Racial Pseudoscience on the Faculty

Liam O’Brien was a master’s student in political science at Cleveland State University in 2019 when a screenshot from a new article, titled “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability,” crawled across his Twitter feed.

To the untrained eye, the abstract was highly technical. “Using the ancestry-adjusted association between MTAG eduPGS and g from the monoracial African-American sample as an estimate of the transracially unbiased validity of eduPGS (B = 0.124),” the authors wrote, “the results suggest that as much as 20%-25% of the race difference in g can be naïvely explained by known cognitive ability-related variants.”

The argument dressed up in that statistical jargon? That Black people are genetically disposed to be less intelligent than white people.

O’Brien was disturbed to see that debunked racial-hierarchy arguments popular in the late 19th and early 20th century had a toehold in modern academe. Scientifically rigorous research arguing that intelligence is inherited is itself controversial, but few geneticists take seriously the claim that intelligence is racially linked.

His dismay turned to outrage when he discovered that one of the authors, Bryan J. Pesta, was a tenured professor in Cleveland State’s business school. O’Brien’s home institution was essentially providing a soapbox for racist pseudoscience.

He had a history of political activism, so he did what came naturally, talking to students and professors about Pesta’s article, and trying to get him censured.

“I didn’t know anything about academia and how difficult it would be to do anything about it,” O’Brien said. Among his acquaintances at the university, he said, “I didn’t encounter a single person who knew anything about him.”

Publications like Pesta’s may fly under the academic radar, but can seep into popular misperceptions of race and lend them a scholarly veneer. Pesta was heavily involved, for example, in editing a 2010 version of Wikipedia’s article on race and intelligence, according to the site’s discussion-forum archives. At the time, the article cited both Pesta’s work and that of other “racial hereditarians.” The racist manifesto of Peyton Gendron, the man accused of murdering 10 Black people at a Buffalo grocery store this year, cited some of Pesta’s racial-hereditarian colleagues and predecessors.

Despite nearly a dozen publications over more than a decade arguing for the intellectual inferiority of Black people, Pesta earned merit pay for research and eventually promotion and tenure at Cleveland State. Finally, this year, after researchers at other institutions filed complaints, the university fired him.

But those complaints weren’t about the legitimacy of his research.

How Pesta got fired, and why it took so long, shows that racist pseudoscience can go unnoticed and unchallenged on a campus for years, even as it makes the rounds among lay readers. It also points to the difficulties faced by legitimate genetic scientists intent on protecting the reputation of their field.

Bryan Pesta had spent most of his adult life at Cleveland State University. He earned his bachelor’s, an M.A., and a master’s in labor relations and human services at CSU, according to his archived faculty page, before receiving a doctorate in the psychology of cognitive aging at the nearby University of Akron in 1997.

Pesta’s Google Scholar profile shows an eclectic collection of nearly 40 publications on management, labor, and aging across a handful of journals, along with articles on race and IQ as early as 2008. He was awarded tenure in 2010 and, by the time “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability” was published, in the fall of 2019, was earning more than $170,000 a year — an amount that could go far in Cleveland, where the median annual income is less than $22,000.

Cleveland State is on the East Side of the heavily segregated city, and residents of the surrounding neighborhoods are nearly all Black. With Black students making up about 13 percent of the student body, the campus is more diverse than its state-college counterparts scattered throughout Ohio, and it’s popular among Cleveland high-school graduates who want to study close to home.

A look at Pesta’s RateMyProfessors page shows students generally rated him very highly, describing him as “hilarious,” “interesting,” and “easy.” One warned: “If you’re easily offended, you might not like some of his jokes, especially when he compares certain graphs to phallic symbols.” But none of the 74 reviews complains about racism.

The Chronicle reached out to 10 Black students who graduated from the business school with bachelor’s or master’s degrees in 2022. Of the three who replied, none said they were familiar with Pesta.

“Literally 100s of Black students have taken my classes,” Pesta wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “I’ve won merit pay for teaching many times. I was regard [sic] as among the best teachers in the business college.”

“If I were racist, or even overly political,” he wrote, “I submit I would have been exposed by now.”

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Many of his papers about race ran in Intelligence, a peer-reviewed journal that has drawn fire for publishing other racial-hereditarian arguments. Three of his articles appeared in Mankind Quarterly, which a writer in The New York Review of Books once called “a notorious journal of ‘racial history’ founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race.” Two were published in the Journal of Intelligence, an international, open-access periodical that advertises its quick review and publication process.

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But in study after study, Pesta and his co-authors reference “race” without any caveats, and break subjects into racial categories of Black, white, Asian, and occasionally Hispanic, or try to determine how much genetic material they have from each category.

Pesta’s papers also consistently maintain that racial gaps in test scores can’t be explained by factors like discrimination or economic status. In 2008, for example, he published an article in Intelligence arguing that the gap between Black and white students’ IQ scores could be explained entirely by Black students’ lower intelligence rather than any bias in intelligence measures.

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When asked about Pesta’s research more broadly, the chair of Pesta’s department, the management professor Timothy DeGroot, defended its legitimacy. “I find it distasteful,” he wrote in an email. But “that is not the point,” he said. “There is a long history of research in this area.”

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O’Brien, the political-science graduate student, tried not to let Pesta’s work go ignored. He gathered students from various activist groups to make an action plan. One group put out an email blast inviting interested students to a Zoom meeting on the subject.

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Ultimately it didn’t matter. Just as the organizing effort was getting off the ground, the first cases of Covid-19 were found in Ohio. The campus was shut down. The campaign sputtered. O’Brien finished his master’s degree online and never returned to campus.

But across the country, geneticists at other universities had set in motion institutional processes focused not on Pesta’s racist claims but on his violation of the norms and regulations of academe.

He had already been on one geneticist’s radar when “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability” was published in Psych.

Luke Miller (a pseudonym) is an early-career scientist who has long been rankled by racial hereditarians. As a geneticist, he said, he feels a responsibility to combat the harm done by the fringes of the scientific community. (The Chronicle has used a pseudonym for Miller and left some other early-career researchers in this article unnamed because they fear professional repercussions.)

“Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability” stood out from similar articles Miller normally saw. The first thing that struck him was its publication in a journal from MDPI, a mainstream publisher, unlike typical vehicles for racial hereditarianism like Mankind Quarterly.

More alarmingly, the paper cited data from the National Institutes of Health’s Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP). The federal agency has strict controls governing who may use its data and how. It struck Miller as improbable that the NIH had given Pesta’s paper the green light, or would have even given him access to the data, if the agency had known what he planned to do with it.

Genetic data is intensely personal. With a person’s genome, in theory, one could deduce a person’s hair, eye, and skin color; diagnose genetic illnesses that haven’t manifested themselves yet; or even tie the person to crime-scene evidence.

Most of the NIH’s requirements for data use are meant to ensure that information is protected. Only specific people named on the data-use application and approved by the NIH are allowed to use the data. The researcher must get special permission to use cloud-computing systems. Failing that, NIH guidelines instruct researchers to “make sure these files are never exposed to the internet” after they’re downloaded from the NIH.

And principal investigators have to submit a request explaining what they’ll be studying. Pesta submitted several in 2018. One, submitted in December that year, said he planned to study whether polygenetic scores — estimates of how likely people are to have a trait or disease based on their genetic profile — were accurate across different ethnic groups if used to predict educational attainment and schizophrenia, since the scores had mainly been studied in people of European descent. Another request said he planned to focus on differences in brain morphology between sexes. A third said he planned to study whether genes predicted mental illnesses like depression and schizophrenia differently in different ethnic groups. None said he would study whether one racial group was genetically less intelligent than another.

Miller was tapped into a network of researchers across the country who felt similarly about hereditarianism. Together, four of them combed the methodology section of Pesta’s article and compiled evidence that he had violated NIH policies.

According to the paper’s methodology section, the data was uploaded to at least two servers: the Michigan Imputation Server, a University of Michigan program that deduces genes that haven’t been included in a sample; and HIrisPlex-S, a web application that deduces phenotypes like eye, hair, and skin color from genetic data. While only Pesta received permission to use the NIH data, and named none of his co-authors in the requests, Miller said he and the other whistle-blowers had inferred that others would have had to have access to it to do the analysis the paper described.

In September 2019 the group of four scientists signed letters listing their concerns to both the NIH and Cleveland State. They also alerted the researchers who had gathered the original data. Documents leaked to The Chronicle by someone knowledgeable about the subsequent investigations, as well as interviews with whistle-blowers, detail what happened next.

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The NIH began an investigation in September 2019. In 2021, the agency sent a letter to the university confirming that Pesta’s use of the NIH data to examine cognitive functioning had violated his data-use agreement, since he had received approval to study mental health, not intelligence. The NIH also found that Pesta had failed to report the publication, as required, until he submitted his close-out report for the project, in February 2021, more than a year after the article came out in Psych. And it found that he had violated his data-use agreement by uploading restricted data to an “unapproved online forensic DNA-phenotyping service.”

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The letter set a June 2021 deadline for the university to destroy all initially approved copies of the genetic data and find out whether any unapproved copies of the data had been made. The agency also revoked Pesta’s permission to use NIH data for any existing projects, and banned him from obtaining any NIH data for the next three years.

The NIH declined to comment on the investigation, saying it did not discuss whether investigations were in progress against individuals. When a reporter pointed out that the inquiry appeared no longer to be going on, a spokesperson replied, “Our prior response still stands.”

In line with its union agreement, Cleveland State set up a faculty committee to investigate Pesta’s alleged violations of university policy. It was not until September 2021, according to Miller, that CSU replied to his and the other whistle-blowers’ 2019 complaint, asking to interview them. After reviewing documentation and interviewing Pesta twice, the committee uncovered a raft of additional sins.

According to a letter sent to Pesta by the then provost, Laura Bloomberg — who has since been tapped as CSU’s president — the university confirmed the NIH’s findings. It also found Pesta had lied to a staff member in CSU’s research office when he said the data would be kept in a university-owned laptop and he would be the only one with access.

Instead, the letter said, Pesta put the data on a machine purchased with funds from the Human Phenome Diversity Foundation, of which he was president.

Pesta said he had requested and received approval from both Cleveland State and the NIH to store the data on a home computer.

“Those bastards totally ignored me when I pointed it out,” he added.

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In an interview with The Chronicle, Pesta said all the allegations against him were false, except that he had uploaded the data to a phenotyping service.

“I should have gotten what’s called prior approval to upload these data to that server, but it just didn’t occur to me that I needed to do that,” he said. He added that a paper published in Nature had used the same phenotyping service, so he believed it was secure.

Bloomberg ultimately found that Pesta’s conduct had damaged the university’s reputation and could impede other professors’ ability to do research.

Cleveland State declared that Pesta had been incompetent or dishonest in teaching or scholarship; neglected his duty, and engaged in personal conduct that substantially impaired the fulfillment of his institutional responsibilities; and interfered with the normal operations of the university. The letter declared Bloomberg’s decision to fire Pesta.

Pesta was officially fired on March 4, 2022, two and a half years after his article was published.

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“It’s obvious I am unemployable in academics now,” Pesta told The Chronicle in an email. “I’d rather not share my current employment status, but it’s been tough.” He said he is suing Cleveland State over his termination, and called both the NIH and CSU investigations “kangaroo courts.”

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