"There is but one practical and feasible program in handling the great problem of the feeble-minded. That is, as the best authorities are agreed, to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to their descendants."

Copies of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life reached bookstores a little over a week ago and already the word is in: This book is bad.

So far, the book's authors, Charles Murray '65 and the late Harvard Professor Richard Herrnstein, have been called "dangerous" (by The New York Times Magazine), "intellectual racists" (by the author Hugh Pearson), and "Neo-Nazis" (by Jeffrey Rosen and Charles Lane of The New Republic).

But despite the fierceness with which many have attacked the book, few have convincingly responded to any of the arguments Murray and Herrnstein present.

For instance, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., writing in The New Republic, considers pernicious the book's argument "that the gap between Black haves and have-nots is a reflection of natural variations within the group and is not a function of the cut-backs in the very federal programs that helped to create the new Black middle class in the first place."

But what cut-backs? Three trillion 1990 dollars have been spent on social programs since 1960. Even during the Republican years, real social welfare spending rose 44 percent. Despite all this largesse, we still had the L.A. riots.

What's Professor Gates's answer? More money on the same failed programs.

One failed program in particular reveals how hypocritical liberals are in castigating Murray and Herrnstein. Murray and Herrnstein are wicked men, we are told, because they dare to look at people in terms of groups. But liberals, at least since Marx, have not only viewed people in terms of groups, but have argued that individuals are entitled to certain benefits simply by virtue of their membership in an "oppressed" group. Liberals call this illiberal dogma "affirmative action."

In their book, Murray and Herrnstein have asked a simple question: If, as affirmative action exponents assume, whites and minorities are fundamentally equal as groups in ability, and the major force preventing Blacks and other minorities from attaining equivalent levels of socioeconomic success is discrimination, why must admissions officers lower relative admission standards for Blacks in order to achieve proportional representation?

As the authors make plain, there is no question colleges are engaging in "race-norming." Here at Harvard, for example, the mean Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) score for Blacks in the class of 1996 was 95 points lower than the mean SAT score for whites in the same class, according to the Consortium on Financing Higher Education.

And Harvard is actually one of the least aggressive among the top 20 schools in holding Blacks to lower standards. The average edge for a Black applicant to an elite college in 1992 was 180 points.

Liberals argue that this sort of double standard is justified by aggregate economic differences between Blacks and whites. Blacks as a whole are less equipped economically than whites, and this difference carries consequences.

An underprivileged youth who grew up in Roxbury and scores a 1200 on the SAT may represent more of an achievement than a white in a very privileged home on Beacon Hill who scores slightly higher. The advantage goes to the former. In these cases, the liberals are consistent with their dogma.

But how much of an advantage is reasonable? According to Murray and Herrnstein's examination of those within a sample of roughly 12,500 persons aged 14 to 22 who went on to four-year colleges, the Beacon Hill white who scored in the 57th percentile on the SAT has the same chance of gaining admission as a Roxbury Black who scored at the 12th percentile (an edge to the Black of over 140 points).

More perversely, however, an underprivileged white who scored in the 36th percentile has the same chance as a Beacon Hill Black who scored in the 17th percentile (an edge to the more privileged Black of roughly 80 points).