Campus Reform: playing footsie with White Supremacy

The quaintly named Campus Reform is yet another creature of a superannuated southern conservative, 78 year old Morton Blackwell. It bills itself as America's leading site for college news. God help us all if that's true.

A recent example of what it calls its rigorous journalism standards and accuracy, objectivity, and public accountability.

Item: Study finds conservatives 'right to be skeptical of scientists’ The first two paragraphs.

A new study by University of Oxford researchers suggests conservatives are right to be skeptical of scientific establishments, given the history of “scholar activism” in fields like sociology and political science.
Led by Nathan Confas, the study “Does Activism in the Social Sciences Explain Conservatives’ Distrust of Scientists?” can be found in the recent issue of the American Sociologist, a special edition dedicated to ideological diversity and conservative issues.

First of all kids, a pro-tip. When you're touting a new 'study', it's best to spell the lead author's name correctly. It's Cofnas. I told them about this weeks ago. Evidently they never read their Twitter feed. So much for public accountability. But this is the least of their problems. So let's cut to the chase. A team of University of Oxford researchers isn't perhaps quite as accurate a description as one might wish for.

• Nathan Cofnas said that he intends to start his D. Phil. (Oxford is too good to issue Ph.D.s) in October 2017. So he's a newbie graduate student in something called the Philosophy of Biology (yikes!). This may not even be technically true; Oxford lists him as a Probationer Research Student. A 2016 paper gives his address as Department of Philosophy, Lingnan University, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong, a small liberal arts college. Interestingly, it's a long opinion piece on race and intelligence, and how scientists refuse to study the topic. The journal itself reeks of nuttiness, in all its glorious diversity. Quantum theory and consciousness, yeah! But save the 'race and intelligence' thought.
  Seriously, Oxford, WTF is wrong with your admissions department?
• Noah Carl is a more senior member of this team of crack researchers. He's a postdoctoral at Oxford. His medium page seems to suggest a definite lean to the right; he also has the same bee in his bonnet about genes, race and intelligence as Cofnas. In fact, this and the Cofnas article cited are almost cookie-cutter replicas.
• The third and real ace of the pack is the oddly-named Michael A Woodley of Menie (he has some aristocratic pretensions). After doing a Ph.D. on the ecology of the plant Arabidopsis, of all things, he seems to have set out on a career to be the next generation's J. Phillipe Rushton (yes, the guy who correlated penis size with race and intelligence).

He contributed to this charming little tribute to Rushton at the explicitly racist Ulster Institute For Social Research, founded by Richard Lynn. This Richard Lynn:

I think the only solution lies in the breakup of the United States. Blacks and Hispanics are concentrated in the Southwest, the Southeast and the East, but the Northwest and the far Northeast, Maine, Vermont and upstate New York have a large predominance of whites. I believe these predominantly white states should declare independence and secede from the Union. They would then enforce strict border controls and provide minimum welfare, which would be limited to citizens. If this were done, white civilisation would survive within this handful of states.

If the evolutionary process is to bring its benefits, it has to be allowed to operate effectively. This means that incompetent societies have to be allowed to go to the wall… . What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of "phasing out" of such peoples. If the world is to evolve more better humans, then obviously someone has to make way for them otherwise we shall all be overcrowded. After all, ninety-eight per cent of the species known to zoologists are extinct. Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.”

Surprise, surprise, the same Ulster Institute has published a book by Cofnas. . And Woodley reviewed it. Thick as thieves, this lot.

Woodley was at that time giving his affiliation as The Ross University School of Medicine in Dominica, a diploma mill which operated first out of a hotel on the tiny island of Dominica, then a ferry docked off St Kitts, and soon, Barbados. Since then he seems to have landed a position at the Center Leo Apostel for Interdiscipolinary Studies at the Vrije Universiteit of Brussels, where he publishes on such subjects as whether feminist activists are 'masculinized'.

So, let's review. The article title is "Does Activism in Social Science Explain Conservatives’ Distrust of Scientists?". The subtext is A trio of white supremacists, or people with an uncomfortably close relationship with white supremacists, claim if we won't publish them, the mob will storm the ivory tower with pitchforks and tiki torches. And Campus Reform are heavily plugging their work.

Lovely.