Daily Inspiration Quote by J. Philippe Rushton

The sentence is almost aggressively boring, and that’s the point. “I then moved” and “was made a full professor” read like neutral career bookkeeping, the kind of CV line you’d skim in a faculty bio. Coming from J. Philippe Rushton, it functions as a credibility shield: a small, institutional stamp meant to launder a larger, far more volatile public identity into something administratively ordinary.

Rushton wasn’t just any psychologist; he became internationally notorious for race-based claims about intelligence and behavior, work widely criticized as methodologically flawed and steeped in biological determinism. In that context, “made a full professor in 1985” is not mere chronology. It’s an implicit argument: the university promoted me, therefore I belong in the realm of legitimate science. The passive voice does heavy lifting. “Was made” erases agency and controversy, smoothing over the reality that Rushton’s career unfolded amid protests, condemnation from colleagues, and a broader culture war over what counts as research versus ideology in lab-coat form.

The line also hints at a familiar academic alchemy: the conversion of institutional status into social permission. Tenure and promotion can be read by outsiders as a moral endorsement, even when they’re often a narrow judgment about publication and internal metrics. Rushton’s choice to foreground the moment he becomes “full professor” frames his story as meritocratic ascent, inviting the reader to see subsequent backlash as political noise rather than substantive critique.

It works because it’s banal. The understatement is strategic: when your ideas are incendiary, the calmest sentence in the room can be the sharpest tool.