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0 pointsn4r96y ago0 comments

That Noah Carl one is interesting, hadn't heard about that. The Cambridge college actually conducted a formal investigation with a panel led by a Professor, and published a statement [0] explaining their decision to retract the fellowship. The reasons cited were lack of research ethics and integrity in Carl's work, poor scholarship, and the risk of the college being used as a platform to promote racist views.

Frankly, this seems like a measured response to a fairly standard complaint. Perhaps the only part of it that grates me is the public and "outraged" nature of the complaint. Without knowing much more about Carl's actual work, I suppose the outstanding question is, if the reasons above are true then how did he get the offer in the first place?

[0] https://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.st-edmunds.cam.ac...

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barry-cotter6y ago

Yeah, if you get to pick the committee you can get them to report whatever you want, whether you explicitly instruct them as to what to find or not. Read his work for yourself and come to your own conclusions.

His research gate profile.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Noah_Carl

His website.

https://supportnoahcarl.com/

> Since I was fired, over 600 academics have signed a petition supporting me , and several leading newspapers have published articles criticising the college’s decision. The support I’ve received so far has been incredible! But petitions and newspaper articles aren’t enough. If we want to safeguard academic freedom, and freedom of speech more generally, we need to start imposing real, material costs on the institutions that buckle under activists’ pressure.

mayniac6y ago

> Since I was fired, over 600 academics have signed a petition supporting me

He initially got fired because (almost) 600 academics signed an open letter casting doubt on his work, on top of 800 students [0].

Also, I don't really think that "read his work for yourself" is a valid argument. For one, you're talking hours, if not days or weeks of research, which isn't reasonable. And secondly, unless the person you're responding to knows sociology well, they're probably not going to be a good judge of his work.

[0] https://medium.com/@racescienceopenletter/open-letter-no-to-...

n4r9OP6y ago

> if you get to pick the committee you can get them to report whatever you want

That's sometimes true, but I'd need more than that to suspect it in this case. The committee was chaired by a senior, tenured life fellow, and perhaps I'm biased as it's my alma mater, but Cambridge tends to be pretty insulated from cultural whims.

As the other reply pointed out it's not really reasonable to expect someone to become proficient in a body of scientific work in order to make an opinion, moreoever the great majority of his research gate articles require the text to be requested.

Unless something further comes to light I'm not yet persuaded that this is a miscarriage of justice or scientific suppression.

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