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:
- 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.
Brilliant responses to the questions. I hope that Ben-Gad’s logical and honest remarks aren’t dismissed because the author is Israeli. Because his response will be one among many, it will be easy for the newspaper’s editors to ignore it. Sadly, newspapers aren’t purveyors of news. News is the raw material that newspapers use to support preexisting narrative. I remain hopeful that one day I might be surprised.
One needn’t scan the signatories on the open letter for very long to see a pattern. Grok saw it, too, and estimates that 86-89% of the signers are men. (I did not confirm its work.) Professional and social networks will explain part of this lopsidedness; it’s unlikely they explain it all.
First of all, a “whistleblower” is someone who, due to their own insider knowledge, is well-versed about an issue that is about to create harm for a group. Cofnas wasn’t a whistleblower. He was an annoyed former Cambridge employee, terminated due to student complaints, who believes that Black people lack the intellect to succeed in anything but sports and entertainment. He took it upon himself to relentlessly obsess publicly about Jason Arday even after the appropriate entities had been alerted to the allegations. So, not a whistleblower.
Second, there had been opposition to Cofnas being hired at Ghent to begin with. As a postdoc, he had been hired through a loophole that excepted him from the normal vetting process. Many employees of the university objected to his hire, because they rightly find that his hereditarian assertions echo the assumptions of the Nazis, and Europe has already been through that once.
Frankly, a guy who says that “after the Revolution” he wants to be the “chair of race science and eugenics at Harvard” should not be teaching students.
Here’s Cofnas’s take (paywalled by the WSJ, but available vis his Substack): https://substack.com/home/post/p-212155227
I would, if I were you, retract your assertion that he goes on the assumptions of the Nazis.
I see their assertions as analogous in that the Nazis believed that Aryans were ubermenschen and that intelligence, virtue, strength, etc. were inherited. They also believed that other groups, including but not exclusively Jews, were subhuman. They based this on what they referred to as race science. If I am missing something in my analogy can you please let me know what it is?
None of the things that Cofnas has aid echo what you say the Nazis believed. He has not said that any ethnic groups are subhuman, nor favored the extermination of any group. You are trying to tar Cofnas with the Nazi analogy and I don’t like that kind of stuff on this site.
First, intelligence and other human traits are of course inherited. Biological factors are much more important than environment in explaining differences in human intelligence and other traits. The science on that is established and clear.
Second, no, the Nazis did not base their ideology on science. They rejected science and Darwin. They were creationists who believed that humans had been created as several different races from the start. In saying that Jews were “subhuman” they were literally saying that Jews were a seperate creation, different from God’s favoured “master race”. There’s no link between the Nazi’s ideology and what Cofnas is saying.
Third, he did not “relentlessly obsess publicly” about Arday, he wrote one blog article (and then did a few interviews on minor podcasts). Major newspapers wrote far more.
Fourth, it’s true that “the appropriate entities had been alerted to the allegations”, but they’d been refusing to do anything about them for two years.
Fifth, his now-notorious statement about black students was pretty much just quoting Harvard about what would happen if they admitted students purely on academic merit, without affirmative action.
Sixth, yes he does think that the mean IQ of different populations is different, and different for genetic reasons. Unfortunately that is what the evidence points to — not conclusively so, since it’s not yet fully settled, but that’s what a disinterested Martian scientist who was oblivious to the sensitivities would conclude to be the most likely explanation.
Seventh, no he was not appointed by a “loophole”, postdocs are often appointed by a PI with little “vetting” by the wider university.
Eighth, sure, there is indeed a lot of opposition to him, that’s because many people want to disallow any research at all into the whole topic of differences between people and how that relates to genes. This is an utterly unscientific attitude.
Ninth, the “chair of eugenics” remark was clearly a joke, a wry comment on what people were saying about him.
It is always the same with Arday’s supporters: You see Arday as an innocent victim, but you cannot effectively defend him because of the overwhelming evidence of his fraud and lies. So you resort to ad hominem attacks and go after Cofnas because he expresses dubious theories.
You guys are just embarrassing.
“… relentlessly obsess”. You mean, he wrote a long and detailed blog post (https://ncofnas.com/p/dei-fraud-and-cover-up-at-cambridge) with multiple screenshots laying out the irrefutable evidence of Arday’s plagiarism in his PhD?
“… even after the appropriate entities had been alerted to the allegations.” This is rich. The appropriate entities had indeed been informed, both by a fellow academic (David Harris) and by a journalist (Jack Grove), but the Cambridge administration’s response was to alert the police and threaten civil legal action for defamation. Without Cofnas’s blog post presenting the evidence publicly — which could have been avoided if Cambridge had taken the evidence seriously when presented with it by the above-named people — there is absolutely no reason to suppose that the public would be any the wiser, and Jason Arday would currently be enjoying fawning adulation during a triumphant book-signing tour.
Thanks for that detail about David Harris. I had asked below whether the initial people who outed Arday’s plagiarism had first gone thru proper channels at Cambridge, but I guess that was done and that resulted in the cops going after the whistleblowers! This is my answer.
So it looks like someone had to do an end-run around the administration, and that is what Cofnas did. Whatever were the underlying motivations of Cofnas, and he may have had base motives, what he actually did was entirely proper. Extensive plagiarism should not be excused.
To claim that Arday was not a whistleblower by the definition you give is simply false. Cofnas knows how DEI actually works in practice (as opposed to what proponents of DEI say about how it works, or what DEI ideally is) because he was at Cambridge University. That Arday did not belong there (one of the top universities in the whole world), you could simply verify that by reading Arday’s writing and listening to some of his talks on YouTube. Sure, Cofnas was annoyed by Cambridge University, as you put it, and embarrassing Cambridge Univ was probably part of his motivation. But the real issue is whether Arday was a con man or not, and not who exposed him for exactly what reasons. It’s not even clear to me that Cofnas is a racist. Though I will say that Cofnas joking that “after the Revolution” he wants to be the “chair of race science and eugenics at Harvard” is just dumb. So he has been accused of being a racist and now he brings in eugenics himself. Wow!
Well, Others have refuted your most inflammatory remarks. But there is a single question that you and others like you refuse to answer or contort to avoid: was Arday or was he not a plagiarist and an academic fraud (independently of his intentions)? If the answer is ‘yes’ all your ad hominems are superfluous.
About nazism and Cofnas just a quote ; he wrote
“The fact that the Nazis rejected Darwinism and the concept of IQ does not necessarily mean that the study of race differences could never inspire a dangerous political movement. It does mean, however, that we cannot point to Nazi Germany as an illustration of what is liable to happen when people adopt a biologically informed view of the evolution of intelligence. In Nazi Germany, “science” followed from ideology, not the other way around. Some contemporary neo-Nazis claim to find support for their Nazi-inspired views in Darwinism and IQ research, but their ideology tends to dictate their interpretation of the science – which is usually grossly uninformed.”
It is not only professor Ben Gad’s presence at the university that caused “mental distress” to the distressed students: it is his existence, like the existence of Israelis in Israel (such as at the Nova festival) or anywhere (such as London).
Now that is where we see echoes of the Nazis: the people who can’t stand Prof. Ben Gad’s existence. They would be any happier if he moved to Poland; they want him dead.
There were earlier inquiries into Arday, which I understand were squelched by police knocking on doors. Then the outing by Cofnas. Then the current situation which certainly has not yet settled down.
My question is: During the earlier inquiries (pre-Cofnas), did the accuser(s) first “go through proper channels” at Cambridge? There are of course in-house procedures for investigating plagiarism, but following through on that can be held up if you don’t do it right. I know this as a fact based on years in academia, and having seen a few … (let’s call them problems) be ignored for as long as possible because the whistleblowers did not officially contact the right admin.
Yes — see Cofnas’s description of Dave Hill’s attempt to get the situation addressed. https://ncofnas.com/p/dei-fraud-and-cover-up-at-cambridge
Noted above. Thank you.
Thx for the update.
Ben-Gad sounds like an interesting guy.
If you, PCC(E) were still actively teaching rather than enriching our days (not kidding here) you’d be in the motha of all culture wars you know!
D.A.
NYC
Ben-Gad’s response was excellent. The questions didn’t seem that leading to me, but the resulting article will probably put my doubts to rest.
Anyway, I urge you to read this article: “Why I believe Nathan Cofnas violated Ghent University’s Code of Ethics.” Don’t be put off by the title. Even though the author doesn’t acknowledge that the Code itself is faulty, since it is written so as to stifle free speech and research, the evidence the author cites still damns Cofnas, both as a person and a scholar.
Cofnas is not merely a racist, he is a proponent of wildly discriminatory ‘race realist’ social policies. He also promotes the so-called “hereditarian revolution.” And frankly, some of the basis for his beliefs is patently psuedo-scientific:
Honestly, Cofnas is as morally repellent, in his own way, as the university that condemns him. But as they say, “I may hate what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”
But still, this all begs a question: How the hell was Cofnas even hired by such a pervasively woke university as Ghent in the first place? And even if Ghent wasn’t woke, it would seem that his subpar scholarship alone would have been sufficient to have justified passing over him.
Well, no, he’s not, he’s never advocated “wildly discriminatory” social policies. Exactly which “wildly discriminatory” policies do you think he’s argued for? He has basically advocated a meritocracy, where people get treated on their individual merits.
Where he has departed from that it is mostly about protecting groups that might be less successful.
You are damning him on the basis of quotes from a person who is drying to damn him, stripping parts of sentences completely out of context.
If you want to disagree with him, then, sure, disagree with him — I disagree with quite a bit of what he said in that article — but at least quote him fairly and try to understand what he’s saying.
And if you think that anything he’s said is “patently pseudo-scientific”, then what exactly is it? Note that the quote directly after that claim is not what he’d say, but is explicitly him saying what the woke would say (again, read it in context to discern his meaning).
Out of curiosity I had Pangram evaluate the four questions. It rated them as 100% written by AI, albeit with low confidence due to the limited amount of text.
While I agree with our host that 1, 2, and 4, in particular are leading questions, that might be partially due to the writing style of whichever LLM was used.
I suspect that a lot of non-native English speakers use AI simply to “correct” their English text, to make sure it doesn’t come across as unidiomatic, and that may be what’s happened here. To me that seems among the more defensible uses of AI.
I signed the letter too. I’m not optimistic about the outcome, though.
I am surprised that Boudry was at Gent. Was he forced out or did he leave voluntarily?
I severed my unpaid affiliation in January, though in any event my temporary (paid) position was ending. Here are my reasons: https://x.com/mboudry/status/2049139256988225560