Yes.

They merely follow their professors, and academics like Dr Stephen Jay Gould, who seemed to act according to what was good for popularity, book sales, etc.

Though Gould was a scientist, his views on this were overtly political

Giving 'scientific' support to an upcoming (erroneous or not) ideology is a pretty good career move in any case.

And so, Gould wrote that the bell curve rests on 'four incorrect assumptions', that intelligence must be reducible to a single number, that it must be capable of rank ordering people in a linear order, that it must be primarily genetically based and that it must be essentially immutable.

But, as Haier suggests, to really understand this criticism, one should read the scientific evaluations of it, where it's shown to be invalid, re-establishing the validity of the (much maligned) bell curve data.

Nonetheless, you can find Gould's book, which is demonstrably wrong, in college bookshops ... under assigned(!) reading.

'It's highly popular, highly influential', this, a book that has been taken apart, point by point, by a number of people who actually understood the data.

But neither did Gould seem to care nor did the professors assigning his book.

So, what are the chances that the poor students can form a cogent understanding?