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The University College London has undertaken an investigation into a “secretive” conference in which some speakers professed “controversial” opinions about race and gender.

The London Conference on Intelligence, or LCI, may have broken UCL’s booking policy, according the Daily Mail.

Some of those attending the LCI have “written about people in some countries having on average a higher IQ than those in others.” The conference was hosted by senior UCL lecturer James Thompson, a psychiatry professor.

The college has “suspended any further bookings” to the conference and is seeking an explanation from Thompson. A UCL spokesperson said “We are an institution that is committed to free speech but also to combatting racism and sexism in all forms.”

From the story:

[The university] added that it did not have prior notice of either the speakers or the content, because it had been booked as an ‘external event’, and thus was not officially endorsed by the university.

‘We have suspended approval for any further conferences of this nature by the honorary lecturer and speakers pending our investigation into the case.’

UCL’s insignia has appeared on a number of LCI publications, and within the conference’s logo on its official YouTube channel.

UCL professor David Colquhoun told the London Student that the LCI was engaged in ‘pseudoscience’ and stated that the organiser, Prof Thompson, ‘clearly doesn’t understand genetics’.

According to promotional material for the 2016 conference, it featured a talk by Richard Lynn, professor emeritus at the University of Ulster.

Prof Lynn has written controversial works highlighting what he said were differences in average intelligence between men and women, as well as different nations.

In 1994, he was criticised for accepting £33,000 of research money from The Pioneer Fund, which has also funded a controversial lobby group called American Immigration Reform.

He said at the time that he was aware that the Pioneer Fund might ‘fund things which some might find unacceptable, but I don’t accept that this affects the credibility of my research’.

He is president of the Ulster Institute for Social Research, which runs the journal Mankind Quarterly.

The journal admits on its website that it has ‘earned a reputation for publishing articles in controversial areas, including behavioural race differences and the importance of mental ability for individual outcomes and group differences’.

The Mail may be a bit kind in its descriptions. For instance, the London Student notes that the head of the Ulster Institute is Richard Lynn, “who has called for the ‘phasing out’ of the ‘populations of incompetent cultures.’”

Mankind Quarterly’s founders, it says, include “a leading member of Mussolini’s eugenics taskforce, and whose board once boasted Nazi Joseph Mengele’s personal mentor.”

The Mail notes geneticist Adam Rutherford told the Student that “based on the titles and abstracts at the LCI, some of the views presented by speakers were a ‘pseudoscientific front for bog-standard, old-school racism’.”

Rutherford added: “As soon as you begin to speak about black people and IQ you have a problem, because genetically-speaking ‘black people’ aren’t one homogenous group.”

Lynn’s Pioneer Fund, which the Southern Poverty Law Center says is “hate group founded by Nazi sympathisers with the purpose of promoting ‘racial betterment,'” financed studies used by Charles Murray in The Bell Curve.

However, Murray had responded to Pioneer criticisms in the late 1990s: “Never mind that the relationship between the founder of the Pioneer Fund and today’s Pioneer Fund is roughly analogous to the relationship between Henry Ford’s antisemitism and today’s Ford Foundation.”

Read the full Daily Mail and London Student articles.

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