Noah Carl’s only crime is being a conservative

I was disappointed to learn that St Edmund’s College, Cambridge has decided to capitulate to a mob of woke student activists and terminate the fellowship of Dr Noah Carl, a social scientist. This follows two investigations carried out by St Edmund’s, one into the process that led to Carl’s appointment, the other into a series of allegations made by left-wing students. The students repeated the charges set out in an ‘open letter’ to the college last December signed by over 200 academics – some of them in fields like ‘gender studies’ and ‘critical race studies’ – in which Carl was accused of producing work that is ‘ethically suspect’ and ‘methodologically flawed’.

Noah Carl’s crime, in case you haven’t guessed, is being a conservative. Academics who are right-of-centre are becoming increasingly rare, as Carl himself documented in a report for the Adam Smith Institute in 2017. He found that less than 12 per cent of academics employed by British universities vote for right-wing or conservative parties, falling to less than ten per cent in the social sciences and less than five per cent in the humanities and arts.