Category: academics behaving badly

Maarten Boudry on Jason Arday and academia

September 21, 2026 • 11:00 am

My friend Maarten Boudry, identified by Wikipedia as “a Belgian academic and skeptic,” was commissioned by Persuasion (the Substack founded by Yascha Mounk) to write a piece on Jason Arday. He did, but they ultimately rejected it. This was a while back, so I don’t think it was passed over because it was old news. It overlaps some with my piece on Arday and Nature at the Chronicle of Higher Education, but is not identical in focus.

At any rate, I read it and offered to post it here, and Maarten accepted. It apparently has three titles, and is indented below.

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The Cult of Saint Arday

The Perverse Incentives of Academic Martyrdom

Saints, Sinners, and Suspensions

A “scholar who inspired a generation,” writes the journal Nature of the late Jason Arday. Anyone searching this editorial for any admission of Arday’s extensive academic misconduct and fraud, will search in vain. If we are to believe the most prestigious journal in the world, Arday was simply a victim of “systemic racism in academia.” This editorial, which needs to be read to be believed, seems to be the apogee (so far) in the canonization of Jason Arday that has taken place since his apparent death by suicide on August 14. Not to be outdone, his own employer and chief enabler, Cambridge University, has launched an independent review this week—not to investigate how an obviously unqualified person like Arday was elevated to the highest ranks at such an august institution, but to ask, essentially, how Cambridge “could have and should have done more” to stand by Arday in the period after the accusations against him entered public discourse. Buried as an afterthought in the announcement is a vague reference to the “wider circumstances of Arday’s time at Cambridge.”

It is tragic that Arday lost his life, and it is also understandable that questions of academic misconduct should fade into the background now. But the complete denial of any wrongdoing, combined with the vicious attacks against journalists and fellow academics who were just doing their job and exercising due diligence, makes it impossible to just move on. Cambridge Chancellor Chris Smith denounced the “racist feeding frenzy” leading to Arday’s death. Celebrity academic Ibram X. Kendi described a “lynching,” while podcaster Owen Jones said Arday was “hounded to death.” A columnist in a prestigious medical journal invoked Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” and wrote that “they are trying to kill us [black people].”

At the risk of belaboring what should be obvious by now, the plagiarism accusation can be settled in a few minutes by simply reading Arday’s thesis side by side with an earlier thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers—with The Telegraph finding over 100 instances of overlap between the two. Arday even copy-pasted responses of subjects from earlier publications, attributing them to people he allegedly interviewed himself, which constitutes outright fraud.

As is also well known, his life story was held together by bizarre implausibilities ranging from world-class long-distance running with serious injuries to doing volunteer work in Brazil for an NGO that never sends volunteers abroad, to an appearance on an acclaimed television show that could only have occurred decades before his birth. For a period of over a year, multiple internal whistleblowers had provided Cambridge with evidence of plagiarism and fraud, but they decided to look the other way. Instead, they fed Arday’s delusions and praised him to the skies as the “best in the world in terms of the research that you do,” as the head of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education said in a BBC story about his appointment. And let’s not forget that Arday intimidated any journalist or academic who dared to raise questions about this misconduct, by hiring legal firms to threaten to sue them for libel, or just by leveling accusations of racism.

In fact, right before Arday decided to take his life, even his own defenders finally seemed to come to terms with these disturbing facts, as they gingerly dropped their support for him. Several prominent signatories of the Good Law Project open letter, which had expressed “unwavering solidarity” with Arday against racially motivated “malicious attacks”, withdrew their names in the days preceding Arday’s death. They must have belatedly realized that the evidence against him was simply too damning, and the risk to their own reputations simply too great. Indeed, Cambridge University itself, which had long dismissed all allegations as a “vile smear campaign,” eventually opened an investigation into Arday after all. Of all newspapers, The Guardian exposed his ludicrous stories about a severed pig’s head and a knife-wielding assailant. A day before his death, a Guardian columnist had accused Arday of “using his neurodivergence as an excuse for dishonesty.” If you’ve lost The Guardian, it’s over. In fact, this loss of support from his erstwhile defenders plausibly contributed to Arday’s sense of despair.

When the former professor was found dead in his London apartment, however, all his sins were instantly washed away. Across academia and the web, the entire mountain of evidence against him was either denied outright or downplayed as the kind of peccadillo every academic is guilty of. Definitions of plagiarism were retroactively modified to suit the purpose, with celebrated academic Jason Stanley arguing that plagiarism does not cover “the mere overlap of sentences.” Apart from the dishonesty, this way of sanctifying someone who took his own life and punishing those who had criticized him also sets up perverse incentives, as Jason Manning wrote in Quillette: “Just as we worry about the impact of social media mockery, so we should worry about the perverse incentives created by elevating a self-killer and punishing his enemies.”

My alma mater Ghent University unfortunately also played a leading role in this drama, because of the affiliation of the man who first set the ball rolling: the self-described “race realist” Nathan Cofnas. Although Cofnas’ controversial views on race and IQ made him the worst kind of messenger for this particular piece of bad news, his role was ultimately limited: he merely broke the silence around Arday’s fraud, after which the legacy media sank their teeth into the story, uncovering fabulation upon fraud. Days after Arday’s death, Ghent University made international headlines by suspending Cofnas, currently a postdoctoral researcher there. When a case of academic fraud comes to light, the Ghent rector must have concluded, the one to punish is the lone academic who had the audacity to blow the whistle.

Fully in thrall to the new cult of Saint Arday, hundreds of academics and students at Ghent University signed a petition claiming that the late professor had come under fire only because “Black scientists are not allowed to belong,” and because his enemies implicitly believe that “elite academic environments naturally belong to white people.” Two Belgian academics even dragged my name into the story, accusing me of “bullying a scholar to death” and “kicking a dead man”—all for having posted a few times about the affair.

In the letter from Ghent University suspending Nathan Cofnas, the rector, Petra De Sutter, accuses Cofnas of a “targeted campaign of professional elimination”—and in so doing entirely overlooks the exhaustive documentation of misconduct provided by Cofnas. De Sutter’s letter is, moreover, one drawn-out heckler’s veto: the justification for the disciplinary measure is not so much Cofnas’ actual violations as the flood of complaints received, the “tension and unrest” in the workplace, and the cancellation of lectures by third parties. (Cofnas remains today barred from campus and under disciplinary investigation for another three months.)

Rather than focusing on a single researcher with unsavory views on race, academia would do better to reflect on how its sweeping abandonment of standards of excellence and meritocracy is not just corrupting entire disciplines, but also harming the racial minorities it pretends to defend. For what is more demeaning to black scholars than the assumption that you need to lower the bar for them because they couldn’t make it otherwise? How does that land with genuinely brilliant black academics like John McWhorter, Kizzmekia Corbett-Helaire, S. James Gates, Jr., Danielle Allen, Musa al-Gharbi, Thomas Sowell, or Kwame Anthony Appiah? Nothing is more condescending than white academics who treat black scholars like children, shielding them from all criticism and amending the definitions of “excellence” and even “plagiarism” to suit.

At this point, I’m more depressed than outraged about the state of academia. It was bad enough that an unqualified fabulist like Arday could rise to the very top of one of the best universities in the world. Worse still was how Cambridge tried to cover it all up and threw around accusations of racism until the bitter end. But the canonization after his death by large swaths of the academic left, and the wild accusations against anyone who has asked critical questions about his story, leave even me speechless. Most damaging of all, it reinforces all the perverse dynamics that led to his meteoric rise and tragic downfall in the first place: don’t you dare question what a black researcher says from his own ‘lived experience’ — because then you’re a vile racist (or a race traitor, if you happen to be black yourself) and complicit in a ‘lynching’ or ‘witch hunt’. Instead of learning vital lessons from what happened here, academia is already preparing the ground for the next Jason Arday

Maarten Boudry is a philosopher and independent author writing on human progress and human (ir)rationality. His upcoming book, The Betrayal of Enlightenment, will be published by Pitchstone Publishing.

A hyperbolic and misguided article in the New England Journal of Medicine, prompted by the death of Jason Arday

August 30, 2026 • 8:45 am

Although the respected New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has the right to publish what it wants, and African-American gynecological oncologist Kemi Doll has the right to write about what she thinks, their intersection in a new NEJM “voices” piece is hyperbolic and misguided to the point of toxicity. Doll’s article simply poisons the debate about merit versus “equity” in America by simply asserting that there are “structural” intentions held by academics to kill—literally exterminate—black professors. The thesis is in Doll’s first sentence—her topic sentence:

“They are trying to kill us.”

And yes, she means that literally.

Doll’s short op-ed, which you can access below, is so over the top that the NEJM has itself gone off the rails, embarrassing itself by publishing it. Its assertions are either distorted or wrong, and there’s no evidence of a conspiracy to exterminate black scholars. Doll’s “evidence” rests on two academics who committed suicide, one being Jason Arday, the Cambridge University professor of sociology who apparently committed suicide after his plagiarism and made-up stories came to light (see my posts about him here).  To Kemi Doll, Arday died because the allegations against him were intended to kill him.

That, of course, is nonsense. The story is complicated, but to couch it as people wanting Arday to die is a ridiculous simplification. There may have been a bit of racism motivating some of Arday’s critics, but most of it came from the realization that Arday, a professor without much merit as well as a serial liar, was promoted largely because of his ethnicity and his claimed disability (he said he was severely autistic). It was an obvious case of ideological capture of academia, a case so clear that it has now become acceptable to talk and write about ethnicity versus quality—a topic previously taboo.

You can read the NEJM piece by clicking on the screenshot below.

I’ll quote a lot of it starting from the beginning. The quotes are indented, and my comments are flush left.

They are trying to kill us.

When Black academics say this, I imagine folks outside of our community think we are being hyperbolic. We are not. I think my non-Black colleagues are starting to get a taste of this as they realize how diabolically opposed to our own well-being most of the movements of our federal health agencies seem to be these days. It’s appalling and scary and also — yes, welcome. This is how it feels to know that there are systemic pressures working against your success, your well-being, and in the case of Jason Arday — your life.

Note that Doll cites racist “systemic pressures” that are aimed at ruining the carers of black academics and even killing them. In fact, the opposite is true.  Affirmative action, DEI, and the “racial reckoning” that’s been occurring for a long time have given minority academics, including women, a leg up. These initiatives, which led to Arday’s promotion and, indeed, sacralization, is clearly what got him the Cambridge professorship in the first place. Until Arday’s fabulism and plagiarism were revealed (starting with a post by Nathan Cofnas, who clearly didn’t want Arday to die), Arday was on a pedestal, told by his own chairperson at Cambridge that “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” Doll continues:

Jason Arday had the distinction of being the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history. His publications specifically focused on race and racism in the British educational system, and he didn’t shy away from using his own life in his examples. After the deliberate targeting of his veracity as an academic by another former Cambridge professor, dismissed due to his racism and white supremacist views, Prof. Arday came under intense scrutiny with regard to his Ph.D. thesis and the stories in his memoir. Besides making the point that his Ph.D. advisor and the university cleared him of any deliberate plagiarism allegations, I want to be clear that I don’t care whether or not any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true. None of them were worth his career. And certainly not his life.

Note the penultimate statement: Doll didn’t care whether any allegations against Arday were true. But if they were true (they include made-up positions he put on his c.v.), and they seem to be, then he was unqualified for his position at Cambridge. Remember that Arday killed himself only after Cambridge decided to investigate the allegations. Did anybody predict that those allegations would lead to his (presumed) suicide? I don’t think so, but Doll argues that his death was not only predictable, but engineered by academia and the media:

But Black academics know that we will always be held to a different standard, and it will look “fair” to most until perhaps we are dead. Dr. Antoinette “Bonnie” Candia-Bailey of Lincoln University expressed the severe stress, pressure, and undue criticism she weathered in her position before her suicide in 2024. Dr. JoAnne A. Epps, Executive Vice President and Provost of Temple University, and Dr. Orinthia T. Montague, President of Volunteer State Community College, died enduring the unique stressors of their jobs. Prof. Claudine Gay was hounded by accusations of plagiarism and ousted by Harvard, who bent to those who simply could not stomach a world where a Black woman was president of such a storied institution. Today, I took a moment to appreciate that she is still with us, thank God.

I urge you to check those references for suicide caused by stress, pressure, and criticism. Yes, Candia-Bailey killed herself after claiming she was bullied in academia, but Epps “died. . . . after becoming ill onstage at a memorial service, the university said.” The reference to Orinthia Montague says nothing about suicide, and I can find nothing about that in other places (e.g., here) What is ludicrous about Doll’s claims here is that she simply asserts that the last two died because of “stress and pressure”. But, for crying out loud, being a president or provost of any college is a stressful job, and there is no evidence that Montague or Epps had sufficiently more stress than other administrators because they were black, crossing a stress threshhold that led to death. Neither death is attributed to suicide, so Doll simply asserts that they were due to blackness-induced pressure. Didn’t the NEJM even check the links?

As for Claudine Gay, she was asked to resign by the Harvard Corporation because she did not handle well the allegations of antisemitism at Harvard (she had to clarify her position several times), because she was credibly accused of plagiarism, and because she could no longer lead the University effectively. Rather than boot her out of the Presidency, Harvard stood by her (even dismissing her plagiarism accusations as only examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution“) until the pressure from the Corporation became too great. Indeed, some people, as in NYT link I just gave, argued that Harvard was going easier on Gay than it was on students who might have done the same thing.  I see no evidence that Harvard wanted to dump Gay because she was black. Indeed, why was she appointed President if there were structural pressures to ruin her career?

At any rate, Gay landed on her feet. Though she resigned the Presidency, Harvard Magazine says that Gay returned to the faculty as professor of government and of African and American studies, earning “a base salary of $1,397,749, plus other compensation of $150,802 (again, principally the value of a University-provided official residence)”. I don’t know another regular humanities professor making nearly $1.5 million per year! Clearly, Harvard was not trying to ruin her career.

More:

The message to Black academics is clear. Come in, be great and indeed be excellent, but don’t dare dream too big. Don’t dare shine too bright. Walk the line of excellence and humility with perfect grace, and be ready to fight for your life.

The lesson is really that your ethnicity (and, in Arday’s class, his claimed early disability) can elevate you to prestige. Beyond Arday and Candia-Bailey, the argument that universities and academia are trying to exterminate black people is nonexistent.

Doll does mention one white man who lost his job after accusations of falsified data:

In contrast, as a white man, you can rise to be president of Stanford University, and after your falsified data is found and has set back an entire field of research for years — you will only lose your job and then quickly find another one as the CEO of a $1 billion biopharma start-up. Beyond this single story of nauseating privilege, it is a fantasy to act like plagiarism, falsified data, and suspicious, unreproducible results are not major and common problems in academia. We have entire websites devoted to attempting to keep pace with the number of scientific papers retracted amid scandal. Scroll through the recent posts on Retraction Watch and let me know how many of those investigators have been hounded, literally, to death by the news media. I hear the assertions that the British press is particularly vicious and unabashedly racist, which contributed to hundreds of articles attacking Prof. Arday in a matter of days. However, this country is not far behind. The New York Times, before his body was even laid to rest, asserted on social media that Arday’s death was a result of “race, diversity, and academic hiring.” Sure.

I won’t list other white academics who lost their jobs for plagiarism or other accusations, or even killed themselves as a result, as that’s just playing an anecdotes game. Yes, Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned from Stanford after wonky and apparently falsified data were found in a paper he co-authored, but, like Claudine Gay, he landed on his feet. And remember, the attention directed to Arday was only tangentially because he was black, for it was his ethnicity and claimed disability, as well as the accusations of fabulism and plagiarism that Cambridge University at first ignored, that gave the story its viral status. The striking part was the realization of how far ideological capture had gone in academia—so far that a man totally unqualified for a professorship had gotten there without anybody looking too closely at his qualifications. (Indeed, I think the NEJM publishing Doll’s palpably ludicrous analysis is itself an example of ideological capture of the journal.)

At the end, Doll bemoans her own fate, telling us that she pretty much has it as bad as did Arday, although that cannot be true. She also analogizes her accusations of racism to lynching, for lynching is the subject of the song “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday in 1939 (bolding below is mine):

As someone who introduced herself here as being in it for the long haul in academia, I am in contemplation this week. Not because I am considering leaving, but because it’s important to query whether my systems and boundaries for my own well-being are strong enough to withstand the ever-present winds of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Are my bonds with my fellow Black academics well-tended to? Are my filters to keep nonsense out of my inbox tight enough? Do I need to ratchet up my “No”s even further?

In these times where trees bearing strange fruit are on the rise (again) in the U.S. South, where Black mothers everywhere heard about Nolan Wells long before it was in the mainstream media, I don’t believe there is such thing as hyperbole. They are trying to kill us. They always have been.

And yet, we are still here.

Rest in peace, Jason Arday.

Ask yourself if you’re an academic: are colleges and universities trying to deny jobs to minorities, impede their progress, or even trying to kill them by putting in motion processes that they know will result in suicide? I’d say that, in these days of DEI, it’s the precise opposite.

But why did the NEJM even publish such a palpably misguided and hyperbolic piece? I would answer this way: the journal’s editors were trying to signal their virtue. And that’s ideological capture.

Nathan Cofnas’s punishment by Ghent University is walked back, but not all the way

August 28, 2026 • 9:45 am

As I reported recently, Ghent University in Belgium suspended Nathan Cofnas from his postdoc position after the death of Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor of sociology who apparently killed himself after Cofnas started a spate of Cambridge University and media investigations by showing that Arday had plagiarized much of his Ph.D. thesis. And that was on top of Arday’s copious fables about his life. fables that were too fantastic to be real. After initially defending Arday, Cambridge finally decided to investigate him, whereupon he was found dead.  I do not hold Cofnas or the media responsible for that death.

Ghent is among the wokest universities in Europe. Yet, knowing full well that Cofnas devoted a lot of his work to the inflammatory subject of ethnicity and IQ, they hired him anyway.  In her letter to Cofnas announcing his suspension, the excuses that Ghent Rector Petra de Sutter gave included Cofnas’s doing work he was not contracted to do (as if no academic diverges from their research plan!), and that Cofnas’s research “had a negative impact on the functioning of the University and the well-being of, and cooperation with, students and other members of staff.” (Maarten Boudry showed that most of de Sutter’s letter was written by AI.)

The real reason, I suspect, is that Ghent got a ton of letters objecting to Cofnas’s presence, the nature of his work, and holding him responsible for Arday’s death. Whatever the reasons, though, the suspension of Cofnay, who is not really an admirable character, is still a violation of his academic freedom.

Ghent’s “preventive suspension” of Cofnas was to precede a formal investigation, even though de Sutter was found to have urged Ghent faculty to write in opposing Cofnas’s presence at Ghent. Some impartial investigation! In the meantime, Cofnas was suspended from teaching and working at Ghent, and was banned from its campus.

I was sure that Cofnas’s suspension would be followed by a permanent firing, but not it’s not clear. Cofnas is an American citizen, and first there was an announcement that the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Bill White, had negotiated an “amicable agreement with Ghent” that would allow Cofnas to see out the end of his one-year term without being suspended. (He was still restricted from some activities, though.)

And although there’s a newspaper article reporting that Cofnas’s suspension had been lifted, Ghent continues to hold its “investigation.” As Maarten notes above, what is the point of investigating him if they’ve reached an amicable settlement?

Here’s an article from the Flemish newspaper De Morgen that deepens the mystery. Click to read the English translation:

Quotes from the article(indented) and tweets (the bolding at the bottom is mine):

US Ambassador Bill White thanks Ghent Rector Petra De Sutter on X for ‘lifting the suspension’ of researcher Nathan Cofnas. However, according to the university, the disciplinary proceedings are ongoing and Cofnas’ disciplinary measure remains in place.

“After having spoken with all parties, I am satisfied that Ghent University and Nathan Cofnas have reached an agreement by mutual consent to lift the suspension of Mr. Cofnas.”

With that message, US Ambassador Bill White responded yesterday evening to a post on X by UGent researcher Nathan Cofnas. “I am very grateful to Rector Petra De Sutter for allowing me to stay at UGent,” Cofnas said in the post.

The reports followed barely a day after Ghent University had announced a new disciplinary measure against Cofnas. This entails that Cofnas must work remotely for three months and is prohibited from taking on teaching duties. The disciplinary measure is part of the disciplinary investigation the university is conducting against the researcher.

On X, however, both seem to suggest that Ghent University dropped the disciplinary case against Cofnas, which has been ongoing since August 20, following intervention by White. “I am against the suspension and possible disciplinary sanctions against Cofnas (…) But this is clearly blackmail by a foreign state and it is scandalous,” writes Ghent University professor Tijl De Bie on X. Philosopher of science Maarten Boudry, on the other hand, is pleased with the ‘agreement’.

Investigation continues

However, UGent confirms to De Morgen that the investigation against Cofnas is still ongoing. According to the disciplinary regulations, the preventive suspension issued by De Sutter last week can last a maximum of seven working days. Instead, a disciplinary measure covering three months followed on Wednesday. The ongoing investigation against Cofnas could also still lead to disciplinary action.

However, there had already been a meeting between the university and the American ambassador. “During that meeting, the ambassador provided further clarification regarding his statements on X,” says a university spokesperson. “UGent informed the ambassador of the disciplinary preliminary investigation, the confidentiality of the procedure, and the measures that were taken.”

The meeting took place after White announced on X last Friday that he would review all American ties with Ghent University, including academic exchanges and research funding. “Insincere, corrupt institutions that engage in scapegoating the masses, or reward such behavior, are not desirable partners for us,” said White.

In his most recent post, White seems to backtrack on that and says he looks forward to further collaboration with De Sutter and wants to continue the relationship between the university and the US.

All in all, Cofnas is not at present suspended from Ghent, but the investigation of his work and behavior is continuing, and he could still be fired.  Ergo, his academic freedom is still under threat (I needn’t emphasize that an “ongoing investigation” has a chilling effect on an academic). This is what happens when you work on a taboo subject.

I’ll add that I don’t think the American ambassador should be butting into this affair, even if Ghent did violate Cofnas’s academic freedom. Ambassador White’s statement above, which is indeed a form of blackmail, is out of line. The U.S. government has no business butting into the affairs of a university in another country, as the Cofnas affair does not affect American interests.

Ghent University suspends Nathan Cofnas for his involvement in the Arday affair

August 21, 2026 • 9:30 am

Well, as 0ne reader commented, the Arday affair may have died down, but the Cofnas affair, closely connected to it, is in full swing. Read the JustTheNews article below (click on screenshot) to see what’s happening, but it’s not much more than this: Nathan Cofnas, who uncovered plagiarism in Jason Arday‘s Ph.D. thesis, igniting a series of investigations of Arday’s fabulism and ultimately his death, moved to the University of Ghent after he left Cambridge University.  Apparently because of Arday’s death (likely a suicide), Ghent has just suspended Cofnas and will probably fire him.

The story from the site:

Ghent University has suspended Nathan Cofnas, the academic who uncovered former Cambridge Professor Jason Arday’s fraudulent activities.

“I was just suspended by Ghent University. They will almost certainly fire me.

The decision was made by rector Petra De Sutter, a former leader of the Green Party,” Cofnas announced on X.

University Rector Petra De Sutter issued a statement on the matter, confirming that the school had chosen to “take appropriate action,” but did not mention Cofnas by name.

“[T]he University takes the recent public statements made by a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University regarding this matter very seriously,” De Sutter wrote. “Ghent University has decided to take appropriate action within its powers and the applicable framework.”

Jason Arday was the youngest professor at Cambridge University. He died this month in an apparent suicide after revelations that he had fabricated much of his academic work, plagiarized much of his writings, made consistently false claims about his life store, and much more.

Here is a a copy of the letter to Cofnas from the Rector of Ghent University. Cofnas apparently doesn’t mind if it’s disseminated. Click screenshots to enlarge them:

There are several things worth noting here:

  • One of the accusations of Cofnas is that he was doing work that was “inconsistent with the contractual scope of [his] employment” and was therefore a “manifest violation of [his] professional obligations towards the University.  That work was Cofnas’s work on race and IQ that, as an intellectual taboo, let to his leaving a research associate position at Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge in 2025, and taking up a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ghent.

What strikes me here are two things. First, though I haven’t read Cofnas’s views and can’t say I sign onto them, I haven’t seen signs he’s an arrant racist. Rather, he’s engaged in academic work of a kind that is not supposed to be pursued. But if you work on this stuff, you’re deemed de facto a racist.  Second, regardless of what Ghent told Cofnas to work on, few academics sign on to do specific things, and often pursue a variety of things. Maarten Boudry, who was at the same University but left because of its authoritarianism and anti-Semitism, worked on many things, including two papers with me on the nature of religious “knowledge.”  This was just one of the many areas of philosophy that Maarten works and publishes on.

Surely Ghent knew that Cofnas would continue work that he’d been doing for several years. It seems that the nature of this work was not the real reason for his suspension, but that it was part of a chain of events that culminated in Arday’s death—a tragic event for which Cofnas bears no responsibility. The letter mentions several times the objections that were raised by others within and without the University against Cofnas’s hiring. These are irrelevant to issues of academic freedom but appear to have weighed heavily in his suspension.

  • Ghent explicitly abrogates academic freedom and free speech by saying that his work violated the law against “discrimination”. Read this pitiful excuse for abrogating his freedom (bolding is by the Rector).

In a series of recent public interviews you made, including interviews with Winston Marshall (8 August 2026), David Starkey (9 August 2026) and Rob Montz (14 August 2026), I have established that you have made various statements in which you assert (among other statements) that racial or ethnic groups differ in intellectual ability for inherited or biological reasons.

Certain statements made during those interviews may be interpreted as advancing ideas concerning the inherent superiority or inferiority of racial or ethnic groups. However, neither freedom of expression nor academic freedom is unlimited. Both may be restricted by law where necessary to protect the rights of others and to prevent discrimination and racism. Belgian anti-discrimination legislation provides for such restrictions. Questions therefore arise as to the compatibility of your public statements with the objectives and provisions of Belgian anti-discrimination legislation, more specifically articles 20 and 21.

This is a “we support free speech and academic freedom, but. . . ” kind of statement. ” Apparently Belgium has “hate speech” laws, and Ghent decided to go ahead and suspend Cofnas because his work supposedly violated those laws. They didn’t wait for government charges.

  • Finally, the Rector’s letter interprets the objections to Cofnas’s presence as substantial evidence that it will cause harm to the members of the university and impede its functioning. From the letter:

By framing your interventions as a ‘crusade’ aimed at the systematic personal and professional destruction of colleagues, you have demonstrated that your actions extend beyond the permissible bounds of academic debate. Such behaviour strongly suggests an intentional and serious disturbance of the peace, which may fall within the scope of conduct protected against under Chapter V of the Belgian Criminal Code concerning offences against a person’s honour or reputation, including the provisions set out in articles 443 et seq.

. . . Considering the volume and nature of the complaints, reports and expressions of concern received, the University cannot reasonably exclude the risk that your continued physical presence in the workplace would lead to confrontations, further disruption of the University’s activities, or a deterioration of the working and learning environment. Immediate intervention is therefore necessary to preserve institutional stability, safeguard the psychosocial wellbeing of staff and students, and prevent any further escalation of the unrest.

The upshot is that Ghent fired Cofnas supposedly because the nature of his work (which they well knew about when hiring him) was such as to wreck the “psychosocial wellbeing of staff and students”.  I don’t believe that; what I believe is that Arday’s death inflamed opposition to Cofnas’s hereditarian views, and it was outside pressure got the cowardly rector to let Cofnas go. To me, regardless of Belgian law—and I don’t believe the Belgian police would have done anything to him—this is a violation of free speech (of course Belgium doesn’t mandate that), and certainly a violation of academic freedom.  Regardless of Cofnas’s work or whether I agree with his conclusions (again I emphasize that I know almost nothing about his work), the work I do know about isn’t bizarre or crazy. It simply violates a common academic taboo. And once they’ve hired him, they can’t suspend him for doing the work they knew he’d do.

Here is a series of tweets. First, one from Cofnas himself:

Maarten Boudry had earlier pointed out that De Sutter had made up quotes (or rather, used at least three AI-made-up quotes) in her inaugural speech at Ghent.  Part of the letter to Cofnas was apparently AI-generated as well. That doesn’t mean De Sutter isn’t responsible for the letter’s content, as she is—completely. It just shows that she can’t trust her own words and has to use a bot, something I consider unethical if she doesn’t disclose it (she doesn’t). Further, as Boudry points out, De Sutter  lied about what she did, saying that she just “paraphrased” the quotes (see below).

Jesse Singal can’t believe that the rector used fabricated quotes in her inaugural speech, but Maarten sets him straight:

While Ghent apparently sees Arday as the victim of a hate campaign by Cofnas, it’s ironic that the rector is pursuing a campaign against Cofnas.

Finally, here’s an excellent tweet from the Committee for Academic Freedom about why Cofnas should not be suspended. Do read the whole statement.

Investigation challenges Jason Arday’s claims that he was nonverbal until age eleven

August 14, 2026 • 9:45 am

Several people have realized that many of Jason Arday‘s extraordinary claims about his life could actually be tested empirically. These include his assertions that he was so autistic that he did not speak until he was eleven, could not read or write until he was eighteen, running 600 miles in six days, completing 30 marathons in 35 days (the last ten with a cracked fibula), his 5-million-pound donations to charity, and his academic jobs. (Some of the latter, like his claims of holding visiting professorships at the University of Glasgow, Ohio State University, and Nelson Mandela University, have already been discredited.)

But the claims of not speaking until he was eleven and being illiterate until eighteen have always baffled me. Not only do they not seem credible (he started university at age 20), but surely, if they were true, there would be records. Does he not have parents who will attest to this? What about friends or associates? Why did not of these people weigh in supporting Arday when the press began investigating him? Because he’s made these claims repeatedly and they’ve been a crucial part of the attention he got, it’s incumbent on journalists to investigate their truth.

Well, the Guardian, which unexpectedly broke a lot of the Arday stuff in the MSM, has done so. The results are mixed: some remember him being quite vocal in primary school, while others buttress his own story. Click below to read the story. Arday’s own biography, Great and Unfortunate Things, wass published in the U.S. Tuesday and is coming out in the UK on August 27.

I’ve indented some excerpts.

The story of Jason Arday’s extraordinary rise to becoming the youngest black professor in the history of the University of Cambridge is all the more remarkable for one claim: that he did not learn to speak until just shy of his 12th birthday.

This claim was mentioned in a letter announcing his resignation last week, which came amid mounting questions about his academic work and statements he had made about his past.

Arday wrote that becoming a professor at Cambridge was something he “could scarcely have imagined” as an autistic child who was “unable to speak until I was 11 years old”.

His memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, was published by Simon & Schuster in the US on Tuesday and is due to be published in the UK on 27 August. It tells the story of how he joined Cambridge aged 37 despite having been non-verbal throughout his childhood and only learning to read and write aged 18.

But interviews with former schoolmates have produced conflicting accounts of his childhood. Two remember him speaking at primary school, describing a chatty child who loved making jokes, while two others say they did not hear him speak until he reached secondary school.

Jonathan Stewart, 40, told the Guardian he remembered Arday from when they were children growing up in south London. He described him as a good mimic who entertained other pupils by putting on accents and singing songs.

Stewart, a YouTuber who says he was in the year below Arday at Heathbrook primary school in Nine Elms, south-west London, said the academic was known as the class clown. “He was always cracking jokes. He was the comedian guy, he would even put on voices,” claimed Stewart, who said he regularly attended church with Arday.

. . .Another man, 40, who was also in the year below Arday at Heathbrook and asked not to be named, said: “I don’t remember too much about him but I certainly recollect him being able to speak.” Both this man and Stewart said they were in touch with people who had been in Arday’s class.

Arday writes in his memoir that as he approached the age of 12 the local council was on the verge of pulling his speech therapy support because he had made so little progress.

“But miraculously, just a few days shy of my 12th birthday, I spoke. It was at the start of one of my sessions, and Katrina [his speech therapist] had just said: ‘Hello, Jason.’ At that moment, I was fiddling with my hearing aid, which was bothering me, and then I took it out of my ear and said hello back to her.”

But here’s some support:

Arday denied the accounts provided by Stewart and the second man and organised for the Guardian to be sent statements by two school friends, Nick Clark and Mike Freeman, who said the account in his memoir accurately reflected the boy they remembered at school.

Clark said: “As a boy, I remember Jason not speaking and being regularly removed from class for additional support throughout his time at Heathbrook. I was not in his secondary school, but we joined the same football team at 13, when we became great friends, playing football together ever since.”

Clark’s mother, Caroline Russell-Clark, also sent a statement saying she helped out at Heathbrook for a couple of years when Arday was very young.

. . .Russell-Clark said Arday remained in the same class as her son throughout primary school. “I do not remember him speaking until he was playing in the same football team as my son aged 14/15.”

Freeman said: “I remember him not speaking during our time at Heathbrook primary school. He was regularly taken out of class for his educational needs. His severe special needs didn’t stop him playing football and games with me and others as he was still friendly and could communicate through play and actions.”

. . .Arday claimed to have completed 30 marathons in 35 days, run 600 miles in six days and raised £5m for charity over several years. After facing questions, he revised some of those claims and instead said he was part of a fundraising group that he was unable to name for legal reasons.

He also told the Guardian he had been the target of threats after his Cambridge appointment, including having a severed pig’s head delivered to his parents’ home. Subsequent investigations found no evidence to support this claim.

Simon & Schuster, which bought Arday’s memoir for a seven-figure sum, according to the academic, is pressing on with its publication and launch in the UK. The publisher did not respond to requests for comment.

So there you have it.  The claims about marathons, running, and raising millions of pounds for charity were never credible and now he’s “revising” them. The proven claims about plagiarism Arday has fobbed off on a tendency to engage in “mimicry” because of his autism.

As I mentioned before, nearly all publishers, including mine, require when you publish a book, you’ve also signed a statement saying that what you assert in your text is, to the best of your knowledge, true. And surely Simon & Schuster would have done that, too. Presumably, even though many of Arday’s claims are questionable, Simon & Schuster could put that off on Arday and not their own fact-checking, which is usually minimal for most publishers. (Libel is an exception, and often mandates that a manuscript be given a “legal read.”)

What can we make of this? The plagiarism, which is extensive, is on its face unethical, and Arday’s excuses are not excusable. The marathon and charity claims are already being walked back, and the claims about recurring brain tumors, mini-strokes, and other physical ailments stretch credibility. As far as the autism and late speaking/literacy claims, well, they bear more investigation, but they’re certainly questionable. All this points to the man as a fabulist who may actually believe all the stories he told. If he doesn’t, he’s a grifter.

At least the Guardian had the moxie to investigate Arday’s claims, though there’s lots of room for more investigation—if anybody’s interested. (Apparently Simon & Schuster is not.) What is truly lame is the New York Times’ new article, “Takeaways from Jason Arday’s memoir” by Neil Vigdor (article archived here). No conclusions are reached, all judgment is suspended. The “takeaways” are simply the claims Arday makes in his book—claims we already know about.  The article is superfluous and bespeaks a lack critical acumen in even noting that Arday’s claims could be investigated.

To improve student mental health, University of Michigan decides to deep-six grades during the first semester

August 12, 2026 • 9:20 am

Now that colleges have morphed from institutions of higher learning to buy-a-diploma mills, colleges are increasingly catering to students’ desires. At many schools now, more than half the students get special accommodations during exams, like having rooms to themselves or extra time. (This is okay for some students, but more than half?).

At any rate, the University of Michigan has joined the ranks of schools that don’t show students their grades awarded during their first semester. (As you’ll see, they do get grades, but they’re secret and used in limited ways).

Click below to read the WSJ article on the deep-sixing of grades, or go here to read an archived version:

 

An excerpt (indented; my own comments are flush left):

The University of Michigan will drop grades for first-semester freshmen next year in an effort to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” according to the school.

Instead of a letter grade, first-semester transcripts will show “pass or no credit.” The program is designed to help students “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys,” the school said.

The program, set to start in fall 2027, applies to students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, which enrolls about half of Michigan’s roughly 8,000 first-year students.

A Michigan spokesman declined to comment about how the university reached the decision to enact the pilot. Although grades won’t be recorded on student transcripts or affect grade-point averages, professors will still assign them internally to track eligibility for scholarships and academic awards.

I’m wondering whether student anxiety will really abate because of this. What happens during the second semester, if you know you passed but don’t know where you stand? If you barely passed during your first semester and get a “pass”, you might want to work harder, but you won’t know where you stood initially in competition with your classmates. Also, the grades do count for scholarship and awards, so they aren’t irrelevant. Will your inability to know your “internal” grades possibly increase anxiety?

And why does the risk of mental problems decrease after the first semester? After all, you’re going to get real, “external” grades from then on.

This tactic is not unique:

Schools including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology have implemented similar “grade-covering” programs in past years.

The shift at Michigan, among the nation’s largest and best-known public universities, comes as schools wrestle with grade inflation and the need for remedial instruction for freshmen ill-prepared for college-level classes. University of California math and science professors have urged UC regents to reinstate entrance exams because so many freshmen were unprepared.

Of course poor preparedness is the fault of secondary schools like high schools, but entrance exams can help.  The SATs or equivalent tests are even better, and, in combination with high-school grades, are the best predictor of how well a student does in college—and later life.

But in a perverse move designed to coddle students (they have numerous excuses), many schools no longer require such tests for admission (the University of Chicago makes them optional), or prohibits you from submitting scores at all.  This kind of coddling is also instantiated in grade inflation. Harvard has taken ineffectual steps to remedy this, but at least they require SATs or ACTs for admission. Michigan doesn’t.

In May, Harvard University faculty voted to approve a 20% cap on the number of A’s per undergraduate course in an effort to curb grade inflation. It won’t apply to A-minuses, which committee members predicted would become the most awarded grade.

At the University of Michigan, a review by the news site MLive found that 74.1% of all undergraduate grades in 2022 were an A+, A or A-. A decade earlier, that percentage was 57.6%.

Kenneth Lowande, a former Michigan political science professor who left for Rice University, said he didn’t think the new policy would make much of a difference because grade inflation had made grades largely irrelevant. Michigan no longer mandates the SAT or ACT for undergraduate admissions.

“Grades have lost their value as an indication of quality or excellence,” Lowande said.

That’s true if you gauge quality relative to others. If everyone is excellent, of course, grades do indicate quality, but that’s not the case. What we have is an Alice In Wonderland “All Must Have Prizes” mentality based on coddling. And the students love it:

Michigan students lauded the new policy. Student body president Summit Louth said he had spoken to around 50 classmates and they were either happy or jealous the policy didn’t exist when they were freshmen. Poor mental health is closely tied to academic stress and anxiety among students, Louth said.

Louth, 20 years old, said he earned all A’s and one B in his first semester and doubted he would have worked as hard had the classes been pass/fail. But he thinks he would have learned more from his classes without the pressure of earning high marks.

How does Louth know that?

Derek Peterson, a history professor and former chair of the faculty government, said he believes the move is generally beneficial because it will give students a chance to explore subjects more freely.

If that’s the idea, why give grades at all? Why not give written evaluations that can be put in students’ transcripts? That might be difficult for large courses, but several schools, according to Grok, have completely dispensed with letter grades:

Schools That Dispense with (or Heavily Minimize) Traditional Grades

. . . . several colleges (mostly small liberal arts institutions) fully or largely replace letter grades with narrative evaluations (detailed written assessments of a student’s performance, strengths, weaknesses, and growth). Examples include:

  • Hampshire College — Narrative evaluations only; no letter grades or traditional majors.
  • The Evergreen State College — Narrative evaluations; no letter grades or GPAs.
  • Alverno College — Ability-based assessment with detailed feedback; no traditional letter grades.
  • New College of Florida — Narrative evaluations / performance reviews.
  • Antioch College / Antioch University — Narrative evaluations (sometimes alongside or instead of grades).
  • Sarah Lawrence College — Strong emphasis on narrative evaluations (letter grades are recorded but secondary).
  • St. John’s College — Seminar-based “Don Rag” discussions; letter grades are recorded but available only by request.

Narrative evaluations would seem to be better anyway for small courses, but in light of the difficulty of grad schools or employers reading a bunch of narratives, I still favor traditional grades, but with caps like Harvard’s. If that policy is made public, students can’t beef about it when they arrive.

There comes a time in life when the free rides stop.  Employers don’t dispense with evaluation of employees early in their tenure on the grounds of mental health.  And college, where you can seek counseling if you’re upset or distressed, is the place for it to start—if you haven’t already gotten grades in high school!  This may sound curmudgeonly, but part of the art of living is to realize that you are not the best at everything, and to either accept that or try to better yourself. After all, grades are not the totality of existence.

Jason Arday resigns his professorship at Cambridge

August 6, 2026 • 6:30 am

As I reported two days ago, Cambridge sociology professor Jason Arday was the subject of several reports of unethical behavior as well as fabulism.  Yesterday he resigned his position at The University of Cambridge after there were multiple credible accusations of plagiarism in his Ph.D. thesis and his scholarly papers (which didn’t seem so scholarly). He also told unbelievable tales about his life, including having raised £5 million pounds for charity, of having run 30 marathons in 35 days, and of having been threatened when there was no evidence of the reported threats. He sicced the police on journalists inquiring about his life, and blamed all the inquiries and criticism on racism.  He said that he was diagnosed as autistic when young, did not speak until he was 11 years old, and could not read or write until he was 18.

The pressure on Arday grew sufficiently intense, and the accusations so numerous, that Cambridge finally announced they were investigating him. In light of this and other mounting investigations, he quit his job (see his resignation letter below); all this is reported in the New York Times (here and here; links free, h/t Keith) and the Guardian. His autobiography, scheduled to appear this coming week, is apparently still in the works, but I suspect it will be withdrawn. From the NYT:

His resignation came hours after Cambridge announced an investigation into Arday, and six days before the scheduled release of his memoir “Great and Unfortunate Things,” by the Simon & Schuster imprint 37 Ink, in the United States.

A representative of Simon & Schuster, which has so far stood by the book, told The New York Times on Wednesday that the publisher had no comment beyond the statement about Arday it released last week, citing “the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication.”

Arday, true to form, did not admit any fabulism or guilt in his resignation letter posted at the GoodLaw Project:

Dear colleagues,

It is with profound sadness that I write to resign, with immediate effect, from my position at the University of Cambridge and Jesus College.

When I accepted the extraordinary honour of becoming Professor of Sociology at Cambridge, it was, without question, the greatest professional privilege of my life. To become the youngest Black professor in the University’s history was something I could scarcely have imagined as a child growing up with a diagnosis of autism, unable to speak until I was eleven years old.

The response from so many people across the world was overwhelming. Thousands celebrated not simply my appointment, but what it represented: that talent, perseverance and hope can triumph over even the greatest adversity. It has been the privilege of my life to teach my students, to learn alongside them, and to witness their curiosity, kindness and ambition. They have given me far more than I could ever have given them.

Sadly, the years since my appointment have also been marked by an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack. While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement. The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.

I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope.

But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great.

I have a family. I want to be present for them. I want to reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life. I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement.

For my own wellbeing, for my family, and for those who have stood by me throughout this difficult period, I have concluded that the only way to bring this chapter to an end is to step away.

This decision should not be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me to Cambridge. Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me. It is simply the decision of someone who has reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.

To my students: thank you. Teaching you has been the greatest honour of my academic career. Your brilliance, compassion and determination give me enormous hope for the future.

To my colleagues and to the many thousands of people, from every corner of the world, who have supported me, defended me, written to me, and believed in me when it mattered most, I offer my deepest gratitude. Your kindness has carried me through some of the darkest moments of my life.

This is not the end of my work. It is simply the end of this chapter.

I need time to heal. I need time to simply be  myself again.

And when that time comes, I will return.

I will return stronger, wiser and with the same determination that has always defined my journey. There is still so much work to do, and I look forward to doing it alongside so many of you in the years ahead.

For now, however, I ask only for understanding, for compassion, and for the space to begin again.

With gratitude,
Professor Jason Arday

Again, he admits no guilt, but implies that “relentless accusations”, which he’d always attributed to racism or ableism, had made his life at Cambridge Uni intolerable.  I feel a bit sorry for the guy, for, after all, his rise was promoted by people who bought into the oppressor/victim narrative. But he himself is responsible for telling apparently false stories about his academic career and life, and for stealing from other scholars. As I said, Arday’s meteoric rise, as well as the many people who defended him in light of credible accusations, constitute an insult to reputable black and minority scholars everywhere.

I doubt Arday will return to academics, for what university would hire him? He is tainted permanently, and the plagiarism and statements about his life are there for all to see. Let this be a lesson to Cambridge to hire solely on the basis of merit rather than to tick an identity box.

Here’s the take of philosopher Maarten Boudry; read the whole thing, and watch the video at the end: