The LCI was investigated in January 2018 following the 2017 attendance of
Toby Young (who was then involved in controversy over his past tweets and tenure on the board of the government-funded
Office for Students) at these conferences, as well as their alleged
eugenicist content,
neo-Nazi links and clandestine nature. The Guardian reported that "Speakers included white supremacists and a researcher who has previously advocated child rape." Young later resigned over the controversy. Thompson hosted the event without informing senior university officials. In response to an investigation by
London Student revealing that the conference had taken place on UCL's campus, UCL announced it would be investigating how a conference on eugenics was able to occur on their campus without the university's knowledge. A UCL spokesperson told
The Guardian that "UCL is investigating a potential breach of its room bookings process for events"; UCL also revoked Thompson's approval to organize future conferences. In response to the controversy, the journal
Intelligence published a correspondence defending the conference authored by 15 of its attendees. The correspondence disputed that the LCI was a eugenics conference, saying that, among the 75 presentations given there over four years, only two had been on the topic of eugenics. One of the authors of the correspondence, psychologist
Aurelio José Figueredo, was subsequently reported to be the only academic receiving funding from the
Pioneer Fund, which is associated with
scientific racism and eugenics. Figueredo told the
Associated Press that the conference was not about eugenics, and that its overall theme could not be represented "by a few presentations". This led to the university setting up an inquiry looking into its historical links with eugenics. Its report was published in February 2020, but nine of the 16 members of the team refused to sign it because it did not look into the conference meetings. Three of its buildings, the Galton Lecture Theatre, Pearson Lecture Theatre and the Pearson Building were renamed. ==Attendees==