From The Guardian:

Cambridge gives role to academic accused of racist stereotyping

University professors among hundreds who object to award of research job to Noah Carl

Richard Adams Education editor

Fri 7 Dec 2018

University of Cambridge professors and academics from around the world have criticised the appointment of a social scientist whose work they say has stoked “racist, xenophobic, fascist and anti-immigration rhetoric”.

A letter protesting about the appointment of Noah Carl to a prestigious research fellowship at St Edmund’s College claims that Carl’s work focuses on “academically discredited lines of inquiry” involving race and genetics.

“A careful consideration of Carl’s published work and public stance on various issues, particularly on the relationship between race and ‘genetic intelligence’, leads us to the unambiguous conclusion that his research is ethically suspect and methodologically flawed,” states the letter, which is signed by seven Cambridge professors and more than 700 other academics.

The group calls on St Edmund’s College and Cambridge to condemn “any association with research that seeks to establish correlations between race, genes, intelligence and criminality”.

… Mouhot said Carl’s writings included associations between cousin-marriage and electoral fraud within Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in Britain.

“The conceptual premise of such work is so obviously ethically suspect, and the ensuing methods so flawed, that it begs the question how such weak scholarship – which doesn’t meet scientific standards – was ever considered for such a prestigious and competitive fellowship,” Mouhot said.

Excellent use of “begs the question,” Professor Mouhot.

Here’s the abstract of Noah Carl’s paper:

Ethnicity and electoral fraud in Britain

Article in Electoral Studies 50 · September 2017

Noah Carl

Abstract
Several reports have highlighted that, within Britain, allegations of electoral fraud tend to be more common in areas with large Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. However, the extent of this association has not yet been quantified. Using data at the local authority level, this paper shows that percentage Pakistani and Bangladeshi (logged) is a robust predictor of two measures of electoral fraud allegations: one based on designations by the Electoral Commission, and one based on police enquiries. Indeed, the association persists after controlling for other minority shares, demographic characteristics, socio-economic deprivation, and anti-immigration attitudes. I interpret this finding with reference to the growing literature on consanguinity (cousin marriage) and corruption. Rates of cousin marriage tend to be high in countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, which may have fostered norms of nepotism and in-group favoritism that persist over time. To bolster my interpretation, I use individual level survey data to show that, within Europe, migrants from countries with high rates of cousin marriage are more likely to say that family should be one’s main priority in life, and are less likely to say it is wrong for a public official to request a bribe.