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Nathan Cofnas, first to successfully expose the plagiarism and lies of Jason Arday, has been suspended from the university of Ghent in Belgium and will soon likely be fired, according to an update on his Substack.
I thought I was wholly desensitized to the gross injustice of modern European freedom-of-speech culture and major institutional decline, but this is a new low. It has even a jaded and resigned man such as me fuming for revolution. The worst part is that the university is barely even bothering to obfuscate by throwing in Cofnas views on race; they really are mostly just straight-up, no attempt at justification beyond "think about poor Arday!", punishing Cofnas for having exposed Arday's blatant lies. The intellectuals of Europe have now reached levels of moral decline which I hoped impossible. A truth-teller exposes a fraud for frauding his way into a fancy university, and the truth-teller is then punished! Judging by the media reaction, it almost appears as if Arday has been able to get away with one last deceitful sleight-of-hand – being remembered as a tragic victim of racist hounding rather than as a lowly con-artist. I'd be impressed with his ingenuity if it wasn't all so terribly stupid and sad, and so indicative of everything that has gone wrong not only with academia but with Europe in general.
What does this add to the story of Arday which we didn't already know? Well, when this story broke I for one was astounded that no one had dared to pull one of the many threads dangling from Arday's vast spider-on-amphetamine-ish web of lies. With this latest development things are starting to make more sense and the picture that emerges is dystopically bleak. Seems like no one reacted because reacting really would get you sacked on the fucking spot. And the institutional take-away doesn't seem to be that DEI might be bad when taken to extremes, but rather that DEI need to be protected especially when it has been taken to extremes. The implication of firing Cofnas for his actions, the astonishing yet unavoidable conclusion, is that it would be better if the fraud had been allowed to continue indefinitely. I mean, look what happens when truth wills out, right? People die!
Regardless of his other opinions, Cofnas is now a hero in my book – he has suffered for the vindication of truth and the destruction of falsehood, and for that if nothing else he deserves recognition and support. The minute he opens up a way to donate to him, which I suspect will happen soon, I'm opening my wallet.
Cofnas was hoping to win over the credentialed progressives, avoiding the populist right. It was imperative. That seems further away than ever now, to say the least. Though many more of them are aware of his existence. That's like, a necessary first step.
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I find myself surprised that you're surprised. The head of the University of Ghent is a transgender Green activist who used AI full of hallucinated quotes for his inaugural address. Of course the university will take Arday's side.
The surprising thing is that Petra De Sutter hired him in the first place and seemed to defend the initial hiring.
We don't know how much she and the university knows about his views when they first hired him.
I like her initial statements in that article though.
In a sense, we can see the same playbook. Cambridge reaction was to defend the hiring and retention of Arday. And Ghent reaction was to defend the hiring and retention of Cofnas. Both failed.
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It's nothing more than a Kaepernick situation. If Kaepernick's refusal to stand for the anthem didn't generate the controversy it did, he would have found a job in 2018. If he were the same player he was in 2012, San Francisco would have resigned him. But in 2018 he was a serviceable backup at best, and there are plenty of other guys available to fill that role who don't come with the attendant controversy. Ghent isn't going to risk the controversy that would inevitably come their way by sticking their neck out for a postdoc whom they had employed for a total of five months.
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I mean, I have to think a great many people realized his autobiographical tall tales were bullshit, but treated them as just that - the tall tales of an eccentric egotist, which academia isn't short on. Without evidence of his track record of actual plagiarism, I don't know that lying about being a world-class marathon runner should be a fireable offense for a humanities professor - and I don't find it implausible that most people honestly never made the jump from "this eccentric scholar is obviously bullshitting about his athletic abilities (etc.)" to "wait, could it be he's lying about his actual scholarly work as well?". Not a great reflection on the rationality of the average human being, either, but not implausible. There's a group mentality at work, if everybody treats this guy as a respected authority in his field, then what's more plausible: he's a slightly crazy genius whose quirk is telling absurd tall tales, or he's a laughably obvious fraud and you're the only one who's noticed? Past a certain threshold the problem becomes self-sustaining. Of course, I don't doubt that people being afraid to seem racist by calling him out was a factor, especially at the start to get past the threshold in question. But I don't think it was necessarily the only force at play, nor the most potent by the late stage at which the bubble was finally popped.
I would challenge you to identify 3 individuals who (1) are straight white men; (2) are or were professors at mainstream universities; (3) had publicly spun tall tales roughly equivalent to those of Jason Arday (i.e. numerous and highly suspect on their face); and (4) were nonetheless hired and/or promoted in spite of their autobiographical tall tales.
I'm skeptical that such individuals exist. And if they don't, it lends support to the hypothesis that Arday's race was the main factor. That either (1) people knew he was there just to be a black professor and therefore didn't care about this other stuff; or (2) were scared to death of saying anything negative about Arday for fear of being accused of racism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Ellis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Harvey_Briggs
"Roughly equivalent" has to do a lot of work and it has to reach back 40 years to find a third example.
Me too. Three bad matches might as well be nothing when you're looking at around a million candidates.
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I don't really think it meets all your criteria, but closest I could search up was Prof. Joseph Ellis back in 2001, who not only lied about Vietnam vet service (including being a platoon leader) and civil rights activism, but also about scoring the winning touchdown during the last game of senior year for his high school football team (which he was not a part of.)
The problem is, those are all sort of plausible lies, even if it is a little weird to be an accomplished academic and still telling stories about your amazing high school football glory days. Honestly, he seems more like the type who is actually quite accomplished, but feels the psychological need to make up more grand and socially legible accomplishments to get the praise he feels he deserves, but isn't getting. A bit like Elon Musk getting caught lying about his video game accomplishments.
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The added irony/unfairness is that if Cofnas were to kill himself as a result of this, the result would not be one of soul-searching or questioning on anyone's part. It would almost certainly be celebration, and confirmation that Arday was firmly in the right and a flawless victim.
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I think it’s relevant that this happened in Europe. America had its reckoning with race-studies scholars of questionable quality a few years ago. The threat of being called-up to Capitol Hill for sworn testimony and having your university’s federal funding cut seems to have put the fear of God back into university administrators. They would be scared to engage in this blatant of a cover-up on this side of the pond.
No American university would ever have hired Cofnas after he was removed from Cambridge for his views (and indeed, none did).
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Cofnas was fired by Cambridge for his views, so it’s interesting that he’s now being fired by the university that hired him afterwards (and which was surely able to Google him before offering him a place).
Cambridge didn't fire him. Emmanuel College released him from whatever he had going on there but his Cambridge tenure played out until its 2025 natural end.
Unless you have some dirt I don't.
Your link is broken. You accidentally added an extra ".com" at the end.
Fixed I think. Thanks.
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Ghent is a pretty low-ranked university, not even breaking the top 100 in most rankings. It's not even the top university in Belgium. They clearly thought they got a good deal by giving a job to a disgraced professor from a top 10 university like Cambridge. (Especially since Cofnas received his doctorate from Oxford, too.)
For Cofnas, Ghent was a huge step back obviously, and I imagine he already felt like his academic career was over, so I don't know if he'll be losing sleep over this. Not sure what he's going to do next; usually the trajectory for this type of person is to join a right wing think tank or something.
Right Wing causes don't seem to have anywhere near the depth of roster or the funding to easily capture everybody of this ilk, though. He's got a big enough platform he can probably find a job/substack around, but I believe Arday would have found it a lot easier to land on his feet than Cofnas might.
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https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/2020013/ughent-under-fire-for-hosting-self-proclaimed-race-realist-philosopher
It's a shame, the rector had showed some backbone in standing by his hiring.
Yes, and it’s even the very same rector, just a few months ago.
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It's just that suicide as revenge worked here.
They may have been willing to tolerate him despite the stink of his original firing and his unrepentant attitude. They may even have been willing to tolerate him taking down a fabulist.
Arday's death turned the situation on its head. Everyone is running away from the issue. I doubt it would have happened if he slunk into the darkness for a year or so.
No bad incentives whatsoever!
Yes, most of the commentary I've seen is that it has to do with Cofnas's remarks after Arday's resignation and suicide. Now, that may very well be a fig leaf and they were planning on getting rid of him regardless, but...
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Yeah, the single most surprising thing about the story to me was that someone like Cofnas could be fired (which presumably planted a huge flag on his CV) and then still find a new academic job in a Western European country to begin with.
Either way, the problem here is, what can anyone do about it? Academic jobs have a very small supply/demand ratio and hardly any security to speak of (since Europe does not do US-style tenure anymore); anyone who sticks out their head can be replaced in short order. I assume Cofnas knew this, and that of all people who could possibly raise the alarm about Arday he was among the easiest targets for retribution, and took the risk willingly.
He probably thought he was fine after they hired him. His reporting on Arday was hardly more controversial than the widely publicized statements that got him cancelled years earlier…until Arday’s death.
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Ghent University sociology professors ought to be careful what they wish for right now.
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Technical point of order: didn’t others do so first, but it didn't gain traction because they were muzzled? First to successfully expose him, yes.
Fair point, and I concede. I'll edit to correct myself.
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As Cofnas put it in his interview with Benjamin Boyce, did Cambridge really expect Arday to not be found out for 31 more years? (Up until retirement age.)
The answer appears to be absolutely, yes.
Of course, the whole "trans rights" thing is based on the truth never coming out despite being obvious to everybody involved. That's what they are training the public for. So that's exactly what they expect and want to happen - everybody would know the truth and nobody would dare to say it. And it should not be just in one place - it should be everywhere, for everything, until there's no such thing as the truth - only what is allowed (and mandatory) to say and what is mandatory to never say.
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The state of Arday’s subfield (sociology of education) is so bad that Arday’s entirely fraudulent work is not of meaningfully lower-quality than the median output.
After leaning more about his work and its context, I would like to retract my previous statement. To paraphrase Bismarck, the integrity of sociology of education research is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.
Well of course, it's copies of said median output.
I mean, that's a trivial way for what I said to be true, but even the original work is of quality that rounds to zero. Zero is not meaningfully lower than something that rounds to zero.
The lower bound of the "sociology of education" article values is not zero.
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31 years ago was 1995. It's easy to notice how much the norms and standards of academia, journalism, and general discourse around intellectual pursuits has noticeably changed in that time. Would a Jason Arday in 1995 have made it as far into Cambridge? I think a reasonable guess is No, he would not have made it as far and, in fact, there's a high likelihood that he wouldn't even have made it to the interview step in applying for the job.
Take that trajectory and extend out another 31 years, with the rock-hard belief that you are on the Right Side of History, that the moral arc of justice will ever bend in your direction. And consider that he was hired in, IIRC, 2022, when there was a lot more optimism on the part of these true believers that their true beliefs were true. It wouldn't be surprising for someone in that mindset to believe that, whenever this does get uncovered, the intellectual environment will be such that such plagiarism and fraud for the sake of uplifting an oppressed black disabled man is actually seen as virtuous or even obligatory. And we can see by how things are playing out they wouldn't have been wrong by much, despite having been found out within 5 years, and with the skepticism to their belief system actually going up in that time.
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Well, the rest of the professors who did a marginally better/lower profile version of Arday have been infesting academia for a century now. Everyone from actual terrorists like Bill Ayers to Judith fucking Butler has reached venerable academic age without any real issue. Why shouldn't they be able to bully the public into funding yet another anti-western sinecure for gay black retards? That's what "academic freedom" means, in practice.
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I think many to most were not fully cognoscente of the likely outcomes. They desperately wanted to believe him. Just as demand for racism outstrips supply and people believe crazy made up racial attacks.
Taking it beyond culture war millions of people believe fabulists that in retrospect should have been glaringly obvious from the get go. E.G. Jordan Belfort, Marcus Luttrell, Chris Kyle, Greg Mortenson, Frank Abagnale, Jr.
This one is understandable because, even putting aside the decade of Navy Seal propaganda, most people have no idea what Afghanistan is like or why something like Red Wings was a total fuck up because we've never been in the military. And it's not like any of the major Navy guys (who all have podcasts) were forthcoming to explain it to us plebs.
(The one exception seems to have been the idea that they voted, which was so controversial it was removed from the film adaptation)
There's also just an element of social proof in having the only guy who survived out there telling the story. Luttrell survived something awful, no one disputes that. Who would be that fucking brazen as to pull that guy out of his well earned break and have him lie about how his friends died to turn things around?
Any child could tell Arday was lying about some of this stuff. And you don't even need the lying: the plagiarism was like shooting fish in a barrel.
It was just Cofnas' bad luck that he was also a ridiculous liar who was likely on the hook for paying back whatever unearned advance he got for that book and that likely helped cause his tailspin.
I'm not trying to brag - maybe I am - but it was very clear to me while reading Lone Survivor that Luttrell was at best exaggerating. I called BS on the voting immediately.
I did some searches to see if I documented my disbelief of Luttrell. Looks like I asked a friend who was going to an event Luttrell was speaking at if he'd call Luttrell a liar. In another conversation I commented "now not like lone survivor where they're doing summersalts down a cliff dropping guys right and left"
I guess having myself careened down a mountain at 13,000 feet desperately trying to regain control of my ice axe made me skeptical...
Ah, but that's what it has going for it! Sheer gall. Even if you entered skeptical of the military and the inherently propagandistic nature of the picture (I saw the film first and then excerpts of the book), you'd just assume the death scenes were vastly exaggerated for jingoistic purposes and not dig any deeper. If you do like the military...you could come to the same conclusion and still find it emotionally true.
If you're really skeptical, you'll think that it coming down to a trolley problem of killing or not killing the allegedly random herders was way too convenient. Oh sure, they would have won but for fear of war crimes charges and liberal newspapers back home!
The movie gives you an exist where you can watch it and leave believing you've seen through it. And, in fact, how contentious a claim is makes you want to stop and argue that war crimes are never justified! But that's the trap, that's a much better argument for the Navy.
But, as someone who very much doesn't wage war, deeper arguments about why it was an operational omnishambles would have totally escaped me if I didn't run into a story about the disgruntled translator and gone down a rabbit hole. What comms systems work or don't in Afghanistan or what to do with the rope you rappel from isn't information I tend to have handy.
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Also the girl in A Rape on Campus was believed by millions despite some blatantly obvious issues with her story. I've harped on this multiple times on this board, but no man (weird fetishists excepted) is going to intentionally put his dick and balls anywhere near a pile of broken glass, violent fratbro rapist or not.
Yeah the lack of immediate hospitalization and no mention of massive scarring on her back were pretty good giveaways that she'd never spent any time on a pile of broken glass.
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I am upset and disheartened by this whole business; and whenever that is the case I open my volumes of Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, whereupon I am reminded once again that there is good in the world. Here's an apt quote from the first volume:
"It has often been said that we ought to follow truth even although no utility can be seen in it, because it may have indirect utility which may appear when it is least expected; and I would add to this, that we ought to be just as anxious to discover and to root out all error even when no harm is anticipated from it, because its mischief may be very indirect, and may suddenly appear when we do not expect it, for all error has poison at its heart. If it is mind, if it is knowledge, that makes man the lord of creation, there can be no such thing as harmless error, still less venerable and holy error.
And for the consolation of those who in any way and at any time may have devoted strength and life to the noble and hard battle against error, I cannot refrain from adding that, so long as truth is absent, error will have free play, as owls and bats in the night; but sooner would we expect to see the owls and the bats drive back the sun in the eastern heavens, than that any truth which has once been known and distinctly and fully expressed, can ever again be so utterly vanquished and overcome that the old error shall once more reign undisturbed over its wide kingdom. This is the power of truth; its conquest is slow and laborious, but if once the victory be gained it can never be wrested back again."
Sadly, more cynical but perhaps more realistic is Thomas Browne's Religio Medici:
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