UCL to investigate eugenics conference secretly held on campus
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- 11 Jan 2021
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University College London has launched an urgent investigation into how a senior academic was able to secretly host conferences on eugenics and intelligence with notorious speakers including white supremacists.
The London Conference on Intelligence was said to have been run secretly for at least three years by James Thompson, an honorary senior lecturer at the university, including contributions from a researcher who has previously advocated child rape.
One prominent attendee at the conference in May last year was Toby Young, the head of the government-backed New Schools Network, who ran into controversyover efforts to appoint him as a university regulator.
Young’s involvement in the conference was revealed by the London Student newspaper on Monday. Young announced early on Tuesday that he was stepping down as a director of the Office for Students.
Young has also resigned from his post on the Fulbright Commission, which oversees student scholarship programmes between British and US universities.
Sir Nigel Sheinwald, chair of the US-UK Fulbright Commission, said: “I accepted his resignation, which I believe to be in the best interests of the Fulbright programme.”
UCL said it had no knowledge of the conference, an invitation-only circle of 24 attendees, which could have led to a breach of the government’s Prevent regulations on campus extremism.
“UCL is investigating a potential breach of its room bookings process for events,” a spokesperson said.
“Our records indicate the university was not informed in advance about the speakers and content of the conference series, as it should have been for the event to be allowed to go ahead.”
UCL said it had contacted Thompson for an explanation. It has suspended approval for his hosting further conferences and speakers.
Young, in a speech to a similar conference in Canada last year, described the extreme measures that Thompson employed to keep the conference a secret.
“Attendees were only told the venue at the last minute, an anonymous ante-chamber at the end of a long corridor, called ‘lecture room 22’, and asked not to share this information with anyone else.
“One of the attendees, on discovering I was a journalist, pleaded with me not to write about the fact that he was there – he didn’t want his colleagues to find out,” Young said.
“But these precautions were not unreasonable, considering the reaction that any references to between-group differences in IQ generally provoke.”
Previous attendees included Richard Lynn, whom the US-based research group Southern Poverty Law Center labelled an “unapologetic eugenicist”, and the blogger Emil Kirkegaard, who has written supportively about pedophiles being allowed to have “sex with a sleeping child”.
The science writer and broadcaster Adam Rutherford said the background of the speakers suggested that “some pseudoscientific nonsense was being discussed”.
“There are some people at these meetings with some deeply obnoxious views that are also scientifically invalid – notably Richard Lynn,” Rutherford said.
Many of the ideas discussed at the conferences, which have been running since 2014, ran counter to the contemporary scientific consensus, according to Rutherford.
“Human variation is, of course, real. But the proportion of genetic difference that is reflected in the characteristics that we can see is minuscule.
“What that means is that evolution is deceptive in this regard: we broadly use skin colour and hair texture – visual cues to class people into races but they are terrible reflections of overall genetic difference,” Rutherford said.
“In fact, there is more genetic diversity within Africa than in the rest of the world. Two black Africans are more likely to be more different to each other than they are to a white person or even an east Asian.”
Lynn told the Guardian: “I have written numerous papers on race differences in intelligence and their genetic basis. These have been published in academic journals.”
Kirkegaard did not respond to requests for comment. But Thompson told the Daily Telegraph that the conference’s main subject was how IQ was inherited between different groups and races. “Eugenics is one topic, but many topics are discussed,” he said.
Young said he attended last year’s London Conference on Intelligence as research for the speech he later gave in Canada, which was “about the history of controversies provoked by intelligence researchers”. He said he “thought the conference in London might provide me with some material – and it did”.
