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

[keepcounsel]

Many posters have cited 'academic freedom' and 'freedom of expression' as well as 'witch-hunt' in terms of Nathan Cofnas being suspended from the University of Ghent. They've also represented the suspension as punishing a whistle-blower due to his being one of the first to publicly communicate concerns about Jason Arday and plagiarism/academic standards. 200+ academics have signed a letter of protest about the suspension and the American ambassador to Belgium as well as Trump have called for him to be re-hired.

The grounds for his appointment seem to be to work as a post-doc on a Professor's project, so not overseen by the University HR department or a committee in the way a lecturer/professorial appointment would happen.
The work/activities of the Professor in question - Bouke De Vries - had been subject to complaints from his colleagues. When colleagues and students protested about Cofnas being hired Ghent's Rector said dissenting opinions should be allowed in the University.

Ghent have now said the grounds for suspension are due to:

a. He didn't conduct the research he was hired for
[they said 'The projects you publicly and repeatedly associate with your affiliation at Gent University, most notably your
'Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution' which advocates for racial barriers and segregation, fall entirely outside the scope of your official research mandate.']

b. He violated the University's ethics code
['prohibits spreading ideas of racial superiority or inciting racial segregation.']

c. He made statements that violate Belgian anti-discrimination legislation

d. He made remarks about Jason Arday that violate Belgian Criminal Code concerning offences against a person's honour or reputation

e. He caused significant unrest in the workplace by advocating a purge of those academics he thought ideologically wrong

My position as an academic invited to sign the letter of protest against his suspension is that academic freedom/freedom of speech is not unlimited, for example if it involves slander or seeks to assert racial supremacy.

I'd have no issue if he's sacked for a genuine breach, rather than it being a pretext for binning him off when the real reason is public outcry against his ideas.

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.

Loads of academics have been suspended for taking action on e.g. Palestine. Where are their open letters?

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.

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?

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.

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.

Or rather that’s what he claims he believes. We don’t actually have to believe him.

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

Maybe. But I think it's a bit more nuanced.

He absolutely went that far though.

His argument that based on academics there would be only a tiny percentage of black students at Harvard and close to zero professors wasn't restricted to Harvard. He then extrapolated it to any high profile positions outside of sports and entertainment 'in a meritocracy'.

Of course he thinks that his argument about black people not being clever enough to be students or professors tracks to Cambridge and his current university and he literally set out to prove it.

I’m not sure I agree that this is something that should be characterised primarily in terms of “nuance”. There may be nuances in how we interpret Cofnas’s motivations or the arguments he thinks he was making, but that shouldn’t obscure the more fundamental issue: that individuals need protection from racial targeting and that should be the priority regardless of how the person doing the targeting justifies it.

This wasn’t simply an academic argument about race or DEI. It was directed at a specific individual. Cofnas chose Arday as his target, made his Blackness and his race central to his framing of the allegations, and publicly scrutinised him in a way that went far beyond simply raising a question about academic misconduct.

And the subsequent chain of events demonstrates what is at stake when individuals are targeted in this way. The devastating consequences that ensued should make us profoundly concerned about the consequences of allowing academics to publicly target individual colleagues on racialised grounds. Indeed, it is hard to see how the story would have ever attracted much attention without the racialised element.

And beyond what happened to Arday - what message does it send to Black academics generally if this kind of racialised targeting is treated as an acceptable form of scrutiny? That they can expect to be subjected to a level of scrutiny their white colleagues aren't? That a mistake, an imperfect CV, or an unsubstantiated claim could be turned into a public campaign about whether they deserved to be there in the first place? And what does that say to Black people considering entering academia?

So for me the nuances of Cofnas's justification are very much secondary to the principle that* *people should not be racially targeted in their employment and then told the targeting is acceptable because the person doing it believes they have a legitimate reason. The protection of individuals from that kind of treatment is what institutional equality and ethical standards are supposed to safeguard.

Much more interesting information comes from the "Attainment 8" published figures in the UK, and from the Pisa programme which compares education in different countries.
Attainment 8 quantifies GCSE results. It gives a view of all Year 11 school students, taking a broad range of exams. They are all the same age, and there is no risk of introducing selection bias. The effect of training, home environment, attitudes to learning, choice of exam subject etc leaves no room to pretend it purely reflects innate ability.
Pisa is even more complex. It gives a rich and fascinating picture of the environmental variables that impact attainment.
However I am now distracted by noticing the uneven number if girls and boys in the Attainment 8 figures.

He couldn't be suspended for simple whistleblowing - just saying Arday plagiarised his thesis and articles.

The grounds seem pretty clear - not doing the work he was hired for, and violating the university's ethics code (etc.) It's not because he publicised the issues with Arday's work but on the occasion of it as he used the publicity that he got from doing that to assert his project (and potentially defame Arday, advocate for purging the academy etc).

He was already being monitored by the University, so if he didn't want to be suspended/martyred, why would he have used the moment to promote a whole project of 'vengeance' and expulsion that was clearly against the code he was supposed to have signed up to (and was under scrutiny for)?

Sorry, my mistake

He can talk all he wants, but I can also see why a University would not want to be affiliated with what he says.

But this university hired him knowing what his views are.

An individual in the University did - the appointment and the manner in which it happened were immediately protested about

He was hired by one professor who had already garnered complaints, academics in the same department protested to the Rector who said they'd monitor the situation, and that the university did not support any suggestions of racial superiority etc. under one of their ethical regulations.

So when Cofnas drew attention to Arday and then used the ensuing publicity to spread his ideas about racial science etc he knew his cards were marked. Not the actions for someone who wasn't seeking publicity/martyrdom.

So once again we have a university that hasn't done its due diligence and the buck is being passed on to some one else?

I'm sorry but the universities cannot keep dodging the blame.

Not sure who the buck is being passed on to. It's fairly standard for a post-doc to be hired by an individual, but in this case he circumvented the usual process. This is the letter written by people in the department about it
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/t47r5th5i7scx0tjzlkim/Translation-of-Positions-of-the-Department-LW01-Cofnas.pdf?rlkey=c29kijdbeh56f1v5kzb25x3gn&e=4&dl=0

The person who hired him had already been flagged as problematic, and seems to share some of Cofnas's views

Clearly there were issues - and the University may have to change its hiring practices for sure.

I'm not defending him generally, but I think your characterisation is inaccurate.

That he believes that black people are over-represented due to DEI doesn't mean he believes that no black people deserve such positions.

He says that without DEI there would be almost no black professors.

Yes, "almost". He concedes that some are there on (his meaning of) merit.

Not that I necessarily agree with that, particularly in a UK context. Especially because, even if we put aside the argument about short-term unfairness towards individiluals from one group to correct long-term unfairness to another.group, I don't necessarily agree that IQ is a perfect proxy for fitness for professorship. (His position is largely based on the tiny proportion of black people in the top 1% of IQ in the US.)

Oh come on, he said "approaching zero" and that black people in high profile positions would disappear from nearly all positions outside of entertainment and sports .

Yes, and I think he's wrong about that, because it is based on racial differences in mean IQ in the US; those dirrefernces are not shown to the same extent elsewhere, and, even if they were, his argument turns on the assumption that IQ=fitness for a high-profile role, which is clearly ridiculous.

In any event, you might be right that he really believes that no black people are worthy, but chose his words to give him wriggle-room. So, with reference to e.g. any particular black professor asking if they deserve to be there, he can say that maybe they are in that group he accepts would have been recruited on merit.