BesondersWeg

Somebody handed me a flyer at lunch today telling me to go to this website, which is the home of a campaign demanding that the president of the FU step down because he’s some sort of autocratic elitist who runs the university like a business.

Most of their complaints I definitely don’t have the background to understand (the Bologna Process? what’s that? and why are you complaining so much about Germany saying your university was an excellent university? I need to read that part again), but I understand this well enough: evidently in 2005 he made an iffy comment about the intelligence of Turks when asked to explain a recently published study that showed Turkish children were doing poorly on German IQ tests.

“Das Problem besteht nur bei türkischen Kindern und nicht etwa bei Kindern aus arabischen Familien. Möglicherweise sind Sprachdefizite verantwortlich für die Intelligenzdefizite, aber das ist nicht erwiesen. Ein Zusammenhang zwischen sozial schwacher Herkunft und mangelhafter Intelligenz besteht nicht.”

["The problem exists in Turkish children but not in children from Arab families. It's possible that speech deficits are responsible for the intelligence deficits, although that hasn't been proven. There is no correlation between having a socially improverished background and poor intelligence."]

And then he made some comments about how Turkish parents needed to help their kids learn better German. He doesn’t put it very well, but it kind of seems like to me that he’s pointing out something very obvious: if you don’t speak German well, and you take a German-language IQ test, you’re going to do poorly. How do you learn to speak German better? You grow up in a home where the German language is used. He doesn’t say Turks are stupid, he says they need to speak more German.

Which is obviously opening up ten more cans of worms about language and culture and implied assumptions, but without launching into a radical critique of the IQ test, the guy had two options: to say “Yes, isn’t that funny, Turks are dumb,” or to say “Hey, Turks aren’t dumb, they just don’t speak German, if they spoke German better they would do better” and I think we can all agree the second is better than the first.

He doesn’t go all the way to saying “The IQ test doesn’t measure intelligence, it measures German-language competency,” but I guess I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt until I see more evidence that he’s racist.

(On a somewhat related note, the university really should have Turkish-for-Heritage-Speakers classes. Well, okay, there’s probably not enough Turks around for that yet, given that some miniscule percentage of them go on to university, but there are more than I would have expected in my Turkish class. The city should get some German-as-a-Second-Language teachers, put them in the elementary schools, and then wait ten years and have Turkish-for-Heritage-Speakers classes.)