London Conference on Intelligence

The London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) was a secret, invitation-only conference on human intelligence, including race and intelligence and eugenics, held at University College London (UCL) from 2014 to 2017. It was organized by the UCL honorary lecturer James Thompson, who booked rooms quietly and without the university's knowledge or approval, and its speakers were dominated by figures tied to the Pioneer Fund, the Ulster Institute for Social Research, and the journal Mankind Quarterly. Exposed by a student newspaper in early 2018, it became the most visible instance of organized academic eugenics in the human-biodiversity network.¹²

Organization and Participants

Thompson convened the conference annually and circulated invitations privately. An analysis of the programs found that 82 percent of those who spoke at both the 2015 and 2016 meetings were associated with the Ulster Institute, run by the psychologist Richard Lynn, or with Mankind Quarterly. Participants included Emil Kirkegaard, who runs the non-peer-reviewed OpenPsych paper repository, the Cambridge researcher Noah Carl, the psychologist Michael Woodley of Menie, and Kevin MacDonald, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a favored academic of the neo-Nazi movement. Several attendees had documented ties to white-nationalist and neo-Nazi circles.¹³

The named editions ran in 2015, 2016, and 2017, with the conference first convening in 2014; the 2017 program comprised 22 talks across three days, May 12 to 14. Other attendees included the Danish psychologist Helmuth Nyborg, who appeared in 2015 and 2016, the Mankind Quarterly co-editor and Pioneer Fund director Gerhard Meisenberg, and Andrew Sabisky, who later became a Downing Street adviser to Dominic Cummings before resigning in February 2020 over his published comments endorsing eugenics and claiming that black Americans have lower average intelligence. Kirkegaard's presence drew particular attention because he had published online posts rationalizing aspects of child sexual abuse.⁵⁶

Exposure and Fallout

The student newspaper London Student exposed the conference on January 10, 2018. UCL opened an investigation and barred Thompson from convening further events on campus, and he moved into retirement. The journalist Toby Young resigned from the newly created Office for Students on the day his attendance at a related eugenics event was revealed. The following year UCL completed its inquiry, and the University of Cambridge terminated the research fellowship of Noah Carl after a campaign over his association with the conference and his publications on race. The episode documented the persistence of a Pioneer Fund-linked eugenics-research network inside mainstream British academia.²⁴

UCL had granted Thompson honorary status and let him book rooms as external events without vetting the speakers or content, a process breach the university acknowledged in its January 2018 statement. The investigation report was published in 2020, but the parallel UCL Commission of Inquiry into the History of Eugenics, whose report appeared in February 2020, fractured publicly when nine of its sixteen members refused to sign the final document, arguing it had failed to address the conference and to confront the institution's eugenics legacy connected to Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, whose names UCL removed from a lecture theatre and buildings in 2020. The affair continued to generate freedom-of-information disputes over the suppressed details of the inquiry.⁵⁷