[1] In 1919 Porteus was invited to join the Vineland Training School in New Jersey, United States,[1] moving there to replace H. H. Goddard as Director of Research.
[2][1] This invitation came at a good time, as his full-time employment as a head teacher with the Victorian Education Department was souring and although he had no university degree, the new job launched him into a lifelong academic career.
[4] His theories about the superior intelligence of white races has led to recent controversy, including protests by students at the University of Hawaiʻi.
[2] Less than two months later, however, a group of university students and faculty called the Coalition to Rename Porteus Hall mounted a full-scale campaign in opposition to the name.
Both the original decision to name the building after him and the opposition to the name centered on his 1926 book Temperament and Race which the university called, "a classic in its field" but which the Coalition denounced as "a flagrantly racist attack on all non-white peoples" and "particularly insulting to the indigenous and non-white immigrant groups who, then as now, make up the overwhelming majority of the population of Hawaiʻi.