In the weeks since the death of sociologist Jason Arday, a number of things have become clear.
Firstly, it is undeniable that, to whatever degree his work was tainted by plagiarism, the relentless coverage of his story was wholly disproportionate. Of the many academics to have been accused of plagiarism, I’m unaware of any who have been the subject of over 200 media articles in the week after they had already stepped down from their position. You do not have to defend or condone plagiarism to be able to recognise that this furious frenzy of coverage speaks to a media ecosystem for whom Arday’s story represented an opportunity to air some personal grievances and beat some hobby horses, and even the more respectable outlets engaged in behaviour that, in retrospect, ought to prompt severe introspection (and the Telegraph’s stealthy deletion of the word “living” from one of their headlines does not count as such).
Secondly, at least some of the claims made by Arday that were deemed most obvious evidence of embellishment and fantasy, upon examination, are well supported by contemporaneous news reports. As an investigation by Emma Monk shows, Arday’s 2010 fundraising series of 30 marathons in 35 days were covered in at least five media outlets at the time, including a statement from a charity director who cycled alongside him for marathon 24. Despite comprehensive coverage of the whole affair, seemingly no media outlet bothered to check before repeating the claim that these runs were obviously preposterous.
And thirdly, the surfacing and mainstreaming of the plagiarism allegations, as well as the forensic scrutiny of Arday’s personal history, was no accident. After a formal investigation by Liverpool John Moore’s University – the institution which awarded his PhD – cleared him of wrongdoing, an as-yet-unnamed academic at the University of Cambridge tipped off Nathan Cofnas, who published about it on his blog. Cofnas, as has been extensively covered, is a philosophy researcher and self-described “race realist”, who has made clear his beliefs that black people are genetically inferior to white people, and intellectually incapable of elite academic work.
The word “belief” is key here: Cofnas is a philosopher of biology and ethics. He has no qualifications in genetics, neuroscience, psychology, or the study of intelligence. Despite how many have sought to portray him, he has no academic expertise in the genetic component of anything, including race and intelligence. His pronouncements on the inferiority of any race hold little more academic weight or credibility than those of Tommy Robinson, or Alf Garnett for that matter.
Rallying support for a “race realist”
Cofnas has stated in interviews that his interest in investigating and exposing Arday was related to the University of Cambridge’s removal of his College Research Associate status in 2024, telling conservative podcaster Rob Montz, “This is what happens when you don’t give Cofnas a job” – a reaction Montz describes as “retaliation”. Soon after his suspension from that associate position, he was invited to give a lecture at Ghent University, where in March 2026 he took up a post-doctoral position – a position from which he has now been suspended.
To hear Cofnas tell it, his suspension from Ghent University was punishment for “discriminating against Arday” by outing his plagiarism – and it is a framing that has led over 900 academics to sign an open letter in support. The letter claims they are “concerned that Ghent University’s disciplinary proceedings against Dr Cofnas appear to constitute retaliation, at least in part, for publicizing academic misconduct that occurred in British universities”, and describes this squarely as a question of academic freedom – “the ability to scrutinize the scholarship of other academics, regardless of their position or status”.
Among the signatories to the letter are names many skeptics might recognise: Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Peter Singer, Sabine Hossenfelder, Nikil Mukerji of the German skeptics GWUP, and Maarten Boudry of the Belgian skeptics, SKEPP. There’s also Bouke de Vries, the professor who hired Cofnas to Ghent University after he had been let go from Cambridge.
This is just the latest show of support for the self-confessed “race realist” and “hereditarian” – in March, Boudry and de Vries were among the signatories to a letter defending Cofnas after staff at Ghent University criticised his appointment, given that he has expressed pro-eugenics views that were “morally beneath contempt”. That letter, too, framed criticism of Cofnas as an attack on academic freedom – stressing that, of course, while the signatories don’t endorse any specific claims Cofnas has made, he should be free to put forward those opinions without the threat of losing employment.
That earlier letter was also signed by Peter Singer, Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, Lawrence Krauss, former Tory MP Philip Davies, Lord Toby Young of the Free Speech Union, Connie Shaw of the Free Speech Union, Mark Oppenheimer of the Free Speech Union of South Africa, Reuben Kirkham of the Free Speech Union of Australia, Lisa Bildy of the Free Speech Union of Canada, Claire Lehmann of Quillette (and the Free Speech Union), and Freddie Attenborough, of the Committee for Academic Freedom (and the former Comms Officer for the Free Speech Union).
Obviously, as a long-term skeptic, I care an awful lot about academic freedom, and free speech. With that in mind, is this a letter I ought to be signing, and recommending readers to sign? To establish that, it’s first worth doing what I’d argue many of those 900+ signatories can’t possibly have done: actually look at what Nathan Cofnas has been accused of. Because while people seemed enthusiastic to acquaint themselves in minute and forensic detail with every aspect of the accusations levelled at Jason Arday, they seem happy to take Nathan Cofnas at his word. Who can say why?
Cofnas at Cambridge
People may be surprised to learn that Nathan Cofnas was never a paid staff member at the University of Cambridge – he held a postdoctoral position funded by the Leverhulme Trust to study “the biological basis of moral norms” as part of the faculty of philosophy. As a College Research Associate (CRA), Cambridge provided him an office to do his research… and the credibility of saying he was researching at the prestigious University of Cambridge.
In return, he agreed to abide by Cambridge’s “culture of respect” policy – essentially, the terms of his affiliation. That included agreeing that:
Belittling, derogatory, humiliating, or inappropriate language, or behaviour which excludes, intimidates, coerces, or undermines others, has no place here.
His CRA role began in November 2023, and in February 2024 he published a blogpost titled “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution: How to Win the Elites and Create a Better World”. If it needs pointing out, creating a hereditarian revolution was not part of the remit of his CRA work, and nor was it remotely related to his research topic.
The blogpost consisted of his own personal opinion that “race realism” was “scientifically correct”, and that a “hereditarian revolution” was “both feasible and desirable”. It is an expression of support for the discredited and pseudoscientific field of eugenics, while stating his admiration for Charles Murray and his eugenicist tome The Bell Curve, and citing and responding to arguments by Christian Nationalist Chris Rufo (father of the critical race theory moral panic, and formerly of the creationist outfit The Discovery Institute).
Crucially, he also argues that race realism will not win “without bringing a substantial number of the elites to our side”. It is perhaps no coincidence that he penned this call for a pro-eugenics revolution while sitting in an office at the highly-elite University of Cambridge.
Given that Cofnas stated that almost no black students or professors at elite academic institutions could be there on intellectual merit, absent the helping hand of affirmative action, it is of little surprise that dozens of complaints were made, including by some of the black faculty members at his university – full-time, tenured members of staff, even – who he had essentially accused of being genetically incapable of doing their job.
The university launched an investigation, and Cofnas sought help from the Free Speech Union – the organisation run by Toby Young, editor of the anti-vaccine blog the Daily Sceptic. As a result of the investigation, the university withdrew Cofnas’ CRA status and in response he took the university to court, with the support of the FSU, arguing that his rights had been violated under the European Convention on Human Rights. He sought £25k in damages, plus legal fees.
On 13 March 2026, the tribunal ruled against him, finding that the University had acted responsibly and proportionately – especially as they had made attempts to find reasonable resolutions that were rejected by Cofnas. The tribunal also reasoned that Cambridge was not Cofnas’ employer, given that he was a short-term, externally funded post-doc who had agreed to a workplace policy that he then violated. By this point, the FSU had raised at least £85,000 off the back of the case – it is unclear how much of that sum was eventually spent on legal fees (questions have been raised in the press about the FSU’s use of donations).
Cofnas at Ghent
By the time Cofnas lost his case against Cambridge in March, he had already secured a new postdoctoral position, replacing Maarten Boudry at Ghent University. The role he successfully applied for was to research “The Birth Problem of Liberalism”, with the remit:
the growth of religious fundamentalist groups that combine relatively high fertility with relatively high retention rates … poses (long-term) challenges to liberal democracies, philosophers have not considered what, if anything, states may or should do about this. Are there morally permissible/necessary ways of ensuring that there remain enough liberal-minded people to maintain liberal institutions, assuming … ‘you cannot run a liberal state that is filled up to the ceiling with illiberal people’
Crucially, the role did not involve anything remotely related to the heritability of intelligence, or anything related to the genetics of race.
At the time, and throughout the subsequent months, there has been significant pushback from academics within the university – not just because Cofnas is a eugenicist, but also because his research history didn’t seem particularly suited to the question he was hired to research, even though he was chosen ahead of thirteen other applicants.
Cofnas was appointed solely by Professor Bouke de Vries, who colleagues criticised for failing to seek input on the appointment from other experts or members of faculty – the kind of input that might have made clear the extent to which Cofnas was unsuited to the role, and a reputational risk to the institution. It is unclear why de Vries chose Cofnas over the other candidates, or whether any of the other applicants had research experience more relevant to the position’s remit.
What we do know is that in 2024, Bouke de Vries gave a lecture at The London Conference on Intelligence – which took place in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, having been expelled from its original home at UCL (University College London). One attendee at the London event in 2017 was the Free Speech Union’s Toby Young, who resigned from his government-funded post in education as a result. Present at de Vries’ Budapest lecture was Emil Kirkegaard, the Danish founder of the “race science” organisation the Human Diversity Foundation, which publishes the eugenics journal Mankind Quarterly and online eugenics magazine Aporia. Nathan Cofnas has been a contributor to Aporia since 2023.
If there were questions around how Cofnas secured his position at Cambridge, there are perhaps even greater questions regarding how he so quickly landed his credibility-restoring job at Ghent. But how, then, did he come to be suspended from the position? Was it, as the widely-signed letter of support suggests, simple retaliation for outing Jason Arday’s alleged plagiarism?
Cofnas’ Ghent suspension
Once again, answers to that question are available for those willing to look. The university sent Cofnas a letter on 20 August, in which they explain that for months they have received complaints, reports and concerning signals from across the wider university community, but in particular regarding interviews Cofnas had given in the weeks around Arday’s resignation and subsequent death. The letter explains that, as per the terms of his employment, committing offences serious enough to damage the reputation of the university is sufficient to be subject to a disciplinary procedure.
Ghent explain that on 9 August, Cofnas stated in an interview that he was continuing his work on “race realism” and the “hereditarian revolution” at Ghent University – which is neither what he was hired to do nor something the university would ever have hired him to do. He chose to explicitly link the university to his advocacy for racial segregation, which – it’s hard to disagree – brings the university into disrepute.
It should be obvious but, by way of analogy, if someone were hired by a university to teach undergraduate maths but they gave interviews saying they were hired to prove the world was flat, it would not be unreasonable for their employer to discipline them. If they were claiming the university hired them to prove that gay people are a threat to children, even more so.
Ghent University points out that, while some may argue his repeated claims that there are racial differences in intellectual ability might constitute freedom of expression, neither he nor they are exempt from Belgium’s laws against discrimination. It may be perfectly reasonable to debate whether Belgium should have laws that classify pro-eugenics statements as illegal discrimination, but what cannot be argued is that the university should have supported Cofnas in potentially breaking the law – especially given that he signed terms of employment in which he agreed to Ghent University’s rules. I am aware of no academic institution that would knowingly encourage its employees to break the law.
Cofnas’ supporters have argued that his work exposing Arday’s plagiarism was an act of whistleblowing and an expression of the academic freedom to scrutinise scholarship – however, that view is clearly at odds with how Cofnas himself has characterised his work as a crusade aimed at destroying Arday’s personal and professional life, and the subsequent resignation as a victory for his “hereditarian revolution”. These are not the terms of scholarly debate, or academic dispute, but of a self-confessed targeted campaign of professional elimination. As he said in the Montz interview:
Maybe the lesson is this is what happens if you don’t give Cofnas a job.
Cofnas’ crusade is not limited to Arday; he has been public and unequivocal in his call to purge institutions of academics he sees as his ideological enemies – which makes it particularly galling to see more than 900 signatories defend his commitment to “academic freedom”. We might ask them how they square that circle, but the simple answer is that they’ve almost certainly not bothered to look into his opinions at all – they’ve allowed their critical faculties to be short-cut by the shielding cry of ‘free speech’ and ‘academic freedom’.
In my opinion, Cofnas’ suspension is not an issue of academic freedom – it is a case of a philosopher acting outside of his area of research and field of expertise to deliberately disparage and undermine colleagues based not on their ability, but his own assumptions about their race. As a philosopher tasked with exploring the importance of preserving liberal values, his personal opinions on which people have a genetic moral and intellectual deficit does nothing to forward academic debate – it only attempts to present discredited and eugenicist ideas as if they were an open question in science. And in representing that work as part of his academic position, he effectively tied his institution to discriminatory pseudoscience.
So why, then, have more than 900 working academics spoken out in support of Cofnas? I believe it is because the majority of them are not fully familiar with the details of his case, and are instead reacting to how it has been presented. In framing his suspension as a retaliatory act for his whistleblowing, Cofnas and his supporters have essentially hijacked the critical thinking of a large cohort of their peers, engaging their reactionary response to a perceived threat to values that Cofnas has made clear, by calling for a purge of his ideological enemies, that he does not himself hold.
It should not be this easy to bamboozle otherwise intelligent people into accepting false and self-serving narratives at face value, but for too many simply uttering the words ‘free speech’ and ‘academic freedom’ are enough to be automatically seen as a victim. If only Nathan Cofnas’ story had received even a fraction of the scrutiny and ‘skepticism’ directed towards the forensic autopsy of Jason Arday’s CV.
