King's lecturer apologises for offending Somali community

Dr Adam Perkins, the King’s lecturer who last week sparked public outrage after a series of offensive tweets were brought to the attention of King’s Intersectional Feminist Community, has issued a public apology on twitter.

In his apology which was reportedly sent to King’s Intersectional Feminist Society last Thursday following felix's investigation, Perkins says: “I would like to apologise wholeheartedly for any offence caused by my recent social media posts concerning use of the words “human capital” and my discussion of Swedish government data. It was not my intention to cause offence and my posts were part of an ongoing effort to understand disadvantage.

“Research on individual differences variables, such as personality, inevitably entails addressing sensitive topics and scientists should be at liberty to address challenging scientific questions. I now realise that such discussions of data need to be conducted with extra care and context.”

In the original tweets, Perkins shared a statistic of “danish data suggesting that welfare benefits taste sweeter to some cultures than others” and he defended Trump’s Muslim Ban saying it “makes sense in human capital terms: people from the banned nations tend to be over-represented in crime and unemployement [sic] stats”.

His social media use came under fire not only because of it’s anti-immigration and particularly anti-Somali rhetoric but also due to his pseudoscientific arguments. Felix found the research ‘cited’ to be either unrelated to the argument presented or unreliable, having undergone a dubious at best ‘peer-review’ process.

The tweets eventually resulted in a condemning statement from King’s Intersectional Feminist Society and a subsequent petition from King’s Somali Society demanding a “formal apology”.

“Somali students have expressed hurt and anger that such educator and peer could express so much stigmatised and ad hoc rhetoric directed towards them, fellow Muslims and black communities based on nothing but unevaluated statistics. To critique and express opinion is a freedom of speech, however to expresses a dichotomy that entrenches racism and divisive intolerance should be unacceptable at King's.”

The apology was tweeted from Perkins’ personal twitter account following criticism from felix in which it was pointed out that “it is unclear where Perkins' apology can be found; certainly not on twitter.”

Numerous twitter users have since come out in support of Perkins with responses such as

and

The original tweets have not been deleted.