Toby Young Toby Young

How Noah Carl is fighting back against Cambridge

Dr Noah Carl, the young conservative academic who was fired from his Cambridge college after being targeted by a left-wing outrage mob, has decided to fight back. He is launching a campaign to crowdfund a legal action against St Edmund’s College, not just to restore his own reputation but to protect the rights of other scholars who find themselves being persecuted for challenging the prevailing orthodoxy. ‘This isn’t about whether you agree with my research or my political views,’ he says. ‘This is about protecting freedom of speech, and standing up to the activists who are trying to control our universities. Hardly a week goes by without another case of someone being fired, or disinvited, or deplatformed, just for holding a certain viewpoint. It needs to stop. Let’s show St Edmund’s College that they can’t get away with this.’ Noah Carl’s difficulties began last November after he was awarded the prestigious Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellowship. A group of hard left academics circulated an ‘open letter’ condemning the appointment and accusing him of ‘racist pseudoscience’, although they were unable to produce any evidence to back up that charge. Carl’s chief sin apparently was to write a paper entitled ‘Net opposition to immigrants of different nationalities correlates strongly with their arrest rates in the UK’ in which he pointed out that those migrants the British public feels most ambivalent about are the ones most likely to commit crimes when they arrive in the UK. To suggest that there might be a rational, evidence-based reason for the suspicion of any immigrant group was heresy in the eyes of open borders evangelists. This, and the fact that he’d written a paper defending the right of intelligence researchers to examine whether group differences in IQ are genetically influenced, was sufficient for these enforcers of progressive dogma to brand him a racist and demand he be sacked.

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