For an Enlightened Direction for Science in the Universities!

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"Academic freedom" and the case of Prof Coleman:
For an Enlightened Direction for Science in the Universities!

The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) recently published a series of articles on what it refers to as threats to "academic freedom". As part of this, it covered the case of David Coleman, Professor of Demography at the Centre for Population Research at Oxford University. This particular issue has been the centre of some attention lately; in Manchester on May 17, a rally was held against the invite to David Coleman by Manchester University.

            The issue was raised when members of Oxford Student Action for Refugees (STAR) raised a petition questioning the activities of demographer Prof Coleman in the light of "his very public work for the pressure group Migration Watch" and "his long but quite unpublicised involvement in the Eugenics Society/Galton Institute". In his own words, he has acted as an honorary adviser to Migration Watch from its beginning and is a member of its Council.

            The petition stated that "Coleman is acquiring a public image in the ongoing public debate about immigration, and that he is using his status as a university professor to legitimise the views and reports produced by Migration Watch ... Through his many media appearances, Professor Coleman is bringing the university into disrepute by associating it with the views of  Migration Watch." It called on the University to ask him "to refrain from using his academic title when appearing on behalf of Migration Watch in the media" and to "consider the suitability of Coleman's continued tenure as a Professor of the University, in light of his well-known opinions and affiliations relating to immigration and eugenics."

            The reaction of the media was one of labelling the petition a "gagging order" and a "witch hunt". The THES in particular has been attempting to set the debate in terms of taking sides over whether or not one supports "free speech" as part of a wider campaign of setting the agenda in higher education and research.

            Rather than being drawn into this debate, let us take a look at the Galton Institute, eugenics and Migration Watch.

            The ideas of eugenics were first systematised by Sir Francis Galton in the latter half of the 19th Century. In his 1883 Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, he described the word:

            "We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognisance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least a neater word and a more generalised one than viriculture which I once ventured to use."

            Though this definition is manifestly racist in form, the focus of early eugenics was that "genius" and "talent" were hereditary traits in humans which were particularly correlated with social class. It was part of that ideology regarding the existence of classes in society as "natural". The idea was to encourage breeding amongst those of "good stock". This went hand in hand with a desire for racial purity. In the words of Galton in introduction to his 1863 book Hereditary Genius: "it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations."

            The Galton Institute, of which David Coleman is a life Fellow, derives from the Eugenics Education Society, later simply the Eugenics Society, which was founded in 1907. It changed its name to the Galton Institute in 1989. Its direct connection with the past is evident in its stated aims, such as to promote the study of "human heredity and of its social implications" and the relevance of heredity to "human well-being in the broadest sense".

            Migration Watch, for which David Coleman is an Honorary Consultant, on the other hand, is an independent organisation, chaired by Sir Andrew Green, a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The group introduces itself on its website with the sentence, "While we appreciate the valuable contribution that many earlier immigrants have made, we believe that the numbers have now become too great." This sums up their position, which is based on the anti-people concept of weighing up human beings against economic worth. "We also recognise that many immigrants have made a valuable contribution to our society in terms of both skills and diversity," they state. At the same time, in January of this year, they issued a now notorious report stating that the net gain to the British economy of immigration amounted to only 4 pence per week per person.

            Both this line and eugenics are sides of the same coin. Part of eugenics is to eliminate the supposed economic burden due to the existence of "dysgenic" individuals, i.e. those of "inferior stock"; it is fascist ideology. This logic lead to the compulsory euthanasia program of the Nazis, with its associated propaganda and slogans such as: "This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community 60,000 Reichsmark during his lifetime. Fellow Germans, that is your money, too."

            While such history has discredited overt eugenicism , eugenic thinking shows itself in, and is indeed promoted by, each news item reporting the asserted finding of a genetic basis for this or that aspect of human existence, particularly behaviour. For example, "Genes may be to blame for infidelity", "Mental illness 'in the genes'", "Courting behaviour 'in the genes'" and "Smoking is in the genes" are just a few BBC articles from recent years.

            So to turn to Prof Coleman, we read in his paper Britain at the Demographic Heart of Europe? that "Britain compares rather unfavourably with the rest of Europe in a number of fertility indicators which suggest that a high proportion of births in Britain will be born into unfavourable material and social circumstances by virtue of the youth or single parent status of the mother. The Galton Institute may wish to take an interest in these developments."

            The phrase "unfavourable material and social circumstances" shows that nothing fundamental has changed in this thinking since the days of Galton. Another paper, A Study of the Spatial Aspects of Partner Choice from a Human Biological Viewpoint, which "considers geographical and social aspects of marital choice in modern Britain and their likely genetical import", is in a similar vein. He has also written a paper entitled Does Europe Need Immigrants? Population and Work Force Projections, where the starting-point of the article whether Europe needs more immigrants to restore its age structure and its work force, concluding that "attention should be given to making it easier for women to combine their desires for children with those for work," presumably since European women make more favourable material. Eugenics and economic worth are closely married in Coleman's papers.

            It should be noted also that the Oxford University Centre for Population Research, at which Coleman is Professor, has the long-term aim to "promote more speculative forward thinking and demographic 'trouble-shooting' about future demographic issues well," since, "in the 21st century new demographic developments, unprecedented in history, face the fifty countries of the developed world. These trends may be summarised as 'fewer babies, longer lives, diverse households, older populations, living alone, more immigrants', all of which raise important theoretical issues and practical problems." Prof Coleman therefore leads projects such as "Britain's place in Europe's population", "Patterns of excess early-age fertility in the English-speaking world" and "Demographic consequences of international migration to the UK".

            In the article he wrote in his own defence, published in The Telegraph, Coleman tells us, "I put my head above the parapet with Migration Watch because I was alarmed at what I saw as an increasing tendency by official spokesmen, political and others, to present a somewhat partial interpretation of statistics on migration, to reinvent the migration history of Britain in ways that supported the official case, and to present analyses of the advantages of the economic and demographic effects of migration which tended to ignore its drawbacks."

            The issue, however, is one of humanity. The professor cannot appreciate the offence of reducing the issue to the balance of economic benefits; he has the right to conscience, but to negate humanity in such a manner is fundamentally anti-conscious. Such views find no place within in a pro-human, pro-social science. In the context of the bicentenary of the end of the slave trade, the world's people have experienced the whole history of colonialism and the "debate", for example, on how human were the African slaves, as well as eugenics, taken up in the most extreme form by Nazism, but which is essentially the argument which leads to the holocaust. Such reactionary ideology plays its part, as did the earlier crude racism, in justifying contemporary racist and inhuman practice by the state in, for example, its treatment of migrants.

            Coleman's argument is also that he is somehow defending science by countering "the creation of an establishment consensus in the 'respectable' media and elsewhere intolerant of dissenting interpretations" with views that are "based on evidence and logic". He has a "balanced view": "Neither do I feel that there are no benefits from migration – far from it. But there is pain as well as gain."

            However, scientists, students and academic institutions do not exist in a vacuum – their views and arguments influence public policy, and students have every right to expose racist and anti-human views whenever they surface. Rather than being diverted by, or taking sides over, the dogmatic rendering of reducing the arguments to an issue of free speech, which is a separate matter altogether and not how the issue poses itself, students and academia as a whole have the duty to take up their social responsibility to defend science against attacks which are taking place under the spurious signboard of "academic freedom".

            Workers’ Weekly Youth Group calls on students and staff to unite around the demand for an enlightened direction for science in the universities and fight against the imposition of a retrogressive and irrationalist content and the fostering of pseudo-science.