Prof claims magazine misquoted him

Associate Regional Science Professor Daniel Vining is upset about how he was portrayed in an article published in the October issue of Rolling Stone magazine. And he is not alone. Other professors have expressed similar objections to what they have described as the accusatory tone of the article entitled "Academia's Dirty Secret: Professors of Hate." The article focused on the research of individuals who have accepted money from the Pioneer Fund, an allegedly racist foundation that has been accused of espousing eugenics. According to the article, Vining ranks as the ninth largest recipient of fund money, having received a total of $197,750 between 1971 and 1992. Still, he said the article deliberately tried to make him look racist. "That was its purpose," Vining said. "[But] I don't think that I am a prejudiced man." Vining claims the story's author, Adam Miller, reported false information about his research and life in addition to describing events that never took place during an interview he had with Miller over the summer. According to Miller, Vining believes that IQ scores reflect intelligence and that intelligence is largely inherited. Vining said this is an inaccurate characterization. "I have never taken an IQ test myself so I don't know [what it reflects]," Vining said in an interview. "Academic intelligence maybe." Miller wrote that Vining has amounted evidence that more intelligent people have fewer children. Eugenicists believe that this is responsible for the progressive decrease in intelligence of the human population. "[Vining] proposes that lowering the birth rates of the United States' poor, who he suggests are less intelligent than the country's rich, would help reverse the theoretical slide of intelligence," Miller wrote. Vining does not acknowledge ever having stated this. In an interview last week, Miller said he acquired information about Vining's beliefs from a number of articles he has written on eugenics. "Daniel Vining is certainly free to deny having written the things he has written and deny having said the things he has said, but despite his denials, he has written them and said them," Miller added. Miller said that during the interview he handed Vining photographs from a Nazi eugenics film and an excerpt written by Garrett Hardin, a professor emeritus of biological sciences at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In a letter to Miller and the editor of Rolling Stone, Vining contends that none of this occurred. "[Miller] never showed me an 'excerpt' from Garrett Hardin's work," Vining wrote. "I would need my reading glasses to read it, anyway, and I never put them on in [his] presence." Vining added that he never saw or held any articles or photographs. Former Chairperson of the Regional Sciences Department Stephen Gale, one of Miller's sources of information about Vining, also said he was displeased with the article. Miller quoted Gale as saying "I'm not going to tell you whether Dan is a prejudiced man. He may be." "Those two comments were made very far apart and in very different contexts," Gale said. Gale also objected to how Miller presented his statement that Vining's stroke, which left him paralyzed, was "an act of God." "I rarely use an expression of that type," Gale said. "Even if it did sound like me, it was totally out of context. "I wouldn't have said that [Vining's stroke] was an act of retribution," he added. Other professors quoted in the article have also criticized Miller's journalistic integrity. "It is pretty obvious that Adam Miller was out to get us all, to make us look bad," said Michael Levin, a philosophy professor at the City College of New York. Levin said he has argued that there are racial differences in intelligence and that these differences are genetic. Another recipient of Pioneer Fund money, University of Delaware Educational Studies Professor Linda Gottfredson, expressed disgust at the way in which the article was written. "I thought it was particularly cruel when it dealt with Dr. Vining," Gottfredson said. "It is the most vicious piece I've seen written about Pioneer Fund grantees. "It shows a reckless disregard of truth," she added. Rolling Stone Publicity Director Maureen Coakley defended the magazine's standards. "We totally stand by our stories," Coakley said. "We wouldn't have printed it if it weren't true." Vining said he did not plan to accept further funding from the foundation and that he "would have rather not been involved with it." Still, this is not the first time that a faculty member has charged Rolling Stone with disregarding the accuracy of what it has written. In 1993, Microbiology Professor Hilary Koprowski sued the magazine for libel after it published an article suggesting that he was responsible for creating the AIDS virus. The magazine cites Koprowski's large-scale testing of an oral polio vaccine in Africa in the late 1950s as the cause of the disease's spread.