David Coleman of Oxford University has provoked student anger after it emerged that he was a co-founder of the anti-immigration pressure group MigrationWatch UK. He has said that immigrants contribute the equivalent of "a Mars bar a month" to Britain. Yesterday he defended his views.
It started as a petition to stop Professor David Coleman using his academic position at Oxford University to promote controversial views on the need for curbs on migration. Then came the wrath of the academic world upon the students behind the campaign, who stand accused of trying to stifle free speech. Cue Professor Coleman's appearance yesterday in the pages of two of Britain's more right-leaning newspapers, earning himself more publicity for his views than he could have imagined a mere month ago.
Cause célèbre for some, bogeyman for a number of Oxford's students, Professor Coleman is not just any lecturer. A professor of demography at the university, he is a co-founder of the controversial pressure group Migrationwatch, whose website insists migration has become "too high', with a majority now backing an annual limit on the numbers to be allowed into the UK. He is also a life fellow of the Galton Institute (formerly the Eugenics Society, or ES) set up in memory of Francis Galton, the 19th-century scientist who wanted to ensure that "the strong and fit" have more children than the "the weak and unfit". Previous members of the ES, it should be pointed out, include the "father" of the modem welfare state, Lord Beveridge.
One of the remarks that particularly upset the students belonging to the Oxford branch of Student Action on Research (sic - it should read Refugees) STAR, which launched the petition, was a claim from Professor Coleman that immigrants had contributed the equivalent of "a Mars bar a month" to the well-being of the UK. As a result, the students created a petition to call on the university to consider Professor Coleman's tenure. The petition also urges him to refrain from using his academic title when appearing in the media - arguing that his views have brought Oxford into disrepute by "associating it with the views of Migrationwatch".
Even as the petition was being launched one of its organisers, Kieran Hutchinson Dean, told Cherwell (the student newspaper) that Star did not expect the university to agree to its demands for the professor. "The main point of the petition is to raise awareness of his views and affiliations amongst students," he said. "We do not expect everyone to agree, but think that it is an interesting and important debate."
On the Oxford branch of Star's website, there is no mention of the petition. It lists its priorities as campaigning for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, with a particular focus on the Campsfleld detention centre six miles out of the city centre. It is committed to visiting the detainees and seeking its eventual closure.
But the students' call was condemned by Dr Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, who argued that, provided the views of the don were "legal and delivered lawfully, he had every right to express them without fear or retribution from his employer". It was also seen as a growing trend in higher education for academics to be singled out for their views. Last November, the London School of Economics lecturer and evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa was accused of reviving the politics of eugenics when he alleged that African states were poor and suffered ill-health because their populations were less intelligent than people in richer countries. Four months earlier, Frank Ellis, at Leeds University, became the first university lecturer to be suspended under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000. His suspension came after he told his student newspaper that black people and women were genetically intellectually inferior. Dr Ellis took early retirement last year.
Yesterday, the row at Oxford continued with Professor Coleman defending his views in a front-page article in The Daily Telegraph, saying the content of the petition was only worthy of a "gamma minus", adding: "My inclination would be to send it back unmarked." On Migrationwatch, he said: "I put my head above the parapet with Migrationwatch because I was alarmed at what I saw as an increasing tendency by official spokesmen, political and others, to present a somewhat partial interpretation of statistics on gration, to reinvent the migration history of Britain in ways that supported the official case and to present analyses of the advantages of the economic and demographic effects of migration which tended to ignore its drawbacks." An Oxford University spokeswoman said yesterday: "We are committed to academic freedom. He is permitted to air his views and he hasn't done anything illegal. I don't think we'll be sacking someone just for their opinions."
Few pressure groups punch so far above their weight as Migrationwatch UK. Co-founded by Professor David Coleman in 2002 and chaired by Britain's former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir Andrew Green, the "think-tank" has become one of the most commonly cited source of statistics on immigration in the media. Predictions such as that Britain is poised to receive a net inflow of two million non-EU citizens per decade or that the UK population will swell by six million over the next 30 years, have found ready homes in newspapers with an anti-immigration agenda. Calls to jail asylum-seekers who travel without documents for lengthy periods have also received support. It was this suggestion that prompted the former immigration minister Barbara Roche to accuse Migrationwatch of peddling "exaggeration and distortion". She claimed it was trying to undermine the 1951 Geneva Convention.
For many opponents, the claim that immigration has a negligible impact on the economy - little more than the cost of a chocolate bar per person per month - has provoked the greatest scorn. The Government puts the benefit at £2.Sbn a year. On its website, Migrationwatch, which is funded by donations, insists that it is not opposed to immigration - provided it is "managed". It also challenges policies of multiculturalism, quoting the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality Trevor Phillips, to support claims that Britain is "sleepwalking to segregation". Despite enjoying a relatively unchallenged position in much of the press, it accuses the media of trying to stifle debate, claiming it is this which has helped fuel the advance of the extreme right in certain areas.
There is more than a hint of Lucky Jim to Professor David Coleman, as he poses for a photograph, tweed-jacketed, in his book-lined room at Oxford. He looks like a man who would rather enjoy stirring things up and goosing the pieties of the moment. Somehow it is no great surprise to learn he acts as an adviser to the controversial think-tank MigrationWatch UK and has argued that "the net contribution by immigrants to average national income per head was equivalent to about a Mars bar a week."
All of which has, unsurprisingly, enraged the Oxford branch of a charitable organisation called Student Action for Refugees, or Star, which exists to raise awareness of the plight of refugees and campaign on their behalf. The raising of awareness in this case would be best served, the Star activists think, by trying to get Coleman, a professor of demography, sacked. They have sent a petition to the university authorities, demanding he should not be allowed to use his academic title when speaking for MigrationWatch UK and that, "in light of his well known opinions", his continued tenure as professor of demography at the university should be "considered".
It is such an asinine step, so obviously an own goal in PR terms, that, at any other time in recent history, one would be justified in suspecting skulduggery from Star's political opponents. It hardly takes the most brilliant student to see that trying to destroy the career of someone who disagrees with them was likely to backfire, publicising the very arguments about immigration which so annoy them. Someone at Star might also have realised, incidentally, that engaging in such an overtly political activity risks breaching the organisation's charitable status. But these are strange times. The Star case against Professor Coleman may not succeed in having him removed from his post but, in the longer term, it will have an effect.
Fear of reprisals, of the rage of students, is now a powerful influence on how academics write, speak and perhaps even think. The story of what happened to Coleman (and he is the third academic to have been accused for having unacceptable attitudes in the past eight months) will have a general chilling effect on the freedom in universities to research and write in the future. Taking offence, that great contagion of the moment, already exerts a hold on what we see on TV and on the stage. It affects what books are published. But when it reaches universities, it is time to press the alarm bell. If those in academic life are not allowed to think outside certain defined, socially acceptable parameters for fear of losing their jobs, then who is?
It is an indication of a new kind of activism that an organisation which clearly has virtue and good intentions on its side resorts to an attempt to destroy an opponent's livelihood, rather than address his arguments. "The main point of the petition is to raise awareness of his views and affiliations amongst students," Kieran Hutchinson Dean, one of the Star protesters, has said. "We do not expect anyone to agree, but think that it is an interesting and important debate to have." The argument is either utterly bogus or simply stupid: a debate in which one side wishes to silence the other is a contradiction in terms. Censorship, it is worth remembering, does not always involve a Ministry of Truth and the closing down of newspapers. A gentle, velvet version can be almost as effective, smothering free expression with threats and campaigns directed at anyone deemed guilty of inappropriateness.
The Star students may be young and idealistic but, like many before them they are using the plight of victims as an excuse to behave like bullies themselves. If they disagree with the views of an academic, they have endless opportunities to put their own opposing case. That is the way freedom of speech works.
terblacker@ aol.com
Sir - In view of the petition that has been circulated against me, and the very wide publicity that it has received, I thought that I should offer some clarification to my colleagues. My views on the petition itself are best left to the imagination. However, I will make a few factual points. Contrary to what is asserted, I never speak on behalf of Migrationwatch, although I believe it performs an important public service. Neither do I write its documents; I advise it from time to time. If, as occasionally happens on the media or in some debate, I am introduced as its spokesman, I immediately correct the attribution. Anyone interested further in my views on migration should consult, for example, the lead article in Population and Development Review 30, 4, 2004 and numerous other papers.
I am baffled by the negative allusions to the Galton Institute, formerly the Eugenics Society. It is a respectable academic body and a registered charity, of which I have been a fellow for over 30 years. Its aims, and the distinction of the members of its Council, can be seen on its website. It does not do 'research on eugenics' and neither do I. My four demographic publications under its aegis are in multiple copies in university libraries and easily found via OLIS.
Yours sincerely, DAVID COLEMAN, Barnett House, Oxford