BUZZ
Academia is deeply divided following Ghent University’s suspension of the scholar credited with exposing Cambridge University Professor Jason Arday’s plagiarism and biographical embellishments.
Professors in America and Europe are locked in a debate over whether the university silenced a whistleblower or enforced ethical standards against a controversial figure who holds racist views.
Nathan Cofnas, a postdoctoral scholar, was suspended by the Belgium-based Ghent last week after being credited as responsible for largely outing the fabulist academic Arday, who later reportedly killed himself as media and criticisms intensified.
Ghent was then criticized for the punishment by many observers, who called it a violation of free speech and academic freedom and a blow to truth and reality.
Not so, according to a petition under circulation.
“With this letter we want to support Ghent’s decision to start an investigation, resist the framing of this investigation as a punishment for ‘whistleblowing,’ and urge Ghent University not to let itself be instrumentalized by people and networks attempting to use the institution to give credibility to racist pseudoscience,” the petition states.
The letter refers to criticisms that Cofnas is a “race realist” who argues differences in intelligence are real, and who was racially motivated to take down Arday.
“Serious concerns were raised about Cofnas’s hire at Ghent University already before the death of Jason Arday,” Belgian Professor Caroline Closon posted on LinkedIn in encouraging others to sign the open letter. “These concerns related to his racist and white supremacist ideas as well as to the procedure through which he was hired.”
“Ghent University’s decision for suspension was not a punishment for his ‘whistleblowing,’ and we do not consider it an infringement on academic freedom,” she wrote. “Ghent University has ample reasons for a disciplinary investigation grounded in its own code of ethical conduct.”
But another petition stands in contrast to academics who support the suspension.
In a letter “opposing punishment of Nathan Cofnas for whistleblowing,” academics from across America and Europe call his punishment “retaliation.”
“An essential component of academic freedom is the ability to scrutinize the scholarship of other academics, regardless of their position or status. This must include the freedom to provide evidence of academic misconduct, such as plagiarism and fabrication. The pursuit of truth depends on rigorous self-policing by academics,” the letter states.
MORE: Ibram Kendi: Cambridge scholar Jason Arday was ‘lynched’ for being black
