Cambridge University fails to answer questions raised by staff and students after Byline Times’ revelation that racist pseudoscience is being promoted on campus under the guise of ‘freedom of speech’
Staff and students at the University of Cambridge have launched multiple campaigns demanding that the university conduct a formal inquiry into the influence of Peter Thiel and the far-right on a network of academics at the institution, following a series of special investigations by Byline Times.
However, it appears that their demands have fallen on deaf ears.
This newspaper’s investigations revealed the role of the chief of staff of Thiel Capital, Charles Vaughan, in cultivating an anti-liberal network of academics who have hosted alt-right figure Jordan Peterson and white nationalist extremist Charles Murray in the name of ‘free speech’.
Murray is a pioneer of scientific racism and eugenics who argues that black people have lower IQs than white people for genetic and environmental reasons. The bulk of the research he cites on race and IQ was funded by the Pioneer Fund, a Nazi eugenics foundation.
Peterson is a supporter of Murray’s work and has openly expressed his sympathies for scientific racism on the podcast show of another white nationalist extremist, Stefan Molyneux.
In both cases, the ideas being discussed have been largely discredited across scientific literature and shown to be based on a dishonest approach to research – as, for instance, one expert in the American Behavioral Scientist journal observed about Murray’s 1994 book, The Bell Curve.
“I believe this book is a fraud, that its authors must have known it was a fraud when they were writing it, and that Charles Murray must still know it’s a fraud as he goes around defending it,” observed anthropologist Professor Michael Nunley. “By ‘fraud,’ I mean a deliberate, self-conscious misrepresentation of the evidence. After careful reading, I cannot believe its authors were not acutely aware of what they were including and what they were leaving out, and of how they were distorting the material they did include.”
On 3 December, staff and students at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Divinity published an open letter, signed by more than 200 people, accusing the department of failing to abide by its commitment to “stand in solidarity with our BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) students and with our BAME colleagues”. The letter noted that the department had released a statement in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd in the US promising that “we are challenging ourselves – both staff and students – to think more deeply about race and to learn from those who have been marginalised”.
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The open letter expressed urgent concerns based on Byline Times’ first report that Faculty of Divinity scholar Dr James Orr had “extended a (presumably ‘personal’) invitation to Charles Murray, notorious author of The Bell Curve“. It went on to state that “Murray’s positions on genetics, intelligence and the alleged ‘dysgenic pressure’ of immigration are patently adjacent to eugenicist pseudoscience… The threat to students of colour and other minorities, represented by Murray’s invitation, once again stands completely at odds with the faculty’s explicit commitment to its minority students. As with Peterson’s invitation, the faculty’s silence concerning Dr Orr’s hosting of Charles Murray cannot be reconciled with its purportedly active solidarity”.
The open letter also referred to Dr Orr’s involvement in the Free Speech Union, citing a previous Byline Times investigation that confirmed its involvement in promoting scientific racism and white identity politics.
It said: “In the case of both these invitations, we are tending toward a ‘freedom of speech’ that is nothing other than a freedom to promote racist views, as well as to deny the viability of racism as both theoretical concept and lived reality. As the same recent reporting has shown, this affiliation of ‘free speech’ activism and racism is indeed institutional. In particular, the Free Speech Union (of whose ‘advisory council’ Dr Orr is a member) enjoys an uncomfortable association with racism and eugenics.”
On 14 December, following Byline Times’ revelations about Peter Thiel’s involvement in Cambridge University’s hosting of Jordan Peterson and Charles Murray, staff and students escalated their demands – calling for a formal investigation by the university into far-right influence on campus.
“The invitations to Peterson and Murray were not isolated events,” said a new petition signed by 185 people. “The investigation reveals how James Orr, together with other members of the faculty and wider university, are part of an organised network, formed with the direct involvement of Peter Thiel’s chief of staff, Charles Vaughan.”
The open letter noted that these individuals are working with a network of institutions, such as the Free Speech Union, to influence UK higher education policy. They are “seeding an ideology that is fundamentally, indeed deliberately hostile, to the university’s aims and values, as expressed inter alia in its equality and diversity policy,” it stated. “The repercussions of the work of this fifth column affect the entire university environment and even the whole of higher education in the UK.”
The open letter concluded: “In addition to our original call for action from the Divinity Faculty, we are calling for a university investigation (with the assistance of any relevant third parties) into the revelations of the Byline Times article.”
The new petition by Cambridge University staff and students highlighted “safeguarding concerns” over the risk of students being “groomed” into far-right ideology and demande