Eugenics In 2015, Young wrote an article for the Australian magazine Quadrant entitled "The fall of meritocracy". Under a section titled "Progressive eugenics" he discussed developments in genetically engineered intelligence, and proposed that should the technology for selecting embryos for high intelligence become practicable, it could be provided "free of charge to parents on low incomes with below-average IQs.” He argued this "could help to address the problem of flat-lining inter-generational social mobility and serve as a counterweight to the tendency for the meritocratic elite to become a hereditary elite," through a mechanism that should be acceptable to political conservatives and also argued that "This is a kind of eugenics that should appeal to liberals — progressive eugenics." Young has maintained that criticism of him as a eugenicist is "based on a deliberate misreading" of the article and that "If 'eugenics' is forced sterilisation, what I was proposing was the opposite — free IVF for the poor." Young attended the London Conference on Intelligence at University College London (UCL) in 2017, which was described by the media and a number of politicians as a "secret eugenics conference". Young said that he attended the conference as a journalist to report about it (which he later did), in preparation for the "super-respectable" International Society for Intelligence Research conference in Montreal in July 2017 at which he gave a speech, which was later published. Office for Students In January 2018 Young was announced as one of the non-executive members of the board for the new Office for Students (OfS), a body intended to ensure institutions in higher education are accountable. The Guardian later revealed that claims (made not by Young himself, but by the Department for Education) about Young's teaching posts at the University of Cambridge and Harvard were misleading as although Young had taught at the universities, he had not been appointed to an academic post. The appointment became the subject of controversy when Twitter posts, described as "misogynistic and homophobic", were uncovered. He resigned a week later, stating that his appointment had "become a distraction" counteracting the "vital work" of the OfS. Shortly afterwards he resigned also as a Fulbright Commissioner. An inquiry was launched shortly after Young's resignation by Peter Riddell, the Commissioner for Public Appointments. Riddell said the OfS panel report to ministers about Young "made no mention of Mr Young’s history of controversial comments and use of social