An organization headed by a prominent University of Nevada, Las Vegas professor has invited four researchers with ties to hate groups to speak at a May conference in Turkey.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the renowned Austrian economist who made headlines in 2005 over remarks he made in the classroom about gays, has invited the researchers to express viewpoints that some civil rights organizations call "academic racism."

They're scheduled to speak at the second annual conference of the Property and Freedom Society, an organization that Hoppe founded in May 2006 to promote "Austro-Libertarianism," according to the organization's Web site.

The conference is scheduled at the Karia Princess Hotel in Bodrum, Turkey, between May 24 and 28.

The society advocates unconditional free trade, "champions peace," and promotes the right to "discriminate against anyone in one's personal and business relations."

Anti-discrimination groups have criticized or condemned the speakers for their views on eugenics, or the study of genetic differences between the races.

"This looks like a very serious academic racist event," said Heidi Beirich, deputy director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, a quarterly publication that monitors hate groups.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Ala., provides tolerance education programs and fights legal battles with hate groups. It has publicly denounced several of the individuals scheduled to speak at Hoppe's conference.

One of the invited speakers is Richard Lynn, a professor at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland who is considered at the forefront of the eugenics movement.

Lynn is listed on the board of directors for the New York-based Pioneer Fund, an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a "hate group."

He has published several papers and books on how different races of people are more intelligent than others.

On his Web site, Lynn states that the average IQ of black Americans is 85, 15 points higher than blacks in sub-Saharan Africa because "American blacks ... have about 25 per cent (sic) of Caucasian genes and a better environment."

In 2002, Lynn wrote in the American Renaissance newsletter, a white separatist publication, that black Americans commit more crimes because they're "more psychopathic than whites."

The work of Lynn and others has done much to fuel white supremacists and other hate groups, according to professors and scientists who follow hate groups and "scientific racism."

According to the Property and Freedom Society's Web site, others who will be speaking include:

• Volkmar Weiss, a German scientist, who is scheduled to speak on "History as Cycles of Population Quality." He is listed as a member of the advisory board for "The Mankind Quarterly," a journal that receives funding from the Pioneer Fund, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Weiss' German Web site lists IQ genetics and Saxon history as a few of his interests.

• Paul Gottfried, whose topic is "Can We Defeat the Disease of Egalitarianism?"

A political science professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, Gottfried also spoke about "The Decline of WASPdom" at the 1998 American Renaissance conference in Virginia. Egalitarianism is the notion that all people should have equal economic, social and political rights.

• Tatu Vanhanen, a political science professor at the University of Tampere in Finland. He co-authored the 2002 book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" with Lynn, and is listed on the agenda to speak on that subject. Vanhanen's son is the prime minister of Finland.

"IQ and the Wealth of Nations" compared IQ test results and standard of living data to conclude that certain races of people were superior to others.

"It sounds like a pretty high-level gathering of high-level academic racists," Beirich said of the event.

She said Lynn, Vanhanen and Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, and Jean Phillippe Rushton, president of the Pioneer Fund, "are the movers and shakers ... in this world" of academic racism.

Hoppe, a tenured professor of economics at UNLV, made headlines in 2005 after he explained "time preference" theory in the classroom, a theory which posits that people save money based on their lifestyle.

He said homosexuals tend to plan less for the future because they don't have children.

The remark kicked off a firestorm, resulting in UNLV officials criticizing Hoppe for not qualifying the remarks but later declining to take action against him, believing the comments to fall under the realm of academic freedom.

Hoppe is on academic leave this semester, according to UNLV officials.

His voice mailbox is full, and he did not respond to several e-mails sent by the Review-Journal about the conference.

A secretary with the UNLV Department of Economics said last week that Hoppe was in Europe and department officials had not been able to reach him lately via e-mail.

Cynthia Luria, Nevada regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, said inviting Lynn and the others to speak was "unacceptable."

"It is troubling to ADL that a UNLV professor would host a conference with featured speakers who have confirmed racist viewpoints," Luria said. "While ADL believes in freedom of speech, one only has to research Richard Lynn or Tatu Vanhanen to discover their philosophy is rooted in racism."

"These are folks who are on the extreme end of the scientific community," said William Turner, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University and author of the 2002 book "The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund."

Turner said Lynn and others use small amounts of scientific evidence to draw large conclusions about a particular race of people, and the Pioneer Fund has been at the forefront of funding such research.

According to Turner, the Pioneer Fund, established in 1937 by people with Nazi sympathies, has funded scientists over the years who have come to the conclusion that whites are inherently smarter than blacks.

Those conclusions have been used to campaign for rolling back school integration and other successes of the civil rights movement, he said.

"There are very, very few organizations that will accept money from the Pioneer Fund because of their racist history," Beirich said.

Paul Lombardo, a professor of law at Georgia State University who has written extensively about the eugenics movement, said the movement is not as popular as it was during the early 20th century, when it often influenced immigration policy.

But the 1994 book "The Global Bell Curve," which cited much of Lynn's work in proposing that certain races were smarter than others, sold more than a million copies in hardcover, he said.

"I think you have to take all of this very seriously," Lombardo said. "The argument that some people are superior and some people are inferior hasn't gone away."

Hoppe remains as president of the Property and Freedom Society and is scheduled to speak at the conference on "The Origin of Private Property (of Land) and the Family."

Other economists are scheduled to speak on other economics-related issues.

Hoppe is a distinguished fellow at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, a far-right libertarian think tank based in Auburn, Ala.

According to the institute's Web site, the institute "defends private property, sound money, and peaceful international relations, while opposing government intervention."

Hoppe wrote on the institute's Web site that "affirmative action and forced integration ... is responsible for the almost complete destruction of private property rights, and the erosion of freedom of contract, association, and disassociation."