Recommended book: “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love”

August 26, 2026 • 10:15 am

My two-person book club, in which a friend and I alternately choose a book for both of us to read, recently finished an excellent novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, writtten by Oscar Hijuelos and published in 1989.  Wikipedia puts it in the genre of “magical realism,” but I wouldn’t call it that, as the “magic” consists only of the main characters having fantasies that might have occurred but didn’t.

At any rate, it’s a longie—407 pages in my library version—but a goodie, recognized with a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1990. The story contains at least one huge spoiler that I won’t describe, but it’s a spoiler that divides the book into two parts, and that bipartite structure helps make the book so good.

“Mambo Kings” is the name of a Cuban-music band organized by two brothers, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, who immigrated from Cuba in 1949, hoping to achieve musical fame in America. They find both living in America and finding gigs tough, and one of the best parts of the book is the vivid description of problems faced and lives lived by Cuban immigrants. As my book-pal emailed me, one of these aspects was

” . . . . the fact that the book never left the world of the Cuban Americans or a made any concessions except indirectly to events exterior that world.”

There are five dominant elements in the lives of Cesar and Nestor: music (always mambo, rumba, and other Hispanic stuff), love, sex (often but not always separable), booze (a solvent for the brothers’ troubles), and memories.  I don’t know how Hijuelos learned so much about Cuban music, but it permeates the book, with dozens of musicians named and recognized. Hijuelos, the son of two Cuban immigrants, must have either been inundated with the music of his parents, or learned it for the book—or both. You too will learn a lot, and you’ll surely have heard of at least one Cuban musician who appears repeatedly in the tale: Desi Arnaz of the “I Love Lucy” television show. (I take this back: you have to be of a certain age to know him and the show.) In the book, Arnaz invites Cesar and Nestor to play on his show, which makes them briefly famous, and then befriends the brothers for life.

Nestor is hopelessly and fruitlessly in love with a woman he left behind in Cuba, while Cesar, justifiably proud of his pinga, beds an army of women but never finds real love, perhaps impeded by the memory of his beloved mother left behind in Cuba.  And both the brothers are ridden with memories of their youth on the island, so you’ll also learn quite a bit about the lower rungs of Cuban life (they grew up in a poor farming family). The sex is frequent and graphic, perhaps surprisingly so for a Pulitzer winner, but it’s integral to the fruitless search for love. My book pal added this:

“despite all the sex (and there’s a LOT of it), it’s at its heart a book about the love between two brothers.”

It’s a colorful, fast-paced, wonderfully inventive and well-written story, and well deserved its acclaim. In the NY Times review of the book in 1989, Michiko Kakutani, a notoriously harsh critic, lauds Mambo Kings.  A few excerpts to give an opinion besides mine:

Indeed, Oscar Hijuelos’s remarkable new novel is another kind of American story – an immigrant story of lost opportunities and squandered hopes. While it dwells in bawdy detail on Cesar’s sexual escapades, while it portrays the musical world of the 50’s in bright, primary colors, the novel is essentially elegiac in tone -a Chekhovian lament for a life of missed connections and misplaced dreams.

. . . With his sympathetic, yet uncompromising portrait of Cesar, Mr. Hijuelos has created a character who will continue to inhabit readers’ imaginations long after they have finished this book; and with his sharply sketched supporting cast of characters he has also succeeded in fashioning a colorful fictional world. Nestor’s wistful wife, Delores, who dreams of bettering herself through books; Vanna, Cesar’s flamboyant mistress, who eventually settles down to life in Co-op City with a postal worker; his shady business partner, Perez, who has made a fortune through prostitution and drug-dealing, and his sensible friend Manny, who has saved all his money to buy a small bodega – together, these friends, lovers and family members give us a portrait of a tight-knit immigrant community struggling to survive in the promised land of New York.

By turns street-smart and lyrical, impassioned and reflective, ”The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” is a rich and provocative book – a moving portrait of a man, his family, a community and a time.

If Kakutani liked it, that’s another reason to read it.  “Rich” is an adjective that is absolutely accurate, while the sometimes graphic descriptions of sex are no longer so “provocative.”

Click below to see the Amazon site. A paperback is only ten bucks.

Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt endorses institutional neutrality on Fox News

August 26, 2026 • 9:15 am

Daniel Diermeier, previously the Provost of the University of Chicago, moved to Vanderbilt University in 2020 where he became the Chancellor (i.e., the Boss). I wish he’d stayed here, for he might have become President after Bob Zimmer died, and I admire a lot about Diermeier. For example, he has no truck with coddling protestors or allowing violations of campus regulations: he had illegal “sit-in” protestors arrested at Vanderbilt, something that the University of Chicago never did and never would do.  

And he’s been controversial, most recently for commissioning a group report on the “State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” which called out these fields for the erosion of scholarship promoted by ideology (see my post here). Humanities scholars went wild in response, many denying that there was such erosion or, even if politics invaded the humanities, it was what was desirable.  Anthropology took the biggest hit: here’s a sentence from the report:

In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.

Them’s strong words, and woke anthropologists like Agustín”Sex Is a Spectrum” Fuentes got their knickers in a twist. Note that Diermeier was not among the ten authors of the report, but he did commission it and presumably helped suggest the authors, and for sure he agrees with most of the report’s conclusions. And yes, ideological erosion of scholarship is a danger, not just in the humanities but also STEM fields.

One of Diermeier’s biggest projects has been the promotion of ideological neutrality in universities, i.e., the principle that universities should not take stands on moral, political, or ideological issues unless those issues involve the very mission of the university (scholarship, teaching, etc.). The University of Chicago was the very first university to adopt ideological neutrality, now embodied in our Kalven Report that was created in 1967. As Provost at Chicago, one of Diermeier’s responsibilities was ensuring that Kalven remained intact, and since then he’s both talked and written about the importance of ideological neutrality. I won’t repeat the rationale here, as you can see it at the preceding link, and Diermeier has both talked and written about it.

Below is a recent 2.5-minute interview Dieremeier did with Fox News (of course).   Although the report and Diermeier claim that more than 150 universities have adopted institutional neutrality, I’m not sure where that figure comes from. The FIRE list of colleges that have adopted institutional neutrality lists but 50 schools (the list is growing rapidly), but there’s a Heterodox Academy (HxA) report that lists about 150 schools. Some schools on the HxA report, like Reed College, do not appear in the FIRE report, and I’m wondering if there are different standards used by HxA and FIRE

Regardless, it’s true that institutional neutrality—something anathema to the woke, many of whom demand that colleges and universities take stands—is spreading. I remember not too long ago when FIRE had only about a dozen schools on the list.

But I think the case for institutional neutrality is virtually unassailable, for it is a way of ensuring that the university community can speak freely without fear of retribution from bucking an “official” university position.  This holds University-wide at Chicago, and also for departments, schools, subunits, and so on—even for the University’s Lab Schools that run from kindergarten through grade 12. (The Lab Schools are a perennial problem, as the teachers and administrators have often insisted on taking political positions and have to be repeatedly reminded that they’re violating University policy in so doing (the Lab Schools are considered part of the University).

Anyway, the interview:

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ divinity

August 26, 2026 • 8:15 am

This latest Jesus and Mo strip, called “argue,” came with an email note,

“Jesus Christ Almighty! A new one today.”

Indeed; we haven’t had a new one in a while!

But I’m not sure I understand it. There is the usual theological back-and-forth, and Mo is right about what many Christians believe, but what is going on about the night? Did Jesus make it beautiful or something?

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

August 26, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Аҳамп амш” in Abkhaz): Wednesday August 26, 2026 and Women’s Equality Day, which, as the site says (my bolding)

. . . commemorates the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibits denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex. Prior to its adoption, women were not guaranteed the right to vote on the national level. The first time an amendment dedicated to women’s suffrage was introduced was in 1878, and similar amendments were introduced numerous times over the next 41 years until the House and Senate both approved the amendment in 1919. Then it needed to be approved by two-thirds of the states, and it was lobbied for by suffragists. On August 24, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state—and final state needed—to ratify it. On August 26, 1920, Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed a proclamation that added the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

You can see the time line for this amendment, beginning in 1848 with the women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, here.  And here are the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments that came from that convention, with the prime movers among “ladies” listed first:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CKXzBSKWwAEzQT8.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Cherry Popsicle Day, National McChicken Day (I’ve never had one), National Toilet Paper Day, and National D*g Day. (I thought the dog days ran from July 3 to August 11)

The Google Doodle is again a subtle gif about the national parks of America; click image to see where it goes:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*An intriguing title at the Washington Post, “I was a U.S. diplomat for 20 years. Now I see how the war in Iran could be won.” The author is Ludovic Hood, identified as “a former U.S. diplomat and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute,” and the article is archived here.

Twenty years of experience as an American diplomat has made me realize that no amount of diplomatic ingenuity can contain Iran. The United States should keep pushing until it gets the best outcome for American interests, the region and the Iranian people: the shattering of the illegitimate regime in Tehran.

Earlier in my career, in 2008, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah urged U.S. officials to “cut off the head of the snake” by attacking Iran’s nuclear program. The more I learned about the region, the more I agreed with the king’s characterization: The regime in Tehran bears overwhelming responsibility for the mayhem and misery in the Middle East since 1979, and its hold on power is a dire threat to regional stability.

. . .During my next assignment as the “Iran watcher” in Paris, I was privy to the Obama administration’s determined — and at times desperate — effort to sign a nuclear accord with Tehran. Iran’s negotiators were (and remain) savvy and cunning interlocutors who extracted U.S. concessions that concerned our French counterparts. My experiences in Paris and the Persian Gulf made me see the logic of Trump’s exit from the nuclear agreement and, during postings in Qatar and in the White House on the staff of Vice President Mike Pence, I witnessed the benefits of the president’s “maximum pressure” campaign. However, a variety of diplomatic considerations tempered the efficacy of the campaign, and the policy failed to yield to new talks, let alone a comprehensive deal. Uranium enrichment and missile production carried on.

Iran continued to sow havoc in the region. The mullahs might not have orchestrated Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, but IRGC know-how and hundreds of millions of dollars of funding over two decades enabled the rampage across southern Israel that killed more than 1,200 people, including 46 Americans. The Hamas attack marked an inflection point in the Middle East’s evolution: It ended tentative moves by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others to improve relations with Israel, and it transformed long-standing tensions in the Levant and Persian Gulf into inexorable and overlapping cycles of violence.

. . . The current showdown in the region is an inevitable result of the Iranian regime’s efforts to dominate the region through bullying, blackmail and terror. Iran’s rulers have shown time and again they will not accede to an arrangement that constrains their hegemonic aspirations.

The best outcome for the region — and for core U.S. interests — is the regime’s collapse. The Islamic republic is in terminal decline: Iran’s economy is in free fall, its leadership is in disarray, and the government does not have legitimacy with the people. A patient, sustained campaign of economic and military pressure, coupled with hard-nosed diplomacy supported by our regional partners, can strike a mortal blow to a regime that grows more brittle with each passing day.

But the American people don’t want a “patient, sustained campaign of economic and military pressure,” nor do our regional partners agree even with the diplomacy we’re supposedly exercising. The problems with this op-ed are twofold. First the American people don’t want a strategy like this and Trump doesn’t either given its effect on the midterms. Second, how do we exercise “military pressure”? Boots on the ground? That won’t work, so an important way of exerting leverage is out. Yes, I think this is a just war, but the U.S. strategy appears to do things that help Trump rather than bring down the Iranian theocracy and free its people.

*A group of grocers has sued New York City over Mamdani’s plan of low-price city-subsidized grocery stores, saying that it will actually hurt an important group of relatively poor people:

A local business group sued New York City and Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday over the mayor’s plan to open five government-owned grocery stores around the city.

The Multicultural Business Coalition, a nonprofit that represents supermarkets, grocery stores and bodegas, filed the lawsuit in the New York County Supreme Court, arguing that the plan would introduce unfair competition to a struggling local industry already dealing with slim profit margins. The coalition says that the plan will particularly harm immigrant- and minority-owned businesses.

Many members of the coalition “cannot compete with the municipal grocery stores, and therefore, will be put out of business,” the complaint reads.

At a news conference, the mayor said the subsidized stores reflect a cost-of-living crisis that has seen grocery prices increase by about 30% over the past few years.

“I am confident both in the legality of this, that it will stand up in court, and the importance of delivering it,” Mamdani said.

Mamdani floated the stores on the campaign trail as a part of his affordability agenda, arguing that subsidized supermarkets focused on cheap, healthy foods would help New Yorkers adapt to rapidly rising food costs. The stores, run by external operators but overseen by the city, would offer a core basket of staples at a 30% discount to market rates. Operators would get free rent and subsidies.

“For many, that 30% discount is the difference between an evening spent around the dinner table with family or working another double shift to make ends meet,” Mamdani said last month as officials announced the details of the proposal.

The mayor has allocated $70 million toward the stores. The city’s Economic Development Corporation says the city has roughly 1.5 square feet of grocery space per capita, compared with roughly 5-10 square feet elsewhere in the country. Mamdani says the plan might save New Yorkers $1,000 a year.

The plan has drawn a stream of criticism as concerns mount over the mayor’s relationship with the business world.

Officials are soliciting proposals from operators willing to run the stores. Applications are due in October, and the city has been leading tours of the facilities.

This is not good optics for Mayor Mamdani, what with the reasonable claim that they are going to put minority-run grocery stores out of business. What he is proposing is a form of grocery socialism, and he has not responded convincingly to that claim.

*In a Quillette article called “The beautiful and banned,” Josh Allen points out the difference between “the banned books promoted by celebrities and genuinely transgressive and provocative writing.” The celebrity he has in mind is singer/songwriter ua_Lipa.

. . . According to the American Library Association, “A book is banned when it is entirely removed from a collection in response to a formal or informal challenge.” The trouble with this definition is that it is generously inclusive; all it takes for a book to be classified a victim of institutional censorship—and for pundits across the world to raise a chorus of condemnation—is for it to be removed from one school library, as we saw in the case of a secondary school in Manchester late last year. The ALA definition does not include texts that booksellers refuse to stock, or the publication of which has been halted or made impossible by social pressures. Nor does it account for all the bold, daring, “unborn books” that will never see the light of day owing to the risk-averse—if not outright censorious—nature of modern publishing. In reality, book-banning in schools is generally an (ill-judged) attempt at safeguarding, not dissimilar to age-gating films, video games, or social media. That is very different to making a book unavailable to adults and children alike. By shifting the blame on to governments and educational authorities, publishers and bookshops are deflecting from their own role in narrowing the range of “acceptable” literature.

Dua Lipa’s latest project, the Manifesto Library, appears to perpetuate a similar misunderstanding of “banned books.” The collection is a partnership between Service95, Lipa’s online book club, and Livraria Lello, the bookshop in Porto where a hundred selected books will be displayed and sold. The Manifesto Library is described as:

[A] space that brings together titles that have been subject to public debate, some that take censorship itself as their subject and others that have provoked sustained, uncomfortable debate about race, gender, identity and political power.

Banned books are only one part of the collection, but the definition of a banned book manages to be at once hopelessly expansive and conveniently restrictive, including books that “have been prohibited from publication, stripped from school curricula or removed from library systems in an attempt to stop someone, somewhere from reading them”. So while One Hundred Years of Solitude has sold over 50 million copies and been translated into forty languages, its removal from a handful of libraries in America earns it the status of a “banned book.” The same goes for The Catcher in the Rye (65 million copies), Animal Farm (twenty million copies), and The Handmaid’s Tale (eight million copies), all of which were once banned by someone somewhere but are now taught on school syllabi and sit atop bestseller lists.

Have a look at the books at the link, many of which I’ve read, and they simply don’t fall into the class of books that have been widely banned and removed from many libraries.  At the Quillette link, there’s a photo of Dua Lipa looking like a cat that swallowed a canary (and making a “fish face”), holding up a copy of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale  (go see for yourself).

Did I really expect to see Dua Lipa pose for a selfie with The Camp of the Saints clutched in her hand? Or Renaud Camus’s Le Grand Remplacement? Or William Powell’s The Anarchist Cookbook? I didn’t, no. I would be surprised to see books like these within a mile of an anodyne collection like this one, compiled for casual readers and pop aficionados. The problem is not that Lipa is not promoting genuinely subversive material; it is that she is claiming to. The publishing world has always been proscriptive, as Vladimir Nabokov, D.H. Lawrence, and Henry Miller—all absent from Lipa’s list—would attest. The difference today is that it likes to pretend it isn’t.

Now this may be making a mountain out of a molehill, but I think the author has a point.  What banned books should represent is a widespread violation of the First Amendment: prohibition of books because they say something that “offends” people.  The bestsellers above can hardly be said to fall in that class.

*At least two of my friends will no longer watch professional football because they consider it too brutal. And it is, especially with the new announcement that at least a quarter of NFL players get CTE, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy: a progressive degenerative brain disease (article archived here).

Since the degenerative brain disease known as C.T.E. was first scientifically linked to football about 20 years ago, and as hundreds of former professional football players have been diagnosed with the disease after their deaths, a haunting question has lingered:

Just how many N.F.L. players will end up with C.T.E.?

New data provides a sobering indication: At least one in four of all the people who have played in the N.F.L. might expect to end up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, according to a study of hundreds of cases over a recent six-year period.

Researchers considered every former N.F.L. player who died from 2016 to 2021. There were 878. Some died in their 20s, some in their 80s, most in between.

The study’s main finding was simple math: At least 215 of those 878 former players — 24.5 percent — had C.T.E.

The actual prevalence could be far higher. The roughly 25 percent rate does not consider the 643 brains that were not examined. Some of those, maybe many of them, likely had C.T.E. too.

C.T.E. is a progressive neurological disease caused by repeated impacts to the head. It can be definitively diagnosed only by examining the brain after death.

Studies have shown that the rate of C.T.E. in people who have not sustained repeated impacts to the head is nearly zero.

If the new study’s statistics were applied to today’s players — 1,696 on the league’s 32 regular-season rosters, not including more than 500 members of practice squads and those ineligible due to injury — at least 400 of them would be diagnosed with C.T.E.

. . .“We know what’s causing it,” said Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, the lead author of the study, the chief of brain injury rehabilitation at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. “It’s a neurodegenerative disease where we know and have complete control over the risk. And understanding the extent of that risk is one of the steps into making sure that we can mitigate and decrease that risk.”

Dr. Daneshvar said that the biggest predictor of C.T.E. is the cumulative force of hits to a head over a lifetime — including those sustained before reaching the N.F.L.

“We can change that cumulative force without changing the game of football,” he said, suggesting that children refrain from playing tackle football and that teams at all levels eliminate hits during practices.

I don’t know how they can change the cumulative force unless they eliminate head hits during games, not just in practice. Better helmet? Perhaps, but I don’t know which ones. Sadly, players now know the risk but go ahead and play, as many love the game and all love the money in the NFL. (It’s also a problem in rugby.) What’s the solution to the deadly side effects of a game that many Americans love to watch? I don’t know.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is serving as a reminder:

Hili: Don’t forget that you have to be at the doctor’s.
Andrzej: Okay, remind me tomorrow.

In Polish:

Hili: Nie zapomnij, że masz być u lekarza.
Ja: Dobrze, przypomnij mi o tym jutro.

*******************

From Stacy:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Give Me a Sign:

Dolly Parton’s nephew announces her death:

From Masih, two Kurdish women flogged and imprisoned for protesting:

From Larry the Cat, a sequel to “Hello, Dolly”:

From Malcolm, an AI video that people love. I don’t get all the cultural references, so perhaps someone can explain a few to me. (I know the Titanic ones.)

Jeff Maurer on the new White House bunker:

One from my feed; Dolly on Johnny Carson’s show singing an appropriate song:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And one from Doctor Cobb; a crazy snake. Who knew?

HahahahahahaThe small end is the headThese sea snakes poke around crevices in reefs so their pinheads are excellent for getting at hiding fish. But they also look ridiculous.Hydrophos melanocephalus📷 Arne Redsted Rasmussen

— Krista Koeller (@kristalerista.bsky.social) 2026-08-23T20:11:21.906Z

Dolly Parton died

August 25, 2026 • 2:00 pm

OMG! I heard the other day that Dolly Parton had canceled yet another show because of unexplained health concerns, but now she’s dead—at 80.  I don’t know anybody who isn’t fond of her; she was a great musician and, by all accounts, a lovely person. From the AP:

Dolly Parton, the country music icon whose soaring vibrato vocals, poignant songwriting and sparkling costumes defined her rise from a log cabin in the Tennessee mountains to the height of stardom and acclaim, has died. She was 80 years old.

Known for her curvy physique, massive blonde wigs and skin-tight outfits that served her self-deprecating wit, she was among the most beloved personalities in music and beyond — the rare celebrity whose appeal transcended generations, geography and politics.

She wrote hundreds of songs, including classics like “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors” and “I Will Always Love You,” that totaled more than 100 million worldwide sales and more than 1 billion online streams. Parton, who plucked bejeweled banjos, guitar and dulcimers with her long fingernails during performances, was a generous philanthropist and successful businesswoman whose projects included a theme park in the Smoky Mountain foothills near her birthplace.

The cause of death was not released, though some articles mention “accumulating health problems.”

As a tribute, I’ll post two of my favorite Dolly Parton songs released a few years apart. This one was apparently written for her mentor Porter Wagoner when she left his show. It’s from 1973.

“Here You Come Again” was written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and released by Parton in 1977.

RIP Dolly.

An inquiry from the Ghent University student newspaper, and an Israeli answers

August 25, 2026 • 10:00 am

As you know, the University of Ghent in Belgium has been involved in a big kerfuffle over the Jason Arday affair, with Ghent’s involvement comprising an invesigation of a scholar they previously hired: Nathan Cofnas, the academic who exposed Jason Arday‘s plagiarism in his Ph.D. thesis. Arday, you may recall, was the youngest black academic hired by Cambridge University, and one of the few scholars of color on its faculty (he was in education and sociology).

Arday’s plagiarism got the press and social media further involved in investigating his life, whereupon it turned out that he was apparently a fabulist, having made up a lot of stories that were unbelievable as well as providing a fake c.v. on what academic positions he’d held. Shortly thereafter, Cambridge University announced it was investigating Arday. He then resigned and then was found dead—an apparent suicide.

Arday’s death exacerbated the fracas, with some blaming racism and the press (and calling for restrictions, like limiting the number of articles the media could write about a person!), while others argued that the media held no responsibility for Arday’s death, pinning it on Arday himself with some help from Cambridge University, who apparently had hired a fabulist and unqualified scholar on the grounds of ethnicity and disability rather than on merit.

But that wasn’t all. Cofnas, who exposed Arday’s plagiarism, had moved on to the University of Ghent as a postdoctoral fellow. After Arday’s death,  Ghent was inundated with letters and petitions calling for them to fire Cofnas, who had studied the radioactive topic of race and IQ. (Ghent surely knew what Cofnas worked on when they hired him.) The rector suspended Cofnas pending an investigation, apparently on the grounds that Cofnas was working on things not specified in his contract, that his work on IQ and race violated Belgian law against discrimination, and that his continued presence at Ghent was a threat to the university community.

(See all my posts on this matter here.)

A number of us—800-odd academics, including me, signed an open letter to the Ghent Rector Petra de Sutter, saying that Cofnas was being punished for “whistleblowing” about Arday and that Ghent was violating Cofnas’s academic freedom. The letter ended with an appeal: “Therefore we urge Ghent University to protect Dr Cofnas from being punished for exercising his academic freedom.”

The Ghent student newspaper (Schamper) wanted to cover all this, and apparently sent many of the signers—again including me—an email asking us to respond to four questions (you’ll see them below). The email was signed by Leone Mattheus, the editor of the newspaper.

Dear Professor,

I am writing to you on behalf of Schamper, the independent student newspaper at Ghent University in Belgium. We are currently preparing an in-depth investigative article on the ongoing institutional, ethical, and legal developments surrounding postdoctoral researcher Dr Nathan Cofnas, including Ghent University’s recent decision to launch a preliminary disciplinary inquiry and impose a precautionary suspension.

We noticed that you are one of the signatories of the international open letter addressed to Rector Petra De Sutter (“Letter opposing punishment of Nathan Cofnas for whistleblowing”).

To ensure our coverage accurately reflects the arguments and concerns of the international academic community, we would be very grateful if you could briefly share your perspective on the following questions:

I decided not to respond as the questions appeared loaded, in line with the rector’s own urging of the University community to write damning letters about Cofnas. The “neutral” investigation is really aimed at getting rid of Cofnas. And the Schamper has a reputation, I’ve found, for “progressive” views, as we call them, including “anti-Zionism.”

I will show the answers to the four questions provided not by me, but by Professor Michael Ben-Gad of the Department of Economics, City St George’s, University of London. Ben-Gad is an Israeli who, like nearly all Israelis, had served in the IDF. For that he himself has been somewhat demonized.

I’ll put the questions asked by the student newspaper in bold and Ben-Gad’s answers in plain text. I of course have permission to publish Ben-Gad’s responses. I thought it would be useful to see a rational response to a biased inquiry:

Dear Leone:

  1. The open letter characterizes Ghent University’s disciplinary proceedings as potential retaliation for Dr Cofnas exposing academic misconduct and plagiarism. Why do you consider his public writings on Professor Jason Arday’s work to be protected whistleblowing rather than a breach of institutional conduct?

Critiquing others’ work is not an anomaly but a normal part of an academic’s duties as a scholar and is usually classified as service to the discipline. This happens every time I am asked to referee a paper or review a grant application. As a macroeconomist, I work with and publish with Keynesians but remain publicly critical of large elements of the Keynesian approach. Is that a breach of my contract? Why? Keep in mind, the Keynesian economists whose work I have criticised are not engaged in plagiarism or data manipulation, they simply do not share my perspective on how best to model the economy. With Arday we are not talking about a difference of opinion—Cofnas performed an important service by uncovering serious academic malpractice.

2. Critics argue that while exposing textual overlap is legitimate, using one scholar’s case to make generalized claims about diversity policies and Black professorial representation violates academic and ethical standards. How do you view this distinction?

I think the management of an insurance company, car company or bank should be entitled to insist that their employees not publicly criticise the institution’s policies or their products as everyone has a fiduciary responsibility to the owners and shareholders. Universities are not-for-profit public institutions devoted to the production and dissemination of knowledge and by tradition operate differently. Diversity policies are perfectly legitimate targets for criticism especially when they lead to the hiring someone for one of the most prestigious positions in academia who are so clearly unsuitable as Jason Arday.

As a general rule, we do not ordinarily check the work of job applicants for plagiarism. The working assumption has been that it is not widespread. Hence, it is unfair to single out Cambridge or any of Arday’s previous employers for not uncovering it. What was plainly visible was that Arday’s published work was scandalously poor. It amounted to little more than a litany of accusations that UK higher education institutions were actively harming the mental health of ethnic and racial minority students without any explanation for why this would be. All this gleaned from interviews with a small carefully selected group of his peers that seem to have been in part also fabricated.

To read Arday’s work, one might think that acquiring a degree from a UK university like Cambridge is equivalent to surviving Dachau. If we apply the same standard, would this not also be an ethical violation? Actually, I think Arday was entitled to hold and express these views, but only an academic discipline that has been so politicised and captured by an ideological fringe would elevate such nonsense.

Cofnas’ ‘racial realism’ is not immune from criticism either. Not because its implications might be politically or socially uncomfortable but because many of his theories are based on weak evidence and that the data that contradicts his thesis is either ignored or explained away by invoking sample bias. This sample bias might be real, but unless he can provide evidence, this is little more than circular reasoning. Yet none of this factor in the decision to suspend Cofnas.

3. What message or precedent does Ghent University’s decision to suspend Dr Cofnas send to the wider international academic community regarding academic freedom and research integrity?

First, Ghent has form in this arena, I wish to highlight the university’s hostile treatment of a serious scholar such as Maarten Boudry, all for questioning the outrageous contention that Israel’s war in Gaza after the atrocities of 7 October amounts to genocide.

More broadly, this is a replay of 2020 when critical theory escaped its containment vessels in departments of sociology, media studies and education and activist scholars and the EDI bureaucracy sought to in effect colonise (they call it decolonise) what they deem to be unenlightened disciplines, including my own. That meant rather than merely critiquing traditional standards of empiricism and logic as White, Racist, Colonial and Eurocentric they sought to impose their values on the entire university. I experienced all this directly, when I was nearly cancelled for failing to alter my macroeconomics curriculum to incorporate racism, colonialism and social justice (Fanon and Lenin in place of Smith, Ricardo and Friedman) and to implement a racial quota (minimum 20%) on the authors of any readings I assigned. I made it clear at the time, that I would not interrogate the ancestry of anyone before I decide whether they belong on a reading list. This was deemed a violation of university policy by some in management, though ultimately not by the President which is why I still have a job.

4. The letter notes concerns about universities acting on internal distress or external boycott threats. Where do you draw the line between a university’s duty of care toward its campus community and its obligation to defend controversial or unpopular scholarship?:

As an economist I believe in incentives. If universities cave to claims of distress or threats of boycott, every group with a cause or grievance will be able to force the university to comply with their agenda.

I can also draw on personal experience. In October 2025, I was subjected to a second campaign to remove me on account of my national service in the IDF in the early 1980s and having studied as an undergraduate at Hebrew University which activists characterise as built in the 1920’s on stolen land. This included demonstrations, threats and and invasion of my lecture. The student and staff unions sided with the activists (even confronted me in Senate and the Board of Studies arguing that I was causing mental distress to the students. I was offered paid leave but insisted on completing all my assigned teaching. Had I not, others, perhaps more vulnerable would have soon been targeted in turn.

Note that Ben-Gad criticizes not just Arday but also Cofnas.  But his criticisms of Cofnas do not rise to the level of trying to deprive him of his academic freedom. Note too that Ben-Gad has experienced several bouts of attempted cancellation because he was both an Israeli and because he refused to bow to academic “purity tests.”

It will be interesting to see what the student newspaper says about all this. I’m betting they too call for Cofnas’s firing.