Coleman petition slammed
Oxford students have been lambasted in the media after their campaign against the controversial Professor of Demography, David Coleman, backfired. Last term it was reported that the Oxford branch of Student Action for Refugees (STAR) was petitioning the University to reconsider the employment of Professor Coleman, a consultant to the think-tank MigrationWatch UK and member of the Galton Institute.
The petition called for Professor Coleman not to use his academic title when appearing on behalf of Migration Watch and for the university to “consider the suitability of Coleman’s continued tenure as a Professor at the University”. In a front-page article in The Daily Telegraph on March 9, Coleman slammed the petition as being “a distinctly gamma-minus affair” and accused its authors of having “little knowledge of the relevant literature”.
In the same article, Coleman stated that he believed official political spokesmen were increasingly presenting “analysis of the advantages of the economic and demographic effects of migration which tended to ignore its drawbacks.” On the same day, Coleman was also featured on the front page of The Independent.
Coleman was also quoted in a Daily Mail article, which condemned the STAR campaign, saying that, “It is the signatories [of the petition] who will bring this university into disrepute and it is they who should reconsider their membership.” Speaking to The Oxford Student earlier this week, however, he indicated that he wanted to draw a line under the affair, saying that he would not support any disciplinary action being taken by the university against the students behind the petition.
Wadham second year Kieran Hutchinson Dean, one of the organisers of the campaign, emphasised that he was not planning to campaign any more about Coleman. He said, “It was understandable that the petition was interpreted in the way that it was. It was never our intention to try and get him fired, and we didn’t even submit the petition to the university. It was really quite overblown by the national press.
The Mail and The Telegraph have their own agenda on this sort of issue, and that’s quite “The petition was really quite overblown by the national press”
19th Apr 2007