INTELLIGENCE AND STUDENT POLITICAL ACTIVISM.

The article discusses intelligence and student political activism. A positive correlation between intellectual ability and leftist ideology is an empirically well-established generalization. Almost all of the research on this interesting topic has utilized college students. In reviewing the literature on American student political behavior, sociologist Seymour Martin Lip set suggests that this correlation between intelligence and leftist ideology may be spurious. This study compares a sample of student political activists at the University of Minnesota with the general student population of which they are a part The original universe of activists consisted of all elected officers of all the student political organizations on the main campus of the University over a span of ten academic years, 1955-56 through 1963-64. Intelligence is one of a number of important social science concepts that elude precise definition. This paper makes no attempt to resolve the definitional problem but defines intelligence operationally in terms of standard measures of intellectual ability.