Noah Carl | |
---|---|
Education | University of Oxford |
Occupation | Intelligence researcher |
Noah Carl is a British sociologist and intelligence researcher who co-owns the Daily Sceptic blog. He was investigated and subsequently dismissed from his position as a Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellow at St Edmund's College, Cambridge after over 500 academics signed a letter repudiating his research and public stance on race and intelligence, calling it "ethically suspect and methodologically flawed", and stating their concern that "racist pseudoscience is being legitimised through association with the University of Cambridge." [1] [2] [3] An investigation by the college concluded that Carl's work was "poor scholarship" which violated standards of academic integrity, and that Carl had collaborated with right-wing extremists. [4]
Carl received a BA in Human Sciences, an MSc in Sociology and a DPhil in Sociology from the University of Oxford. [5] His DPhil thesis was titled Cognitive ability and socio-political beliefs and attitudes. [6] Prior to his appointment to the St Edmund's College, Cambridge fellowship, Carl received media attention for papers on the link between artistic tastes and views on Brexit, [7] the reasons why London pubs are disappearing, [8] and a study for Adam Smith Institute which found that conservatives were heavily underrepresented among academics at British universities. [9] [10] Additionally, he was in the news for a study on the relationship between intelligence and trust in other members of society. [11] [12]
His work has been published in academic journals such as Intelligence , the Journal of Biosocial Science , the British Journal of Sociology , as well as Mankind Quarterly , which is commonly described as a white supremacist journal. [13] [14] As of 2018, he was the second most prolific contributor to OpenPsych , an online publisher that has been described in the New Statesman as a "pseudo-science factory-farm". [15] According to an article in the New Statesman from February 2018, Carl had also published two papers on whether larger Muslim populations make terrorism more likely and one suggesting that British stereotypes about immigrants are "largely accurate". [16] In relation to the latter article, the New Statesman quoted Dr. Niko Yiannakoulias of McMaster University as commenting: "It is never OK to publish research this bad, even in an inconsequential online journal." [16]
Carl has spoken twice at the London Conference on Intelligence, a private conference on human intelligence at which some attendees presented papers on race and intelligence and eugenics. [16] He was one of 15 attendees to collaborate on a letter defending the conference following media coverage. The letter was published in the journal Intelligence in September 2018. [17]
In December 2018, Carl was awarded the Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellowship, a 3-year fellowship at St Edmund's College. More than 500 academics signed a letter opposing Carl's appointment to the fellowship, stating their "deep concern" that "racist pseudoscience is being legitimised through association with the University of Cambridge." [1] [18] Clément Mouhot, one of the letter's organizers, was quoted in The Guardian as saying that Carl's work relied on "selective use of data and unsound statistical methods which have been used to legitimise racist stereotypes about groups". [19] The St Edmund's Combination Room also produced a statement arguing that Carl's work "demonstrated poor scholarship, promoted extreme right-wing views and incited racial and religious hatred." [4]
An internal investigation at St Edmund's concluded that Carl's work demonstrated "poor scholarship" and "did not comply with established criteria for research ethics and integrity", and that it fell outside the normal protections for academic free speech as a result. [4] [20] The investigation also found that Carl had "collaborated with a number of individuals who were known to hold extremist views", and that continuing his affiliation would risk allowing the college to be used to "promote views that could incite racial or religious hatred" and damage the reputation of the college. Carl was subsequently dismissed from his fellowship. [2] A separate investigation into the appointment process itself found no irregularities in the process of recruiting Carl, but did recommend changes to future hiring procedures. [4] [21]
An editorial in The Times was critical of the decision to terminate Carl's post, arguing that his "main offence seems to have been to challenge the 'woke' left-wing orthodoxy". [22] Opinion columnists in The Telegraph and The Spectator also criticised the decision. [23] [24]
Historian Evan Smith argued that the narrative advanced by Carl's defenders "has little basis in reality", and that it is rather these defenders who seek to stifle free speech by mobilizing a fear of "wokeness" in order to diffuse the power of student protest. [25] [26] Reaction from supporters of Carl's firing also focused on questioning whether St Edmund's had failed to properly vet him before he was hired in the first place. [27] [28] [29]
In June 2019, Noah Carl began crowdfunding a legal challenge to his dismissal. [30] [31] In September 2019 his $100,000 fundraising goal was reached. [32] Varsity reported that this campaign was coordinated by a company created by a developer named Conner Douglass who had provided similar services to white nationalist Richard Spencer and other neo-Nazis involved in the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. [27] [30]
In March 2021, Carl withdrew his claim; the case was settled by a confidential agreement between both parties. [33]
Reviewing the controversy surrounding Carl's dismissal in 2023, scholar John M. Herbert distinguished between academic freedom and inflammatory remarks including racism in a different setting, for example arguing that "academic freedom is not the same as absolution or immunity from the consequences of extramural speech." He would go on to support Carl being dismissed on the basis Carl authored pseudoscience papers outside of his research at the University of Cambridge and also commented: "Noah Carl's Oxford credentials were touted by White supremacists in order to promote eugenics." [34]
Since October 2021, Carl has been a director of the company Skeptics Ltd., publisher of The Daily Sceptic which promotes misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines and climate change denial. [35] [36]
Carl is a frequent writer for The Daily Sceptic and has published articles critical of the COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom as well as support for the Great Barrington Declaration. [37]
Carl is currently an editor for the Aporia Magazine which has published interviews with eugenicists and advocates of scientific racism. [38]
Kevin B. MacDonald is an American antisemitic conspiracy theorist, white supremacist, and retired professor of evolutionary psychology at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB).
St Edmund's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in England. Founded in 1896, it is the second-oldest of the three Cambridge colleges oriented to mature students, which accept only students reading for postgraduate degrees or for undergraduate degrees if aged 21 years or older.
The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences". The organization has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the Pioneer Fund as a hate group. One of its first projects was to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of Erbkrank, a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics.
Toby Daniel Moorsom Young is a British social commentator. He is the founder and director of the Free Speech Union, an associate editor of The Spectator, creator of The Daily Sceptic blog and a former associate editor at Quillette.
Mankind Quarterly is a pseudoscientific journal that covers physical and cultural anthropology, including human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, linguistics, mythology, archaeology, and biology. It has been described as a "cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment", a "white supremacist journal", and "a pseudo-scholarly outlet for promoting racial inequality". The Mankind Quarterly is published by the white nationalist Human Diversity Foundation.
Intelligence is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal of psychology that covers research on intelligence and psychometrics. It is published by Elsevier and is the official journal of the International Society for Intelligence Research. The journal was established in 1977 by Douglas K. Detterman. The editor-in-chief is Richard J. Haier.
Linda Susanne Gottfredson is an American psychologist and writer. She is professor emerita of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. She is best known for writing the 1994 letter "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", which was published in the Wall Street Journal in defense of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's controversial book The Bell Curve (1994).
The International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) is a scientific society for researchers in human intelligence. It was founded by Douglas K. Detterman of Case Western Reserve University in 2000.
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Toby Alexander Howard Wilkinson, is an English Egyptologist and academic. After studying Egyptology at the University of Cambridge, he was Lady Wallis Budge Research Fellow in Egyptology at Christ's College, Cambridge and then a research fellow at the University of Durham. He became a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge in 2003. He was Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Lincoln from 2017 to 2021, and then Vice Chancellor of Fiji National University from January 2021 to December 2021. Since 2022, he has been Fellow for Development at Clare College, Cambridge.
Heiner Rindermann is a controversial German psychologist and educational researcher.
Matthew Peter Dominic Bullock is a former banker and chief executive. From 2014 until 2019, he was Master of St Edmund's College, Cambridge.
Clément Mouhot is a French mathematician and academic. He is Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. His research is primarily in partial differential equations and mathematical physics.
The Welfare Trait: How State Benefits Affect Personality is a 2015 book by Adam Perkins, Lecturer in the Neurobiology of Personality at King's College London.
Gerhard Meisenberg is a German biochemist. As of 2018, he was a professor of physiology and biochemistry at Ross University School of Medicine in Dominica. He is a director, with Richard Lynn, of the Pioneer Fund, which has been described as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He was, until 2018 or 2019, the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, which is commonly described as a white supremacist journal and purveyor of scientific racism.
Aurelio José Figueredo is an American evolutionary psychologist. He is a professor of psychology, Family Studies and Human Development at the University of Arizona, where he is also the director of the Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology Laboratory. He is also a member of the interdisciplinary Center for Insect Science at the University of Arizona. His major areas of research interest are the evolutionary psychology and behavioral development of life history strategy, cognition, sex, and violence in human and nonhuman animals, and the quantitative ethology and social development of insects, birds, and primates. He is known for his research on personality, such as a 1997 study in which he and James E. King developed the Chimpanzee Personality Questionnaire to measure the Big Five personality traits in chimpanzees.
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OpenPsych is an online collection of three pseudoscientific open access journals covering behavioral genetics, psychology, and quantitative research in sociology. Many articles on OpenPsych promote scientific racism, and the site has been described as a "pseudoscience factory-farm". The journals were started in 2014 by a pair of nonprofessional researchers, Emil Kirkegaard and Davide Piffer, who had difficulty publishing their studies in mainstream peer-reviewed scientific journals. The website describes its contents as open peer reviewed journals, but the qualifications and neutrality of its reviewers and quality of reviews have been disputed.
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Carl has also written for Mankind Quarterly, described as a white supremacist journal and published by the Pioneer Fund, a pro-eugenics fund which also bankrolls Jared Taylor's white nationalist American Renaissance.