Socialist’s big break

The then new University Of Otago central library, looking towards Otago Museum reserve in 1965, about the time Jim Flynn joined the institution. Photo by the Otago Daily Times.

The best day of my life was in early 1963 when I was 28 years old.  

At the time it seemed a bad day.  My  head of department told me I was to seek a job elsewhere because a socialist unbalanced the department.

Prof Jim Flynn. Photo: ODT

He also knew, without speaking to him, that the president of the university felt I had no future there; a form of mental telepathy, I assumed. 

I remarked that since American socialists were about 1% of the United States population, there would have to be a department with 100 members to make me employable.

This was the second time I had been fired because of my politics. 

The first time was a year earlier when I was fired in the South for being too friendly to blacks: I was chair of Congress for Racial Equality in a Southern town. 

The president of the university wanted to run for governor and was afraid I would cause trouble.

My wife came from a radical family. Her mother’s brothers and sisters were told that if they even communicated with her, they would lose their jobs, which led to a terrible estrangement.

Their phones were tapped and their rubbish went into a separate bag on the rear of the truck to be taken to the FBI for analysis. 

They burnt all radical literature but tore corset advertisements into thousands of little pieces to keep the FBI busy. She was in as much a mood to leave the US as I was.

Moving to New Zealand gave me a career far more rewarding than anything I would have got in the US. 

There I would have been in a department in which I was expected to publish trivial articles strictly in the political science area and would have been subject to the censorship that forbids research in "delicate" areas (anything that might make someone angry).

Here I was allowed to wait a few years while I broadened my competence, and found I was valued for publishing broadly, in philosophy, literature, psychology, and on the race and IQ debate (which gets everyone angry). 

The three books I am publishing this year, on how people have the autonomy to upgrade their mental abilities, on great contemporary novels, and on climate change would simply never have been written. 

I owe everything that has made my scholarly life blossom to that day now 54 years in the past.

Your best day

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