This is not an organized or formal essay, more a bunch of thoughts on these recent events. I’m not going to explain the entire sequence of events to people unfamiliar with it – if you haven’t been following the controversy, I suggest reading this Reuters article and this article in The Independent.
Cofnas did not deserve to be suspended. He exposed one of the worst academic frauds in recent years, and that too at an elite university. He didn’t attack Cofnas on the basis of his race, and his Substack post exposing Cofnas was full of evidence documenting that Arday had risen to the top via fraud and plagiarism – this was a well-argued allegation of academic fraud, not some kind of racist hit-piece. It is a tragedy that Arday committed suicide, but Cofnas can’t be held accountable for that. Ghent University (and all the supporters of its decision) is setting a terrible precedent with this suspension; asking people to self-censor on the basis of mental health concerns is absurd, especially when the censorship is related to something as important as exposing academic fraud at Cambridge. If tomorrow I find evidence that Trump has stolen $100 billion from the US Treasury, then some crazy MAGA supporter with a mental disorder might kill himself after realizing his god was a charlatan – does that mean I should self-censor, or not put that information in the public domain? People can bicker back and forth all day over what constitutes ‘public interest’ and when the risk of potential suicides outweighs the societal utility of publicizing certain information, but ultimately, when you place the power of censorship in the hands of anybody – be it the Ghent University administration, or public opinion (read: mob justice guided by populists) – you open the door to abuse of that power, the silencing of dissent, and the suppression of important information. History is full of examples (case in point, India) of well-meaning societies enabling powerful institutions to censor ‘dangerous’ speech, and that power being used for increasingly nefarious purposes.
Some people are suggesting that Cofnas should have privately approached Cambridge rather than writing a public post on Substack, which created right-wing anger against Arday and possibly contributed to his mental health issues that eventually culminated in suicide. This is another absurd idea. Arday’s fraud was already an open secret according to one of Cofnas’ anonymous sources in Cambridge faculty, and Cambridge had previously received allegations of academic dishonesty but refused to take action because it would result in bad PR for their DEI initiatives. Appealing to the Cambridge administration’s reason had failed already – they were placing ideology and political motives above truth and integrity. The only option left for Cofnas was to utilize public pressure and embarrassment for Cambridge to force them to take action. Blaming Cofnas for publicizing this information ignores the fact that Arday’s public humiliation wouldn’t have been necessary if Cambridge hadn’t gone out of its way to protect its DEI wonder-boy even after they’d been privately approached with evidence of fraud.
The allegations of ‘discrimination’ are baseless. Cofnas found a case of academic dishonesty and exposed it, and the culprit just so happened to be Black – are Cofnas’ critics seriously asking that people expose white frauds and Black frauds in pairs any time they find a case of an African American person committing plagiarism? He didn’t go hunting for instances of Black people doing bad things, he just happened to find a case of academic dishonesty where the culprit was Black, and now he’s being hounded for it. If an institution did a study where they searched for plagiarism only among African American academicians, they could be accused of discrimination, but to the best of my knowledge, Cofnas did nothing of the kind. A lot of people seem to be angry about ‘discrimination’ because of a perception that African Americans are being disproportionately called out for plagiarism nowadays and that white people are never caught. The flip side of the equation is that the main reason so few white people are getting exposed this way is because DEI hires account for the majority of people climbing the ranks with such little scrutiny and low standards. My university would not protect me (an Indian) if I plagiarized, lied, and cheated my way to a faculty position – if, on the other hand, I was African American or transgender and had a good story about overcoming poverty/adversity, they’d be willing to look past a fair bit of academic fraud. There’s no ‘discrimination’ in Cofnas exposing a Black guy, it’s just that the only (known) fraud at Cambridge happened to be Black because of how insane DEI has gotten.
One of the few reasonable complaints against Cofnas is “b-b-b-but he’s a racist! He said African Americans have inferior intellect!” However, we must consider a few things. Should a person’s wrong statements or beliefs in the past discredit things they are currently saying, if their most-recent statements are factually grounded? I think no – if someone is telling the truth, they are telling the truth, regardless of their past. It’s possible for somebody to be a horrible person while still being right on some things. Also, we shouldn’t attack people on the basis of past statements and beliefs unrelated to the statement they are currently making; this disincentivizes people with a history of unsavory remarks from speaking up even when they have something actually important and productive to say. People who typically spout pseudoscientific, dangerous nonsense are sometimes capable of saying something important, and we shouldn’t attack those important, logic-based statements with ad hominem attacks based on unrelated opinions. Ghent University’s suspension of Nathan Cofnas signals that people guilty of wrongthink are not welcome in the public sphere and must tread lightly, i.e. some people’s right to freedom of speech is worth less than others’.
This is somewhat unrelated to the controversy over Arday, but it’s worth discussing: are race scientists (if it can even be called science) actually such evil people? Most race-science research is misguided and based on fallacious reasoning, and it has terrifying potential consequences for the world if politicians start using these papers as justifications for Nazi-esque policies. However, a lot of self-proclaimed ‘race realists’ are not themselves particularly evil people – they believe traits like intelligence are passed down genetically, and that some races are smarter/dumber than others, but many believe that these alleged differences in intellect shouldn’t influence how we treat people and that African Americans, Asians, whites, etc all deserve equal treatment even if some are supposedly smarter than others. I don’t think these race realists deserve to be ridiculed and denounced as crypto-Nazis who hate African Americans; they are misguided and producing research that could potentially do a lot of harm if politicians start citing it to justify policies like forced sterilizations, but many of the race realists are not themselves advocating for anything so extreme and treat everyone equally, even if they look at some people as being racially inferior in intellect. They are misguided but not holding any beliefs or engaging in any behavior (e.g. support for segregation or forced sterilizations) that should be considered ‘evil.’ If we really want to shunt some people into the margins of society, let’s focus on the people who are actually advocating for policies that are discriminatory towards African Americans, which includes a good chunk of ‘race realists’ but not all of them. A lot of the allegations against race realists focus more on thoughtcrimes rather than actually doing anything that harms African Americans. Note that seeing some people as inherently ‘dumber’ is itself an attack on the right to dignity and respect, and ‘race realists’ do deserve criticism for that, but this ‘thoughtcrime’ form of racism needs to be considered separately from support for actually racist and discriminatory policies. I dislike the way race realists think, but 1) we shouldn’t be policing thoughtcrimes (Voltaire’s “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”) and 2) while dignity and respect do matter, I don’t think seeing some people as ‘dumber’ amounts to the kind of horrible evil many of us are making it out to be, although it is wrong and deserves condemnation. We should revise the way we view all ‘race realists’ as uniformly super-evil people.
Even supposing that belief in heritability of intellect really is ‘evil,’ are academic suspensions and cancel culture the best way of dealing with it? History tells us no. Ridiculing and name-calling is never effective in persuading people they are wrong, and cancel culture usually pushes unsavory ideas into fringe online forums where they fester and grow even crazier (partly due to anger over being cancelled) rather than actually losing popularity and influence. The Biden administration tried censoring social media posts spreading mis/disinformation during COVID, and all they achieved was even more vaccine skepticism as people pointed to the censorship as yet another example of the ‘deep state conspiracy.’ In the internet age, you can’t shut down weird ideas by just suspending people from universities or deleting their Facebook posts. Another issue is that, by ridiculing and ostracizing people with moderately crazy opinions, the only friends they have left are the complete nutcases – if the penalty for moderate craziness is the same as the penalty for complete craziness, people have no incentive to try engaging with the mainstream once they already differ from it in some ways (see also, SSC’s “Radicalizing the Romanceless” on this). Perhaps the best way of combating conspiracy theories and pseudoscience is to let idiots screech as much as they want and let normal people see how crazy they are – they can no longer claim ‘our enemies are silencing us to hide the truth’ and gain support that way, and each crazy article is another opportunity for fact-checkers to thoroughly debunk their nonsense. Even if some people fall prey to misinformation as a result, it does far less damage than cancel culture, which fails to actually protect people from misleading articles, creates a victim complex that just makes fringe ideas grow even more crazy and terrifying, and leaves moderate-crazies with no network other than nutcase forums.
Finally, one of the other interesting complaints against Cofnas is that minor issues with plagiarism are natural mistakes that don’t prove someone is actually a ‘fraud.’ The best response to this is Cofnas’ own Substack post, which many of his critics probably haven’t even read. Arday’s fraud went far beyond ‘oops I forgot to cite a source’ – Arday pulled entire paragraphs word-for-word without making clear that he was quoting, he had articles that were almost entirely based on other papers which were not cited, and most of his published work did no substantive analysis and relied on subjective analysis of interviews (which would be fine for an undergraduate paper but is rather odd for a celebrity Cambridge professor). Arday claimed that he only committed small errors of plagiarism because of his autism, but that doesn’t explain why none of this was caught during peer reviews, why such errors occurred over and over, or why he rose so high in academia despite producing unremarkable research with serious plagiarism issues – he was clearly being held to lower standards and a lower level of scrutiny than his non-Black colleagues, and Cambridge was employing (and hailing as a genius) an unremarkable serial-plagiarist for purely political reasons. That is the real complaint against Arday, not ‘oh he didn’t paraphrase enough in some places.’
I am not a fan of Nathan Cofnas, and I think his race-related research is wrong in many of its conclusions and explores a sensitive area with serious tactlessness. However, I support him in his attempt at exposing fraud and double standards in academia, and I dislike the way many people are attacking his claims not on the basis of logic or reason, but rather on the basis of who made the claims (i.e. ad hominem attacks).