The history of eugenics at UCL: the inquiry report

Jump to follow-up The inquiry into UCL’s historical role in eugenics was set up a year ago. Its report was delivered on Friday 28 February 2020. Nine (the MORE group) of the 16 members of the inquiry commission refused to sign the final report and issued their own recommendations. The reasons for this lack of consensus included the fact that the final report did not look beyond the 1930s. It failed to deal with the science, and, in particular, it failed to investigate the London Conference on Intelligence, which was one of the reasons the inquiry was set up. That is a topic that I addressed at the time. Firstly I should say that I agree entirely with all the recommendations, including those of the MORE group. I’ve thought for a while now that the Galton and Pearson buildings/theatres should be renamed with a prominent plaque saying why. But I was disappointed by the scope of the inquiry, and by the fact that it failed entirely to engage with the science. This was dealt with much better in the excellent podcast by Subhadra Das which came out at the same time. She had also made an excellent podcast, “Bricks + Mortals, A history of eugenics told through buildings“. The inquiry did some surveys by email. This was a laudable attempt, but they only got about 1200 responses, from 50,000 UCL staff and students and 200,000 alumni. With such a low, self-selected, response rate these can’t be taken seriously. The author of this report said “I believe...
Source: DC's goodscience - Category: Science Authors: Tags: eugenics UCL Galton inquiry Pearson Penrose Source Type: blogs