The following resolution was adopted by a meeting in Cambridge convened by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (UK) , on Saturday February 23, 2019.
Oppose the promotion of eugenics and pseudo-science at Cambridge University!
This meeting convened by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) condemns the decision by Cambridge University’s St Edmund’s College and the Toby Jackman Newton Trust to award a research fellowship to Noah Carl.
Carl seeks to explain inequality, crime, intelligence and other social characteristics based on anti-scientific racial and genetic theories. He is part of a network of far-right and fascist advocates of eugenics.
We support the open letter, ‘No to Racist Pseudoscience at Cambridge’ signed by nearly 1,500 academics and students. As that letter stated: “We are deeply concerned that racist pseudoscience is being legitimised through association with the University of Cambridge. This fellowship was awarded to Carl despite his attendance at, and public defence of, the discredited ‘London Conference on Intelligence’, where racist and pseudoscientific work has been regularly presented. Carl’s work has already been used by extremist and far-right media outlets with the aim of stoking xenophobic anti-immigrant rhetoric.”
Noah Carl’s elevation at Cambridge is part of the broader state promotion of far-right forces across Europe. Last year, Professor Heiner Rindermann’s book Cognitive Capitalism was published, claiming global inequality is the result of genetic, racial differences in intelligence. Rindermann occupies the Chair of Educational and Developmental Psychology at the Technical University of Chemnitz, the city where over 7,000 neo-Nazis rampaged through the streets in August.
History shows where the promotion of such anti-scientific theories leads. Eugenics formed a central plank of the Nazi’s fascist program that ended in the Holocaust.
At the same time, prominent academics including Professor Jörg Baberowski at Berlin’s Humboldt University are seeking to revise German history and rehabilitate Nazism with claims that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler “was not vicious”. We support the fight of students at Humboldt University against such dangerous falsifications of the past.
Universities must be centres of scholarship and learning, not havens for the promotion of neo-fascist ideology!
This meeting demands that St Edmund’s College and the Newton Trust end their silence and publicly explain the basis on which this prestigious research fellowship was awarded to Noah Carl.
We urge all concerned students, clubs and societies, to pass resolutions demanding that Noah Carl’s research fellowship be rescinded. This demand is part of the necessary fight against the state promotion of far-right influence at universities across Europe and internationally.
February 23, 2019