What the Cofnas Controversy Reveals About Academia

On July twenty-first, Nathan Cofnas, an American philosopher employed at Belgium’s Ghent University, set off a scandal that would reverberate through higher education. In a judiciously researched post on Substack, Cofnas documented numerous instances of plagiarism by Jason Arday, a professor at Cambridge University. Even Arday’s non-plagiarized work, he showed, was not up to normal standards of scholarship.

Cofnas's reporting was all the more significant because Arday had been fêted as the youngest black professor in Cambridge history. This led Cofnas to cast him, not unjustly, as an exemplar of DEI—“diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or the suspension of meritocracy in favor of persons from certain minority backgrounds. On the heels of Cofnas’s exposé—itself based on the testimony of an anonymous whistleblower—international media picked up the story, churning out a tidal wave of articles on Arday’s and Cambridge University’s misdeeds. The flurry of news coverage was followed by Arday’s resignation and his subsequent death, widely attributed to suicide.

Arday’s death has widely been described as “tragic.” This is correct in the full sense of the word. True to the genre which the Greeks dubbed “tragedy,” Arday’s downfall was a predictable outcome of his flaws, as well as those of the leftist academic environment that promoted him. However, instead of confronting their own role in creating the conditions for Arday’s rise, proponents of DEI have been more than happy to scapegoat Cofnas. The international left’s rage against this irksome gadfly looks to have been the reason for Cofnas’s suspension from his job at Ghent University on August twentieth. At the time, Cofnas wrote that he would “almost certainly” be fired. Yet, on August twenty-eighth, it emerged that Cofnas would be allowed to keep his job after all. The reversal appeared to be due at least in part to the efforts of Bill White, the United States ambassador to Belgium. This is a heartening victory for academic freedom and much to the United States government’s credit.