CUSU Council has unanimously passed a motion to support St. Edmund’s College JCR in their calls for further investigation into the controversial appointment of Dr. Noah Carl, who has previously been linked to eugenics work.

The motion supports the students of St. Edmund’s wishes to achieve a “fair and balanced investigation” into Dr. Noah Carl, the current holder of the Toby Jackson Newton Trust Junior Research Fellowship, and “the processes that lead to this selection”.

Student representatives from St. Edmund’s told Council that their College’s student population has unanimously rejected the College’s panel investigation of Carl on the grounds that the panel was not independent, lacked a timeline and adequate relevant expertise.

They asked for “solidarity” from JCR and MCR representatives at CUSU Council, and for them to “take the campaign forward in College, [and] to have the University take a stance on racism and the definition of racist research”.

A spokesperson from St. Edmund’s College declined to comment on the situation, telling Varsity that “the College is following its internal procedures and will not comment while these are under way.”

The St. Edmund’s College Combination Room held an emergency meeting on 25th November, writing to the College about the situation and calling for an investigation into Carl’s appointment.

The open letter urged the College to confirm whether the appointment panel had known of Carl’s participation in the London Conference on Intelligence, a controversial conference on race intelligence and eugenics secretly held at UCL for three years in a row.

In December, over 280 academics signed an open letter condemning the appointment of Carl to the research fellowship, citing links of his research to eugenics and racial profiling.

The letter described Carl’s work as “ethically suspect and methodologically flawed”, and called on the University of Cambridge to “immediately conduct an investigation” into his appointment.

It also demanded the College, University, and the Newton Trust disassociate themselves from research that “seeks to establish correlations between race, genes, intelligence, and criminality in order to explain one by the other”, and highlighting their concern that “racist pseudoscience” being legitimised through Carl’s appointment in Cambridge.

The motion also called on CUSU to lobby the University to take a clear stance on Dr. Carl’s appointment, as well as raise awareness about “the perceived comeback of race sciences in Cambridge”.

A spokesperson for St Edmund’s College told Varsity: “The College is following its internal procedures and will not comment while these are under way.”