Noah Carl is a British sociologist and intelligence researcher. 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". Newspaper columnists have criticised the decision to dismiss Carl as an attack on academic freedom. Others justified the decision, arguing that Carl's work relied on "selective use of data and unsound statistical methods which have been used to legitimise racist stereotypes about groups", and alleging that he had collaborated with far-right extremists.
Biography
Carl received a BA in Human Sciences, an MSc in Sociology and a DPhil in Sociology from the University of Oxford. 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, the reasons why London pubs are disappearing, and a study for Adam Smith Institute which found that conservatives were heavily underrepresented among academics at British universities. Additionally, he was in the news for a study on the relationship between intelligence and trust in other members of society. His work has been published in academic journals such as Intelligence, the Journal of Biosocial Science, the British Journal of Sociology. He is the second most prolific contributor to Open Quantitative Sociology & Political Science, an online journal that has been described in the New Statesman as a "pseudo-science factory-farm", and he has contributed to Mankind Quarterly, which is described as a white supremacist journal. 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". 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.” 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. He was one of 15 attendees to collaborate on a letter defending the conference following media coverage. The letter was published in the journal Intelligencein September 2018.
Appointment controversy
In December 2018, Carl was awarded the Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellowship at St Edmund's College. More than 500 academics signed a letter opposing Carl's appointment to the research fellowship, alleging that Carl's work was based on pseudoscience and discredited race sciences. Mathematician Clément Mouhot was one of the organizers of the letter. According to Toby Young, writing in the conservative magazine the Spectator, a counter-petition defending him has been signed by over 600 academics. An internal investigation concluded that his work "demonstrated poor scholarship, promoted extreme right-wing views and incited racial and religious hatred", and that it fell outside the normal protections for academic free speech as a result. The investigation also found that Carl had "collaborated with a number of individuals who were known to hold extremist views" and concluded 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. A separate investigation into the appointment process itself found no irregularities in the process of recruiting Carl. 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". Opinion columnists in The Telegraph and The Spectator also criticised the decision. In June 2019, Noah Carl began crowdfunding a legal challenge to his dismissal. In September, 2019 his $100,000 fundraising goal was reached.
