ON THE FOUR DESPICABLE INTELLIGENCE AND EUGENICS CONFERENCES AT UCL

 

       

Extract from my draft book: Lavender Rising: An Intersectional History of the Queer Struggle

7. Eugenics: The Scourge of Humankind

Luck, chance, and fate bemuse philosophers to this day;

Maybe everything’s predestined, but have it your way.

Our fortune is their misfortune,

As Isis rolls the die,

And secretive eugenics takes them like a fly,

Maybe we’re all controlled

By strange powers rippling from above;

Maybe the ruthless Gatekeepers are void of human love.

7.1 RETURN TO UCL

In January 2018, the Guardian reported that a senior academic (James Thompson) at UCL had hosted a pseudo-scientific conference on eugenics and intelligence, attended by arch-Tory Toby Young, with speakers who included white supremacists and advocates of paedophilia.(Rawlinson and Adams, 2018).

While UCL Provost Michael Arthur claimed that he wouldn’t tolerate anything on campus that incited racial hatred or violence, it was stated that the conferences had been held four times since 2014 and included associations with the U.S. Pioneer Fund, originally co-founded by the American, pro-sterilization, pro-Nazi eugenicist Harry Laughlin (Van Der Merwe , 2018)

In reaction to these unauthorised conferences, a medical student called Ayo Olatunji co-organised the ‘decolonise UCL campaign’ (Cheesegrater, 2018).  Leonard (2019) we quote Olatungi as saying:

“When we look at the legacy of eugenics there is heavy focus on race, class and disability, but the legacy also notably houses the ideals that led to the fatal persecution of LGBT people globally, through the instillation of imperialist colonial laws. We must acknowledge eugenics was and is intersectional no matter how perverse the ideas it generated.”

In July 2019, I (Tom) visited UCL, my postgraduate alma mater, for the first time since 1976, accompanied by my friend Scott Forster, a Scottish poet who I’d met at a meeting of the Edinburgh Creative Writers Group, and who’d helped me during 2013 to put together my history of Bayesian Statistics.

At UCL, we gave invited expert witness testimony to the 14 member Commission of Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL which had been created in reaction to student protests concerning the four secret conferences on Eugenics on the UCL campus. We came under the scrutiny of the élite Commission in an office attached to the magnificent UCL library under the dome that overlooks the celebrated UCL quadrangle.

The eugenics policies we condemned (see section 7.7) included, among numerous others:

Homophobic Discrimination

Transphobia

Social Control against non binary or gender fluid people

Practises of social control fuelled by gender-influenced colonial attitudes to the gender binary

Kevin Rawlinson and Richard Adams (2018) UCL to investigate eugenics conference secretly held on campus (The Guardian)

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jan/10/ucl-to-investigate-secret-eugenics-conference-held-on-campus Accessed 27 April 20233e

Ben Van der Merwe (2018) Exposed: London eugenics conference and is neo-Nazi links (London Student)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Student

(Iink: ninth reference) Accessed 30 April 2023

Cheesegrater (2018) Inheriting Galton: The people working to make UCL

less racist (News and Investigations

https://cheesegratermagazine.org/2018/03/19/decolonise-ucl-institutional-racism/ Accessed 29 April 2023

UCL Minds [1] Eugenics Podcast Transcript (UCL Living with Eugenics)

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-minds/podcasts/living-eugenics/transcrip

Thomas H. Leonard (2014) A Personal History of Bayesian Statistics. WIRES Computational Statistics Vol 6, pp80-115. Wiley Hot Article of the Week, 28 April 201