Eugenics, UCL and freedom of speech

Jump to follow-up On Monday evening (8th January 2018), I got an email from Ben van der Merwe, a UCL student who works as a reporter for the student newspaper, London Student.  He said “Our investigation has found a ring of academic psychologists associated with Richard Lynn’s journal Mankind Quarterly to be holding annual conferences at UCL. This includes the UCL psychologist professor James Thompson”. He asked me for comment about the “London Conference on Intelligence”. His piece came out on Wednesday 10th January. It was a superb piece of investigative journalism.  On the same day, Private Eye published a report on the same topic. I had never heard about this conference, but it quickly became apparent that it was a forum for old-fashioned eugenicists of the worst kind.  Perhaps it isn’t surprising that neither I, nor anyone else at UCL that I’ve spoken to had heard of these conferences because they were surrounded by secrecy.  According to the Private Eye report: “Attendees were only told the venue at the last minute and asked not to share the information" The conference appears to have been held at least twice before. The programmes for the 2015 conference [download pdf] and the 2016 conference [download pdf] are now available, but weren’t public at the time.   They have the official UCL logo across the top despite the fact that Thompson has been only an honorary lecturer since 200...
Source: DC's goodscience - Category: Science Authors: Tags: ethics eugenics genetics Uncategorized Universities University College London Adam Rutherford Francis Galton James Thompson Karl Pearson Steve Jones Toby Young UCL Source Type: blogs