University College London launches 'eugenics' probe after controversial conference secretly held on campus

Speakers at invite-only event have included notorious white supremacists

University College London has launched an investigation into a secretive conference where eugenics was debated (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

University College London has launched an investigation into a secretive conference held on campus by a senior academic who invited a notorious white supremacist, allegedly to debate eugenics.

Contributors to the London Conference on Intelligence (LCI), organised for the past three years by honorary psychology lecturer James Thompson, have also included a researcher who once suggested a “compromise” of allowing paedophiles to rape children in their sleep.

Attendees of last year’s conference in May included Toby Young, who has previously advocated offering free embryo intelligence screening to parents with below-average IQs in what he termed ”progressive eugenics”.

Mr Young, who this week stepped down from a role on the government’s higher education watchdog amid a furore over misogynistic and homophobic comments, revealed measures taken to ensure the secrecy of LCI during a speech at a similar conference on intelligence research in July.

“Attendees were only told the venue at the last minute – an anonymous antechamber at the end of a long corridor called ‘lecture room 22’ – and asked not to share the information with anyone else,” he told delegates in Montreal.

“One of those present, 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,” he added.

UCL said it had no prior knowledge of the content of Dr Thompson’s conference, an invitation-only event said to have involved a close circle of only 24 attendees. It has launched an investigation and blocked the academic from hosting further events at the university.

A spokesman said: “UCL is investigating a potential breach of its room bookings process for events after being alerted to conferences on intelligence hosted by an honorary senior lecturer at UCL.

“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. The conferences were booked and paid for as an external event and without our officials being told of the details. They were therefore not approved or endorsed by UCL.

“We have suspended approval for any further conferences of this nature by the honorary lecturer and speakers pending our investigation into the case. As part of that investigation, we will be speaking to the honorary lecturer and seeking an explanation.”

The university stressed it was “committed to free speech but also to combatting racism and sexism in all forms”.

Details of the LCI first emerged in an article by London Student, the university’s student publication.

Recurring speakers at the conference have included Richard Lynn, classed as an extremist by US research group the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which describes him as ”one of the most unapologetic and raw ‘scientific’ racists operating today”.

Mr Lynn’s Ulster Institute for Social Research has received grants from an American organisation, the Pioneer Fund, which was described by the SPLC as a “white supremacist foundation…dedicated to demonstrating white intellectual and moral superiority”.

He has argued that IQ tests can be used to determine the worth of racial groups and nations.

“What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures,” Mr Lynn wrote in 1974. “But we do need to think realistically in terms of ‘phasing out’ of such peoples.”

Other speakers at the conference have included Emil Kirkegaard, a researcher who justified child sexual abuse on his personal blog.

In a 2012 post, he wrote: “Perhaps a compromise is having sex with a sleeping child without them knowing it (so, using sleeping medicine). If they dont [sic] notice it is difficult to see how they cud [sic] be harmed, even if it is rape.”

He later added a note to the post in which he said he did not support the legalisation of paedophilia but advocated “frank discussion of paedophilia-related issues”.

Mr Kirkegaard presented research – which was not published by peer-reviewed journals – on differences in cognitive ability between ethnic groups at the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISID) conference in Montreal last July, at which Mr Young also lectured.

Labour MP David Lammy, a former higher education minister, questioned whether Mr Young should be allowed to continue as director of the government’s Free Schools Network.

He tweeted: ”I don’t think that anybody who attends a ‘secret eugenics conference’ attended by someone who advocates the rape of children should be a) working in education at all; b) in charge of schools; c) running an education charity that takes money from the taxpayer.”

Mr Young said he attended the London conference “as a journalist” for research ahead of his speech at the ISIR meeting.

“I popped in for a few hours on a Saturday and sat at the back,” he wrote in a column for The Spectator. ”I did not present a paper or give a lecture or appear on a platform or anything remotely like that. I had not met any of the other people in the lecture room before, save for Dr Thompson, and was unfamiliar with their work. I was completely ignorant of what had been discussed at the same event in previous years. All I knew was that some of them occupied the weird and whacky outer fringe of the world of genetics.”

He added: “Yes, I heard some people express some pretty odd views. But I don’t accept that listening to someone putting forward an idea constitutes tacit acceptance or approval of that idea, however unpalatable. That’s the kind of reasoning that leads to people being no-platformed on university campuses.”

Toby Young has previously advocated ‘progressive eugenics’ (Rex Features) (Rex)

Mr Young denied suggestions his resignation from the board of the Office of Students was linked his attendance at the conference.

Emma Yeomans, a journalist who first reported on the LCI, had said on Twitter she contacted him about the story hours before he stepped down.

Dr Thompson’s writings have often focussed on the idea that women are naturally less intelligent than men, and have also addressed “intelligence differences” between children according to ethnicity.

In a blog post in October 2017 for the Unz Review, a website which hosts “controversial perspectives largely excluded from the American mainstream media”, he wrote: “Somewhere between 3 and 4 years of age, tests detect racial differences in intelligence between black and white children. By 7 years of life, the differences are stark.”

Science writer, geneticist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford told the London Student that, based on the titles and abstracts from the material presented at the UCL conference, the views being discussed appeared to be a “pseudoscientific front for bog-standard, old-school racism”. He said: “As soon as you begin to speak about black people and IQ you have a problem, because genetically-speaking ‘black people’ aren’t one homogenous group.”

Dr Thompson denied his conference promoted eugenics. He said “many topics” were discussed, with a focus on ”the idea that intelligence is heritable”.

“The conference did not promote eugenics,” he told The Independent.

He added: “It was by invitation only because researchers believe, with some reason, that they will be hounded for debating about group differences in intelligence.”

In a Twitter post, Mr Thompson said he intended the host the conference again in 2018.