Monday Musings ...

Nestled in southern Indiana, there is a beautiful university. On the campus you will see Gothic –style buildings with limestone facades, winding sidewalks, majestic trees, and buildings with tunnel-like breezeways that separate different parts of buildings. In the spring and fall of each year, you will find it difficult to find a more beautiful college campus.  

When I first visited this university, its beauty captured me. It was one of many reasons I decided to apply to Indiana University.

As a freshman in large lecture halls, I sat submissively writing notes from professors. At the front of the lecture hall, a learned professor would speak to hundreds of students. I sat in humble awe of the professor.  I dare not question any professor.

Who questions the accuracy of a professor? At the time, I never thought of posing an opinion different from my professor. We took the notes, gobbled required readings, wrote papers, and took tests. 

By the time I entered Indiana University research from professors had never been seriously questioned. Do you know any studies that need to be debunked? I do. The science of Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey ...

If only more people had questioned Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s research and publication of the landmark book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.

According to Sue Ellin Browder an award winning investigative journalist some scientists actually questioned his research and his findings. Kinsey’s book was published in 1948 with rave reviews and sold 200, 000 copies in two months. *

Browder states, “But beneath the popular approbation, many astute scientists were warning that Kinsey’s research was gravely flawed.  The list of critics, Kinsey biographer James H. Jones observes, “read like a Who’s Who of American intellectual life.”  They include anthropologist Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; Stanford University psychologist Lewis M. Terman; Karl Menninger, M.D. (founder of the famed Menninger Institute); psychiatrists Eric Fromm and Lawrence Kubie; cultural critic Lionel Trilling of Columbia University, and countless others.

“In December 11, 1949, New York Times, W. Allen Wallis, then chairman of the University of Chicago’s committee on statistics, dismissed “the entire method of collecting and presenting the statistic which underlie Dr. Kinsey’s conclusions: Wallis noted, “There are six major aspects of any statistical research, and Kinsey fails on four."

By the time Kinsey’s volume about women (Sexual Behavior and the Human Female was published in 1953) many journalists the admiring throngs has joined the critics. Magazine articles with the titles like, “is the Kinsey Report a Hoax? And “Love is Not a Statistic”. Time magazine article ran a series of stories exposing Kinsey dubious science.  (One was titled Sex or Snake Oil)

 *Source: Kinsey’s Secret: The Phony Science of the Sexual Revolution.

Both of the Kinsey’s studies were published before I was born. Yet its impact continues to shape law and policy.

Beautiful campuses can hold dark ugly secrets that masquerade as science.