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Yet another nail in the coffin of free enquiry this week, this time from St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, which terminated the research fellowship of the young, brilliant, contrarian researcher Noah Carl. This follows rapidly on the heels of the revocation of Jordan Peterson’s two-month visiting fellowship by Cambridge’s Divinity School in late March.
St Edmund’s claimed that “Dr Carl had collaborated with a number of individuals who were known to hold extremist views. There was a serious risk that Dr Carl’s appointment could lead, directly or indirectly, to the College being used as a platform to promote views that could incite racial or religious hatred, and bring the College into disrepute.”
With these moves, and its recently announced inquiry into the University’s association with the slave trade, Cambridge seems determined to signal its fealty to Left-modernism, or what African-American linguist John McWhorter calls the “religion of anti-racism”, the reigning ideology of our high culture.
What are Noah’s crimes? First, daring to attend a conference on intelligence research at University College London that was invitation-only and where some who study the putative association between race and intelligence were, apparently, present. Carl himself doesn’t endorse the race-IQ link, but he does defend scholars’ right to research in this area in pursuit of truth. That’s a distinction, between liberalism and the science of group differences, that is lost on the guilt-by-association mob.
The need for the event to be private should be obvious, given the hysterical reaction to it from radical students and staff that would accompany any open conference on such matters. This was not some secret plot to sterilise the unfit, but a serious symposium that had to convene in secret to avoid a lynching by the progressives.
Peruse Noah’s research profile on Google Scholar, which his social justice critics no doubt have not, and you will see that he has collaborated with numerous leading academics and written mostly on, well, intelligence research. Much of this is in leading peer-reviewed journals such as Plos One, and its findings are eclectic.
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SubscribeIs Cambridge broken? I had not noticed…
[Apologies. I thought that the drivel deserved to be decorated with a least one comment]
Meanwhile Carry on Blocking people on Twitter
Perhaps the significant point is that you hadn’t noticed.