Bradley Foundation, Political Advocacy and the Funding of Research

Before the 2012 presidential election, anonymous billboards sprung up in battleground states warning voters that voter fraud was a felony. These billboards were placed in areas where minorities live in Ohio and Wisconsin. It has been widely assumed that the intent was to frighten minority voters and to suppress their vote, which would likely be heavily Democratic.  More recently it was learned that these billboards were funded by the Bradley Foundation (http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/176675811.html), whose president, Michael Grebe, was the campaign manager for Scott Walker, the controversial right-wing Republican governor of Wisconsin (http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/11/11834/bradley-foundation-bankrolls-controversial-billboards-treading-controversial-new-).

What many people may not be aware of is the Bradley Foundation’s role in supporting the writing of the influential scholarly work, The Bell Curve, which claimed that IQ is a genetically inheritable trait, directly related to socioeconomic success.  Charles Murray, one of the authors, was given $800,000 over a period of 10 years by the Bradley Foundation to support his work on this book (The Critical Assessment of Research, 35).   Many reviewers of The Bell Curve, both in the mass media and scholarly periodicals, lauded the book.  It was  called “a landmark study,” “meticulous,” and “honest,” with findings that “cannot be easily dismissed” (The Critical Assessment of Research, 29-31).  However, given its advocacy of hard right wing positions (see http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/from-local-roots-bradley-foundation-builds-conservative-empire-k7337pb-134187368.html and http://www.jsonline.com/news/134079498.html), is it likely that the Bradley Foundation was funding research whose findings were anything but a foregone conclusion from its very inception?

Women and Literature: Who Reviews and Who Gets Reviewed

In The Critical Assessment of Research we discuss the close relationship between the literary works that are considered the classics in a culture, the literary canon, and the theories about what gives an artistic work value and significance (52ff). We discuss how literature from certain groups is more likely to be considered important worthy of attention, while literature from other groups is more likely to be ignored, and less likely to become part of the literary canon. It is therefore significant when whole classes of literary works are given less media attention than other classes of work, or when those selected to review the works tend to be from one group rather than another.

Given this, two related pieces during 2012 suggest that literature written by women, despite all indisputable advances (The Critical Assessment of Research, 54-57), is still given rather short shrift.  One of these pieces is a study by VIDA, an organization devoted to a discussion of “the critical reception of women’s creative writing in our current culture.” This organization counted the number of books written by men and written by women reviewed in prestigious mass media venues. Also included is a count of the number of male and female reviewers. Here is the relevant link: http://www.vidaweb.org/the-2011-count. Similarly, an essay published in The New York Times Book Review by Meg Wolitzer entitled “The Second Shelf” discusses the issue in a more personal vein: http://nyti.ms/URu7Yg.

Does any of this matter to those of us concerned with research in the literary arts? Absolutely, because works which are not brought to the attention of scholars or the public in general are not likely to become part of the literary canon (The Critical Assessment of Research, “Artistic Canons,” 52-60).  The degree to which men and women are represented in a literary canon affects what gets studied and discussed in academia and elsewhere.  And this, in turn, affects our perception of men and women and the way we see the world.