Post by @YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems

2026-09-01 06:00 UTC

This may be a little bit off topic, but since it sits at the intersection of academic freedom, race science, and plagiarism I honestly can’t imagine our very good friends staying quiet on the matter for long. Jason Arday, youngest black professor in Cambridge history, dead at 41 after plagiarism debacle It looks like the initial accusations here came from Nathan Cofnas, a notorious racist shitheel. I am not qualified to speak on the actual validity of the plagiarism accusations, but suffice to say that my priors are very low. Cofnas’ current employer seems to agree at least that the optics are pretty fucking bad, and he’s been given a teaching ban and presumably a private request to stay out of the spotlight for a while. It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle, but I think the more salient criticism is that it’s get another example of academic culture being unable and/or unwilling to handle people acting in bad faith. Like, even if the plagiarism accusations are completely substantiated, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Cofnas was looking to harass a prominent black professor at a well-regarded university and that the low-effort “the AI app says this is plagiarized” attack was simply an expedient means to do so. Race “science” is still a political project masquerading as academic inquiry. Or rather, the line between “impartial” academic inquiry and political activity is far less coherent than advertised and failing to acknowledge this will only empower assholes like Cofnas to continue their bullshit.

Replies (8)

@schnoopy@awful.systems 2026-09-01 07:20

I was pretty disgusted by that. It seems like the guy’s crimes were some poor citation (he did cite the academic he alledgedly plagurised so obviously it’s not plagurism lol) and maybe exaggerating some of his life? Seeing the media go from uncritically regurgitating a racist’s allegation, to reporting about the allegation controversy, to uncritically reporting what people claim to have or have not remembered about his life from 30 years ago, to digging through his entire life. For, I’ll reiterate, maybe citing something badly and doing some sloppy scholarship. You know, the thing that gets someone a disciplinary chat and maybe a bump down if anything.

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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-09-01 07:54

even if the plagiarism accusations are completely substantiated The university actually cleared him of the plagiarism charges early on, they had hearings and landed on it being within accepted limits for this sort of thing. It’s insane how the whole thing went from the initial coverage implying he’s a complete and total fraud that Cambridge didn’t do due diligence on because of woke to actually, even his more far fetched claims about endurance running seem to check out.

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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-09-01 08:14

Part of the accusations were also that he faked running a lot of marathons in a short period. Which he actually did. I even heard that some news outlets who accused him of faking it actually had reported themselves on him running the marathons. It is a kiwifarms style witch hunt but started by a racist academic, and perpetuated with help from the media.

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@jonasty@awful.systems 2026-09-01 10:06

Here in Belgium some investigative journalists have been reporting on Cofnas since his appointment in March. They recently translated one of their pieces to English and made it available for non-subscribers: apache.be/…/self-declared-race-realist-nathan-cof… The UGent philosophy department is also not without controversy. Maarten Boudry, a former employee there, is one of the main people in this country pushing ‘climate realism’, ‘concerns about Islam’ and ‘cultural marxism was a Nazi conspiracy theory but right now we itnis actually happening in our institutions’. He’s very buddy buddy with Steven Pinker and likely trying to get more international reach. Apart from that, plagiarism issues never make news headlines because they happen very often at universities. The only cases I’m aware of are Arday and Claudine Gay. Probably because they have a political skin color.

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@NextElephant9@awful.systems 2026-09-01 11:46

Relevant: Open letter on the suspension of Nathan Cofnas at Ghent University.

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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-09-01 12:56

I have to take this story in small doses, it’s fuckn terrible.

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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-09-01 15:07

The thing that bothers me the most is that while this happens in Cambridge but over at Data Colada, Ariely is just like “whoopsie” and gets to keep his job. datacolada.org/138 - personally I consider fabricating your entire study to be worse than sloppy quotes, but it is insane how these two people are treated so differently. I also think it’s really lazy that BBC couldn’t even mention Claudine Gay (AND Martin Luther King) since it was the exact same thing. Different country I guess.

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@fnix@awful.systems 2026-09-01 18:56

It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle It should be said here again that these people don’t even know what academic freedom means and are abusing the term. They mean it essentially as a synonym for free speech, but academic freedom has specifically do to with freedom from state interference in the affairs of the university born from the struggles over its sovereignty between the two in European history; it has nothing to do with academia itself having the means to proscribe the conduct of individual academics. If a geology department suspends a flat-earther, that is academic freedom (among other things) operating as intended. Ironically, the US ambassador directly intervening in the proceedings at Ghent is the actual violation of academic freedom here and these idiots are completely clueless about it.

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