Kate Clancy Gets James Watson Disinvited

"Moral character and ethics matter more than science."
(Kate Clancy)

I wouldn't normally write about this, but Kate Clancy happens to be in my wheel house, or perhaps just a little stuck in my craw. It seems she led the charge against James Watson speaking at the University of Illinois. I want to deal with this both at the level of principle and the particulars of the case. For good order: I refuse to send the obligatory virtue signal of "denouncing" the man's views before defending his right to speak.

I think this sort of silencing is distasteful, no matter who is speaking. Someone at UI wanted to hear what Watson had to say and there was no reason to think that he was going to incite anyone to violence or otherwise undermine the institutions of Western democracy. By contrast, Clancy threatened to organize a protest against those institutions if the talk was to go ahead. Clancy was objecting to the peaceful exchange of ideas between interested parties in a university setting. Watson appears to have had something on his mind that he wanted to share; an institute appeared to be willing to listen. The fact that Clancy couldn't abide this event says a great deal about her and people like her. The fact that the talk was immediately cancelled because of her Twitter-based objections says something about the institute and perhaps the larger institution. The weakness of our institutions against even the threat of protest is a bit disconcerting. But there it is.

But what about the basis of the complaint itself? James Watson is, of course, one of the discoverers of DNA, something for which he is justly famous. He doesn't just know a thing or two about genes. He knows what is, arguably, the first thing about them. It is not surprising that an institute devoted to the study of genomic biology* would want to hear his thoughts on cancer.

The News-Gazette article points out that he was going hold a narrowly "scientific" talk, but why should this matter? Watson apparently once held and perhaps still holds views about the genetic basis of intelligence and, well, "fun". He thinks, or thought, that black people are less intelligent, and women more fun, than he is. That is or was his opinion, or is at least something he accidentally said and later regretted saying. Regardless of what he now thinks, as a question of the distribution of traits in a population it may or may not be true. (We are told it is scientifically "discredited".) Watson's proposed mechanism (genes) may or may not explain the phenomenon. Now, even if that was what he had wanted to talk about, and if the Carl Woese Institute had wanted to hear him talk about it, what business is it of Clancy's?

Or we can put this point even more strongly. If James Watson can't say that intelligence has a genetic component, who can? How can this idea ever be discussed if the Nobel prize winner on the topic can't discuss it? Likewise, if not even a Nobel prize winner can talk about how to have fun in the lab, who can? But, again, that wasn't even what he was going to talk about. On Clancy's view, it seems, once you have said something that she thinks science has "discredited" you shouldn't be allowed to speak anywhere again about anything. This is a very strange view to me. I don't mind her not inviting him to dinner, or even not putting him at the top of her list of suggested speakers for her events. But to prevent researchers (and students) from hearing what he wants to tell them seems like overreach to me.

Unfortunately, she does seem to understand the power she wields. The Carl Woese Institute was certainly sufficiently cowed by the prospect of her "plan to organize against it". She may call it "moral character and ethics" but what she really thinks matters more than science is her morality. For Clancy, ideology trumps knowledge.** It saddens me. I hope this tactic will soon be sufficiently discredited to be immediately ignored by our institutions of higher learning.

Update: A Twitter exchange between Nathaniel Comfort and Kate Clancy tells us something important about discourse in this area. "[Kate Clancy] gets Jim Watson disinvited to give lecture at UIUC. What do you think: Social justice or censorship?" tweeted Comfort. That is, he simply raising the question of whether disinviting Watson is a good thing. He's calling for a reflection on a (threatened) protest. Clancy's response is to associate even raising the question with sending death threats. (She also deflected blame for "getting" Watson disinvited; she did not, of course, likewise deflect the praise she had been given before this.) This was echoed by Clancy's supporters who demanded that Comfort delete his tweet. Matthew Francis's statement clearly states (and amplifies) Clancy's objection: "OH FUCK YOU. How can this be read as anything other than calling people to give Kate more misogynistic hate? This is shitty." Grant offered the following advice: "You made a huge social media faux pas in your approach. Screencap the tweet, issue a simple apology, delete it, and try again. Very easy." Remember that Comfort's "faux pas" was to ask whether disinviting Watson was justice or censorship (which is the question to ask here and on which Clancy simply has an answer: it was justice) and to name the person who publicly led the campaign to make that disinvitation happen. Social justice activists appear to believe that questioning their actions is, in itself, as a social injustice! That's not good for discourse. To his credit, Comfort has left the tweet up and, after trying to explain himself and offering a private apology, appears mainly to have let the event pass.

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*I wonder if some sort of underlying conflict between biological anthropology (Clancy's field) and genomic biology is playing out here. It would be interesting to look into that.
**I added these two sentences and the epigraph. I'm grateful to my anonymous commenter for bringing this tweet to my attention.