An Oxford University professor at the centre of a debate on academic freedom said last night that he was being hounded because he had dared to challenge the Establishment’s views on immigration. David Coleman, a co-founder of the think-tank MigrationWatch, has faced calls to be sacked from his job as professor of demography after being targeted by students opposed to his questioning of the benefits of large-scale immigration.

The Oxford Student Association for Refugees, part of a group that receives substantial funding from the Government and the National Lottery, said that the academic is bringing the university into disrepute.

Professor Coleman said last night: “My feelings about the motives of those behind these misrepresentations and their desire to suppress opinions that they do not share are at best left to the imagination.

“The breathtaking mendacity of their claim that this affair is not ‘personal’, they are not actually seeking my removal, or that they really want a ‘debate” is beneath contempt.”

Writing in The Daily Telegraph today he said that he had become involved in MigrationWatch after being concerned with the increasing tendency of official spokesmen to analyse the advantages of the economic and demographic effects of migration which tended to ignore the drawbacks.

“It seemed to me to be leading to the creation of an establishment consensus in the ‘respectable’ media and elsewhere intolerant of dissenting interpretations, regarding them almost axiomatically to be heretical or malevolent,” he wrote.

“Naturally there is disagreement within academic circles on the benefits and costs of migration, here and internationally. But those disagreements are (mostly) conducted in a decorous fashion on a rational basis.”

He added: “Those who have some specific knowledge on matters of public interest should try to keep a balanced interpretation in public view.

“That is not to say, of course, that various eminent economists and other experts do not endorse the economic and other merits of large scale immigration, or that my views are infallible. But they are based, I hope, on evidence and logic.”

Professor Coleman said that he is puzzled at the students’ objections to his fellowship of the Galton Institute, previously called the Eugenics Society. He says the group, whose membership has included three Nobel prizewinners, aims to promote and debate the ethical aspects of human hereditary and helped to “invent” demography in Britain.

Professor Coleman has been targeted because he acts as honorary adviser to MigrationWatch and sits on its council. The group, chaired by Sir Andrew Green, a retired diplomat, has been criticised by the Home Office for its forecasts of the level of migration into Britain and for questioning the economic benefits of migrants.

The Oxford Student Association for Refugees is particularly critical of the claim by MigrationWatch in January that immigrants contribute the equivalent of a Mars bar a month to the UK.

However, fellow academics have condemned the campaign to oust the don. One, Dennis Hayes, president of the University and College Union, said: “The students should be arguing with Professor Coleman, not calling for his sacking.”

The Tories have asked for an inquiry into the funding of the Oxford group’s parent body, Student Action for Refugees, which has had lottery cash.

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