the 'object', rather than theoretical metaphysics of logic, was his cue to training us to 'check the evidence' as the correct basis for any political stance. It is good to remember that Marx was an economist as well as a social theorist, turning over huge books of collected figures in the British Library.

Correct attitudes in statistical interpretation has been brought out by the latest Climate change and academic science brouha. I was a young political ecologist activist as well in those days. I have no doubt that the figures are hardly conclusive, but it is important that they are kept - even if it is 200 years before any sense is made of them. The problem is always what I like to call the Doomsday scenarios. From religion to insurance salesmen - lets have a single 'bogey man' tactic. Rising sea levels is a strong image. Pollution on its own is bad enough. But in an age when hours in the British Library is not the only way to share information, academics can't cower in their institutional isolation any more than the politicians can. If you have to defend your work to the educated masses as well as the intimates of the learned cloisters, that is as it should be, even from the University of East Anglia.

Flynn is a Distinguised Associate of the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University, where he is described as a psychologist. His son Victor is a professor of Mathematics at Oxford, and did his PHD at Cambridge, after an undergraduate degree at Otago.