Why we should defend Nathan Cofnas’s academic freedom

Nathan is a brave guy.  I have had some correspondence with him. His grandparents were Lithuanian Jews who managed to escape Hitler so branding his mention of some undoubted facts as "racism" is absurd

After a controversial blog post he made earlier this year, the professional career of Dr Nathan Cofnas, a Leverhulme early-career research fellow at Cambridge’s philosophy faculty, is dangling by a thread. The American academic has already been defenestrated from an unpaid research associate position at Emmanuel College, and is now the subject of two investigations, one by Cambridge University and another by the Leverhulme Trust, the foundation funding him.

You don’t have to agree with Cofnas to see that the fact he might be fired for expressing his views violates fundamental principles of academic freedom

Dr Cofnas works in the philosophy of biology, in particular what he calls ‘evolution-informed social science’ and its attendant ethical controversies. This includes the thorny topics of race, genetics and intelligence. He’s currently being hauled over the coals for a February blog post titled ‘A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution’, where he calls for a wider understanding of population genetics in society, something he calls ‘race realism’. The principally offending passage is about affirmative action and meritocracy in elite American academia. He cites Harvard University data which suggest that were the college to use a colourblind system for academic selection, judging applicants by academic qualifications alone, its proportion of black students would fall dramatically, from around 14 per cent to just 0.7 per cent.

When it comes to Harvard faculty, Dr Cofnas added that in a meritocracy they ‘would be recruited from the best of the best students’, meaning ‘the number of black professors would approach 0 per cent’. He adds that black people would ‘disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment’ in this society.

Unsurprisingly, his piece prompted outcry on campus after being reported in the student newspaper. A petition denouncing him as ‘bigoted’ and a ‘eugenicist’ and calling for his termination soon gained over 1,000 signatures. Protests were organised and Emmanuel College’s JCR issued a statement condemning his ‘racist views’.

At first, Cambridge authorities nevertheless defended his right to academic freedom. ‘Freedom of speech within the law is a right that sits at the heart of the University of Cambridge,’ said Professor Bhaskar Vira, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education. He pointed out that while they may be offensive, the views of one academic do not reflect the views of the university, adding, ‘We encourage our community to challenge ideas they disagree with and engage in rigorous debate.’

Case closed, one might have thought – especially after the embarrassing debacle of disinviting a world-famous professor at the behest of activists and then performing a very public U-turn. Indeed, it was in reaction to the growing problem of campus cancel culture that the government passed its Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act last year, which strengthens universities’ legal duties to protect academic freedom.

Yet as protests have continued, with one senior academic denouncing Cofnas’s work as ‘abhorrent racism, masquerading as pseudo-intellect’ at a student ‘town hall’ meeting, it seems Cambridge may be about to cave to the mob again. Prof Vira has since told students Dr Cofnas ‘crossed a line’, and in April Cofnas was informed that Emmanuel College was ending its relationship with him.

The letter makes it abundantly clear that this was because his blog posts ‘amounted to, or could reasonably be construed as amounting to, a rejection of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI and EDI) policies’. It maintained that this was ‘inseparable’ from its mission of ‘educational excellence’, and Cofnas’s blog thus ‘represented a challenge to the College’s core values and mission’.

As Peter Singer, the world-famous moral philosopher and Princeton professor of Bioethics, wrote in an op-ed denouncing the move last month, it seems ‘freedom of expression does not include the freedom to challenge [Cambridge’s] DEI policies’. This was an ‘extraordinary’ state of affairs, he said, not least given that Western institutions’ adoption of DEI policies is such a ‘recent phenomenon’.

Thankfully, others are now also weighing in to defend Cofnas’s academic freedom. On Thursday, 14 leading academics and public intellectuals, including Singer, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, the ethicist Jonathan Glover and US author Coleman Hughes, jointly signed a letter to the Times urging Emmanuel College to reverse its decision, and for the investigations by the Faculty of Philosophy and the Leverhulme Trust to be called off. They were ‘dismayed’ at how he was being treated, adding that ‘there is nothing to investigate’.

The Free Speech Union is also supporting Cofnas with the two ongoing investigations. ‘Free institutions don’t tell academics how they should reason their way from a premise to a conclusion,’ it has said, ‘nor should they say that certain questions are prohibited from the off.’

You don’t have to agree with what Cofnas wrote to see that the fact he might be fired for expressing his views violates fundamental principles of academic freedom. If people believe he is wrong, then they are perfectly within their rights to say why and how and to explain the flaws in his arguments. Instead, the principal claim levelled against Cofnas has been that some find his ideas ‘offensive’ and ‘distressing’. That may well be so, but if universities are to successfully fulfil their truth-seeking mission, academics’ right to explore offensive or controversial topics must come before considerations of hurt feelings. This vital principle must always be defended – especially when it comes to hard cases. Nathan Cofnas must be free to speak.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-we-should-defend-nathan-cofnass-academic-freedom/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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