Garrett began his academic career at Columbia University, where he became a full Professor of Psychology at Columbia in 1943. In 1955, Garrett became a visiting professor in the Department of Education at the
University of Virginia. Because of its ambiguous conclusion, one contemporary was concerned that the purpose of the article, and of the publisher's decision to print it, was to hand a political weapon to the
white supremacists then violently opposing desegregation. At the September 1961 meeting of the
American Psychological Association, the
Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues passed a resolution taking exception to this paper, declaring that the evidence supported the view that intellectual differences between Whites and Blacks were not biologically innate, and that there was evidence for Black-White equality in intelligence under comparable conditions. Garrett disputed this resolution in an article in
The American Psychologist the following year. Garrett co-wrote the introduction to
Carleton Putnam's
Race and Reason, published in 1961. According to A.S. Winston, he "praised
Byram Campbell's analysis of the Nordic as the ideal race." He is credited with coining the term
equalitarian dogma in 1961 to describe the by then mainstream view that there were no race differences in intelligence, or if there were, they were purely the result of environmental factors. He accused the Jews of spreading the dogma, and wrote that most Jewish organizations "belligerently support the equalitarian dogma which they accept as having been 'scientifically' proven". He wrote in the
White Citizens' Council monthly journal
The Citizen, "Despite glamorized accounts to the contrary, the history of Black Africa over the past 5,000 years is largely a blank," and, "The crime record of the Negro in the United States is little short of scandalous" (Garrett 1968). Garrett served as a Director of the
Pioneer Fund from 1972 to 1973. ==Death==