American Academic Who Sparked Scrutiny of Cambridge Professor Is Suspended, Prompting a Rebuke From the State Department

An American academic at Belgium’s Ghent University, Nathan Cofnas, who accused the late Cambridge professor Jason Arday of plagiarism and embellishing his biography has been suspended — and the U.S. State Department is threatening to cut off partnerships with the university in response. In a post on X on Thursday, Mr. Cofnas, a postdoctoral researcher in Ghent’s philosophy department, wrote, “I was just suspended by Ghent University. They will almost certainly fire me.” That post came hours after he said he was “under investigation by my university for discriminating against Arday.”Ghent confirmed his suspension, saying in a statement that it was a “precautionary measure” as a disciplinary investigation plays out. The American ambassador to Belgium, Bill White, wrote in a post on X on Friday, “The United States Mission to Belgium condemns, in the strongest terms, Ghent University’s retaliation against an American scholar following his accurate whistleblower reporting on academic fraud.”Mr. White noted that the federal government frequently helps fund research at foreign universities and said that “dishonest, corrupt institutions that engage in, or reward, scapegoating mob behavior” are not “desirable partners.”“We are therefore reviewing any relationships we have with Ghent University,” the ambassador wrote. “Bad-faith ideologues will try to make this a referendum on the content of Cofnas’s scholarship – or polemical distortions of it. That’s wrong. Free speech means that controversial views are protected. And Cofnas’s views were known to Ghent University when he was hired.”Arday, who was the youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history, resigned earlier this month after he was accused of plagiarizing a portion of his PhD thesis. The British outlet the Telegraph reported his thesis included more than 100 passages that were similar to the thesis of a Brunel University student, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, that was published six years earlier. Arday was once a celebrated professor at Cambridge, with a biography that detailed his experience overcoming immense challenges, such as being nonverbal throughout his childhood and not learning how to read until he was 18. Last week, the Metropolitan Police said that Arday was found dead at his residence.After the news of Arday’s death, Ghent University’s rector, Petra De Sutter, and its vice rector, Herwig Reynaert, said they took “recent public statements made by a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University regarding this matter very seriously” and said they had taken “appropriate action.” They said that the university attaches “great importance to academic freedom and to open academic debate, even when views are controversial,” but that freedom “is not unlimited.”Arday’s death, the rector and vice rector said, should “prompt reflection” about “the way we treat one another both within and outside the academic world, particularly when people become the subject of public controversy.”Mr. Cofnas brought public scrutiny to Arday’s record earlier this year when he published a post on Substack entitled, “DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge.” The post not only accused Arday of plagiarism but questioned his assertion that he was nonverbal, and other aspects of his story such as his claim that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days. A British newspaper, the Guardian, interviewed some of Arday’s former classmates who remembered him speaking and singing as a child. The late professor denied the accusations of plagiarism, pointing out that there had been numerous investigations that “concluded that there was no plagiarism or academic misconduct.” However, amid the scrutiny of his personal academic record, he resigned.Mr. Cofnas has been hailed by conservatives for raising questions about the promotion of Arday and whether a focus on diversity had impacted Cambridge’s academic rigor. But he has also faced criticism over his own comments and research. In 2024, he was suspended from Cambridge’s Emmanuel College over his view that in a meritocracy, black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”In a column published by the Wall Street Journal on Friday, Mr. Cofnas acknowledged that he holds “views about race that are controversial” and “easily misunderstood.” One of those views, he said, is that “differences between ancestral populations” are not solely due to “environmental forces” and that there are “group disparities” that come from “natural differences for which no one is to blame.” Mr. Cofnas said it is “tricky” to say whether he regrets his Substack post about Arday, writing, “I set off a series of events that led to a death. If I say I have no regrets, it sounds like I don’t appreciate the horrific nature of the outcome. If I say I do regret it, it sounds like I’m accepting moral responsibility for what happened.”While the researcher said he was involved in the controversy that ended with Arday’s death, he blamed the British press for aggressively investigating the late professor’s biography. He also blamed Cambridge as he said the university had been aware of the accusations against Arday for “years” and could have found “a way to let [him] down gently” by moving him to a non research position. Instead, he said the university “set him up for humiliation.”

American Academic Who Sparked Scrutiny of Cambridge Professor Is Suspended, Prompting a Rebuke From the State Department

American Academic Who Sparked Scrutiny of Cambridge Professor Is Suspended, Prompting a Rebuke From the State Department

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