Sathnam Sanghera: Mensa

Mensa

The other week I learned something new and rather exciting about myself: I am a genius. At the invitation of Mensa, I spent 45 minutes completing their Home Test, the first step you need to take to join the high IQ society, sent it off in the post to be marked, and waited for the result.

A letter came back a few days later saying I had an IQ of 155. To put this in a bit of context: the average IQ is 100; to qualify for Mensa, which takes only the top 2 per cent of the population, you need an IQ of 148 or above. A score of 155 puts me in the top 1 per cent. In short, I am very clever indeed.

But while this happy letter from Mensa confirmed what I had always quietly suspected, it presented a problem. I had also got four colleagues to complete the Home Test and was now terrified that they had fared worse than me. I would have to tell them my brilliant score, they would have to face the fact that they were not as bright as me, and, frankly, it would be awkward. Nobody likes a show-off.

My heart skipped a beat as they opened their respective envelopes. FT columnist Lucy Kellaway was first. It was a relief to see the slight smirk: she had got 155 too. Management editor Mike Skapinker was next. Again, that giveaway smug grin. 155 too. Then it was Paul Solman, the deputy features editor. A selfsatisfied smile. 155. Ditto for employment correspondent David Turner.

In one way it was the ideal result none of us were exposed as being measurably dimmer than the rest. But I couldn’t help feeling deflated. It’s fun being a genius, but when everyone around you is a genius too, it’s not so exciting. I began wondering about the accuracy of the Mensa test. Lucy Kelly away, the genius that she is, did a calculation on the back of an envelope showing that the likelihood of us all having an IQ of 155 was somewhere around one in 24m.

I fired off an e-mail to John Stevenage, the chief executive of Mensa, asking why we had all attained the same fantastic score. His prompt reply listed several possible explanations: we all work for the same clever newspaper so a high score is “quite possible” (our favourite explanation); some of us might not have kept very strictly to the allotted 45 minutes (our least favourite explanation); the Home Test is only a trial indicator in order to formally join Mensa you need to pass a more reliable supervised IQ test, or submit a qualifying test score from an approved test.

But my genius colleagues and I came up with an alternative theory: Mensa is so desperate for members that it flatters people who complete the free Home Test in the hope that they will then sit a supervised IQ test and become paid-up members. It’s a horrible, cynical thing to suggest about a great British institution such as Mensa but could it be true? Surely Mensa isn’t that desperate? Unfortunately, membership figures for the society, which was set up in 1946 by Lancelot Ware, a postgraduate Oxford student, and Roland Berrill, an Australian with a private fortune, suggest that it might be. Membership in the UK currently stands at a lowly 26,247 the lowest figure in 15 years, more than 17,400 below the figure 10 years ago, when membership reached an all-time high of 43,652. While Mensa has a worldwide membership of 98,861, British Mensa, the heart and home of the society, is in a very sorry state indeed.

So wheat has gone wrong? Well, Pretty much everything. Mensa did very well for a period between 1980 and 1997 when Sir Clive Sinclair was Chairman, growing from about 8,000 members to 36,000 when he stepped down. The expansion was the result of Sinclair’s high public profile in the 1980s and the work of chief executive Harold gale, who aggressively increased membership by placing Mensa puzzles and adverts in papers.

But things went very wobbly in the mid 1990s when Gale was unceremoniously sacked for running a small puzzle business out of Mensa offices. Though his appeal through the industrial tribunal was successful, he never got over the depression generated by the publicity. In 1996 the 57-year-old drove his car into a railway support bridge. The official verdict was accidental death, but those close to him believe he took his own life. Before setting out he left a note on the kitchen table. “It would have been better”, he was reported to have written, “if Sir Clive and the Mensa committee had put a contract out on me than let me endure the last two years.”

Things continued to fall apart when Sir Clive was in 1997 replaced as chairman by Julie Baxter, a sociable 45-year-old from Lancashire, the firstever female chairman of Mensa. In 1998 she resigned following a vote of no confidence passed at the Society’s annual meeting ob Bournemouth. She had already been sacked once before by the board but was reinstated by the membership. She finally left threatening to set up a rival organisation, complaining that Mensa’s leaders were “sexist, manipulative and bullying” and there were “dark forces at work”.

Speaking at the Mensa headquarters in Wolverhampton, where the society’s collapse in membership has left the premises particially empty (they are looking for smaller offices), Mensa’s current leadership – 47-year-old chief executive John Stevenage and 55-year-old chairman Sylvia Herbert, a freelance PR consultant – admit that Mensa has been through a very difficult period. “In 1999 membership numbers were in freefall”, says Stevenage. “It was a bit like stopping the Titanic going down. But we seem to have stabalised now.”

Asked to explain why membership has collapsed so spectacularly, the two reel off contributing factors: Mensa suffered as a result of bad publicity over the Gale and Baxter affairs; the society can no longer afford to run adverts in the papers (“money got tight in the 1990s”); the membership fee has increased from £25 to £40; people have an increasingly large choice of things to do with their leisure time. But there is, I would suggest another possiblilty: Mensa has a serious almost insurmountable image problem. Rather than having cachet, membership of Mensa is now considered a mark of social inadequacy.

Again, it’s a horrible thing to suggest, but I attend a recent Mensa social evening in London to see whether or not my predjudices were well placed. There are countless Mensa social meetings taking place every month – many of them called Social Interest Groups, focus on particular areas of interest, ranging from board games to bible study to grey hound racing. The meeting I went to was fairly unexotic new members meeting in a pub off oxford street.

With nearly all Mensa gatherings, the men outnumbered the women around two to one. And not everyone of course, was a social misfit. But there were certainly more than your average proportion of eccentrics in the crowd. One middle-aged man arrived in a yellow running top and tight black hotpants, looking a little like on eof the guys from that 118 118 advert (on asking whether hew had just come back from a jog, I was told: “No, that’s his casual wear.”). There was also an elderly gentleman in an tweed jacket who was using a tie as a bely.

When I asked a few members why they had joined, they all, invaribly gave the same answers; to prove that they were intelligent, despite not having flash qualifications; to meet like-minded people socially. Some of them even had met there long term partners through Mensa. It confirmed what had been long said about the society, that it is essentially a social club or even a dating agency for nerds – “somewhere for egg-heads to get laid”, or rather, somewhere for egg-heads with chips on there shoulders to get laid. The last thing I witnessed aw I left the meeting were two members snogging each other to at the bar.

“Mensa is essencially a social thing”, says Herbert, who recently the face of Mensa in the BBC’s IQ experiment, test the nation, and who enthusiastically reveals that Mensa has heard if seven engagements between members in the past 12 months. “If you have a high intellect sometimes you’re not understood by the general population. At Mensa you will find like-minded people who will laugh ay your jokes and that sort of thing.”

However when it was originally founded, with the aim of recruiting the top 1 percent, rather than the top 2 percent of the most intelligent people in Britain, Mensa wasn’t just perceived as a social club. There was talk of members possibly advising governments. Even now it officially has three aims, of which only one is “to provide a stimulating social environment for its members”. The other two aims are “to identify and foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity.” And nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence”.

Many Mensans have tried to get the society to do something useful in line with these latter aims, but efforts rarely get anywhere. In 1990 there was talk of setting up a school in London for gifted children, but it didn’t happen. A while back a prominent member talked about setting up a sperm bank, but that didn’t happen either. A few years ago, Mensa International, the umbrella organisation (national branches are almost completely independent of each other) launched Mensa Intellegtual capital Venturers, to offer advice to members who wanted to convert ideas and inventions into reality. Nothing has hit the market yet.

And this, perhaps is the main reason why Mensa is doing so badly. It lacks a sense of purpose. What is the point of a bunch of people with high IQ’s getting together? And surely IQ tests simply measure one’s competence at IQ tests rather indicating real “intelligence”? Besides, with the internet, nerds now have thousands of opportunities to get in touch with each other – ways that don’t require the hassle of an IQ test.

Mensa’s leadership, of course, reject the suggestion that Mensa’s time may have been and gone. They say membership levels are stabalising, that a new website next year will boost recruitment, and that it is becoming fashionable to be clever. Stevenage is confident that Mensa can expand commercially: the international organisation has just signed a publishing deal to release Mensa Puzzle books, it is working on releasing a Mensa Board game, and Stevenage is pushing the Mensa brand into new areas. “There’s lots of potential – we could do IQ testing for companies.”

But Jane Baxter, the former Mensa chairman who was ousted a couple of years ago, is not optimistic. “Where is Mensa going? Nowhere,” declares the woman who now runs an internet based society called Atticus, designed to “explore emotional intelligence in relation to religion, pyscology and philosophy.” “It’s outdated. There’s a lot of social and professional mobility and people just don’t have a need for it. It’s sad but I just don’t think it’s very relevant.”

Harsh words, no doubt coloured by bitterness and rejection. But I cant help thinking she may have a point. And what I think must count for something – I am a genius after all.