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Notes -
A curtain is falling over Europe. It looks like Nathan Cofnas, the heroic researcher that uncovered Jason Arday's academic fraud may end up in a Belgian prison.
His crime is talking about racial differences in intelligence. The complaint stems from this talk which he gave at a gathering of Flemish Catholic students.
It seems that Belgium has something call Unia, which is an independent governmental institution. They receive complaints about discrimination, and then in some cases refer these to courts, who will try them. Unia sometimes joins the prosecution. Perhaps our Belgium users can shed more light on the process. To me it seems very indirect and Orwellian which I suppose is the point.
Although it is probably unlikely that Cofnas will go to actual prison, there are significant risks of fines and other punishments, including the process itself for which he will need a criminal defense attorney.
What is supposed to be "heroic" about Cofnas? I have zero problem with him uncovering Arday's fraud, but this seems rather more like "detail-oriented" or "actually paying a tiny bit of attention". Is he heroic for another reason?
He risked his job and apparently even his freedom to tell the truth.
It doesn't seem to me like there is a reasonable expectation that making a blog post that an obviously false autobiography is, in fact, false would lead to retribution. Recall, for example, the reveal that A Million Little Pieces, popularized by Oprah, was fake many years ago.
I will admit that I am not paying nearly enough attention to have any opinion at all on whether Cofnas' posting about Arday was mean-spirited or otherwise inappropriate, but I assume it was not. It sounds like (again, I am not paying attention to this topic) what is actually happening is that Cofnas' notoriety for the association with the Arday scandle has drawn attention to Cofnas' other online writings, which are... at minimimum, probably problematic for his employer. To me, this suggests a lesson about the dangers of real-name online problematic writing and/or earning notoriety if one has writing that would have negative consequences for one's employment.
Also, obviously, European free speech protections are not nearly strong enough.
I disagree. Perhaps I am overly taking advantage of the benefit of hindsight, but of all the sacred cows in academia, there are few more sacred than black DEI professors.
I think that's pretty much the way retaliation works in these situations. The target's life and work are scrutinized for evidence which can be used to harm him.
It seems like, from other replies, that Cofnas had good reason to expect retribution and that my assumption that he did not was wrong. I was not aware of the context that threats were made against others and presumably Cofnas himself. I figured that Cofnas just read the manuscript and made a quick blog post pointing out how obviously fake it was.
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