Cambridge and the Stigmatisation of Intelligence Research

The Cambridge fiasco has made modern DEI look laughable, but it is no joke. Widespread damage has been inflicted by politically correct ideas about race over the years, and one of the first and worst casualties was academic teaching and research about human intelligence. The stigmatisation of this topic has increased lately, and the implications for scientific inquiry are grave. As far as I can
determine, as of 2025, not a single major college or university psychology department in the United States offers such a dedicated course. How did this happen to a key topic in psychology?

The marginalisation of intelligence research began more than fifty years ago with a backlash against the hypothesis that average group differences in IQ scores might be influenced by genetics. In 1969, a paper by Arthur Jensen exploring this possibility produced attempts to prevent him from teaching at UC Berkeley and from speaking at academic conferences (including death threats). E.O. Wilson was condemned as a racist after he published Sociobiology in 1975. His Harvard colleague Richard Herrnstein had experienced similar treatment after he published I.Q. in the Meritocracy two years earlier. Undaunted, Herrnstein co-authored The Bell Curve with Charles Murray in 1994, which discussed the important role that intelligence plays in stratifying modern societies. The responses to that book, mostly from academics and journalists who had not read it, continued the tradition of intimidation and vilification (Herrnstein passed away just before the book was published, so Murray was left to absorb these attacks by himself).

These examples and others like them deterred most researchers and faculty from investigating this topic lest they receive the same treatment. As a result, students interested in learning what intelligence research is uncovering have been left without access to objective courses or research mentors. Since intelligence is a pillar of meritocracy, the progressive Blank Slate orthodoxy that group differences are entirely explained by environment, culture, and social structures was protected from the findings of behavioural and molecular genetics, neuroimaging, neuroscience, and psychometrics. This lopsided understanding of group differences surely contributed to Cambridge University’s uncritical embrace of Jason Arday despite his weak academic history and highly unlikely personal story.

This brings me to Nathan Cofnas, the young scholar who finally exposed Arday’s apparent plagiarism and what he has called the “cover-up at Cambridge”.