To think 'academic freedom' and whistleblower punishment are misused in those protesting the suspension of Nathan Cofnas

If he'd said that, yes. But he didn't go that far (even if one suspects he might think that).

Well, of course — that is Cofnas’s own justification. He doesn’t self-identify as a racist; he believes his attitudes towards Black academics are legitimate and that his actions were motivated by concerns about academic standards. But however he justifies it, the relevant question is what he actually did. He made Arday’s race/Blackness part of the basis on which he singled him out and framed the allegations against him. His insistence that his motivation was legitimate doesn’t somehow make the racial targeting disappear. Racially targeting an individual in this way is contrary to the University’s code of ethical practice and can constitute grounds for dismissal.

I get that you don’t want to suppress disagreement because that could be a slippery slope, but don’t you think a university could say that “I genuinely think that black people aren’t clever enough to be my colleagues or my students” is an opinion that renders one unsuitable to work with those colleagues and lecture those students?

Maybe. But no doubt he'd say that given how important Ardays race was to Cambridge (they made a lot of noise about it), querying whether them appointing an alledgedly under-qualified person (seemingly without checking any of his fantastic biographical claims) was a 'diversity hire' rather than an appointment purely on academic merit wasn't racist, but was about academic standards/integrity. Personally, I don't belive he wasn't motivated by race, but it'd be hard to prove to standard necessary to sack him.

Because when we try to kick academics we don't agree with out of academia we set a very dangerous precedent. Really, he should see out his current post, then not got another one due to his poor scholarship. Rather than Ghent concocting some convoluted charge to get rid of him when the real reason is that they're caving to public pressure to sack him now for stuff they nlknew he was saying before he was even appointed.

I disagree that it is difficult to prove that Cofnas's intervention can reasonably be understood as racially motivated. We do not need to speculate about his private state of mind, because his own blog post explicitly makes Arday's race central to his argument.

If he had simply set out evidence of alleged plagiarism and argued that it should be investigated, that would be one thing. But he chose to frame the entire piece as “DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge”, with the subtitle “University refuses to investigate DEI star's plagiarism.” He explicitly says that Arday was hired to advance racial diversity and describes his appointment as an “overtly political act” to promote DEI and increase the representation of particular groups.

More explicitly still, he writes that Cambridge could have found “a black professor” who was qualified, but instead “grabbed a random black person”, before asking whether Cambridge was effectively suggesting that “the only way to have black professors is to abandon all standards.” He then argues that people like Arday are hired because they “tick certain identity and ideology boxes”.

It is clear that this was not a neutral intervention about plagiarism and academic misconduct, whatever one thinks of the evidence of plagiarism itself. Cofnas very deliberately turned Arday's case into an argument about Black academics and merit.

Because when we try to kick academics we don't agree with out of academia we set a very dangerous precedent. Really, he should see out his current post, then not got another one due to his poor scholarship. Rather than Ghent concocting some convoluted charge to get rid of him when the real reason is that they're caving to public pressure to sack him now for stuff they nlknew he was saying before he was even appointed.

He alleged plagiarism, seemingly with some reasonsble basis. There would have to be a strong case that he was motivated by racism to justify sacking him for making that allegation. Because the chilling effect of holding those who report wrongdoing responsible for the alleged wrongdoer's fragile state of mind would would likely deter good faith and well-founded criticisms. (Personally, I suspect racism did come into it, but I doubt that could be proven.)

Cofnas himself has written blog posts about how we should be kicking people he disagrees with out of academia.

If he's broken the terms of his contract, should we just overlook that?

I don't think Cofnas should be kicked out because we disagree with him, but rather because his actions- particularly is personal targeting of Arday, violated the university's own code of ethical conduct.

Because when we try to kick academics we don't agree with out of academia we set a very dangerous precedent. Really, he should see out his current post, then not got another one due to his poor scholarship. Rather than Ghent concocting some convoluted charge to get rid of him when the real reason is that they're caving to public pressure to sack him now for stuff they nlknew he was saying before he was even appointed.

Because when we try to kick academics we don't agree with out of academia we set a very dangerous precedent. Really, he should see out his current post, then not got another one due to his poor scholarship. Rather than Ghent concocting some convoluted charge to get rid of him when the real reason is that they're caving to public pressure to sack him now for stuff they nlknew he was saying before he was even appointed.

There's a difference between stopping him talking and not boosting what he's saying though.

He can talk all he likes still, he has his substack, but without the backing of a university. I mean, why amplify him and give him credibility?

Sadly, I'm sure they will. I still think the effects of stopping him talking would be worse than those of pointing out he's talking bollocks.

Don't you think some people will just want to believe in what he says anyway - and feel it's a tenet of faith that white people are superior?

Don't you think some people will just want to believe in what he says anyway - and feel it's a tenet of faith that white people are superior?

Also his ideas and conclusions are so utterly foolish and so obviously flawed that it's difficult to reconcile this with even the idea that he is "book smart"...

He's a common or garden racist. Might be academic and book smart but his 'theories' are sick.

Environmental theories dominated early 20th C thinking about autism (“refrigerator mothers”).

For a long time, being gay was taken to be a product of culture, bad parenting or bad choices.

Would you say that understanding the genetic influence on both of those has undermined esteem or respect for autistic people, gay people and those around them who were previously “blamed”?

Would you put that knowledge back in the box?

I totally agree with you that establishing a genetic basis for racial differences in intelligence absolutely would create/reinforce a hierarchy of esteem and respect, even if that weren’t the intention. But I think there’s a more fundamental question here: why should establishing such a difference be regarded as a meaningful or worthwhile scientific objective in the first place?

while we might study sex differences in particular cognitive abilities, we don’t generally regard the question “are men or women more intelligent?” as a particularly coherent or useful scientific question. Intelligence is multidimensional, the distributions overlap enormously, and average group differences tell us very little about individuals. I think similar considerations apply to racial comparisons, with the additional problem that racial categories are socially constructed and genetically heterogeneous.

Race isn’t a set of discrete, genetically coherent biological categories. There is enormous genetic and phenotypic variation within racial categories, and they don’t map neatly onto underlying population structure. So the question of whether an observed difference between socially defined racial groups is “genetic” is already a scientifically shaky hypothesis to pursue.

So to me the burden here is on those proposing this line of enquiry to first explain why this particular comparison is even scientifically meaningful, what it would actually tell us, and what value there is in pursuing it, rather than assuming that the possibility of a genetic difference makes the question intrinsically worth asking.