On Thursday February 27th, Students rallied outside the F23 Administration Building to protest USyd’s decision to platform Professor Julian Savulescu, whose upcoming talk entitled ‘Polygenic Selection and Editing: A Welfarist Approach’ promotes dangerous eugenic ideologies targeting queer, disabled, and BIPOC communities.
The demonstration, organised by USyd’s Disabilities, Queer, Anti-Racist, and Welfare Collectives, drew passionate supporters opposing the scheduled talk, and the conflation of scientific discrimination with academic discourse.
Prior to the protest, campus security was overheard discussing plans to lock down the F23 building, though their presence remained minimal. The rally began with an Acknowledgement of Country that powerfully connected historical eugenic practices to the continued oppression of First Nations peoples, setting the tone for a demonstration that highlighted the real-world consequences of ostensibly abstract academic debates.
“This is, to put it bluntly, an argument for genetically selectively removing and eliminating personal traits that are wrongly assumed to be undesirable,” the first speaker* told the crowd, referencing Savulescu’s proposal to use polygenic scores to select against traits including “same-sex behaviour.”
Multiple speakers emphasised the political danger of such theories, particularly in the current global climate of rising far-right movements. One speaker powerfully articulated that technologies enabling trait selection “cannot exist in an apolitical vacuum” and further risk being “weaponized to fascist ends by those in power.”
A representative from the Queer Action Collective devastatingly deconstructed Savulescu’s argument, stating “He claims that gene editing will save us from the moral depravity of everyday people and this is why we have a moral obligation to gene edit.”
It was particularly damning when the protestors’ cited Savulescu’s own acknowledgement of the connection between polygenic selection and “the spectre of eugenics and memories of Nazi atrocities” in his 2021 work,a connection he seemingly dismisses in framing selective reproduction as a “moral obligation.”
Throughout the demonstration, the crowd grew as passing students joined in solidarity, culminating in powerful chants: “Hey hey, ho ho, eugenicists have got to go!” and “Sexist, racist, anti-queer, bigots are not welcome here!”
The School of Public Health has defended their decision to host the event, claiming Professor Jackie Leach-Scully will provide a counter argument, though her contribution remains conspicuously absent from promotional materials.
The talk’s platforming is especially concerning given the School’s problematic history with eugenics, including its continued commemoration of Harvey Sutton, who supported “regimes in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.”
The protest represented a powerful stand against the normalization of eliminationist ideas, with students making clear that no amount of academic veneer can disguise discrimination targeting vulnerable communities.
*Speakers were not named for privacy concerns
