Rashmi Chugani

How I Became the Scapegoat in the Jason Arday Affair I have been smeared as a racist and threatened with violence. My university suspended me. All I did was tell the truth, writes @NathanCofnas for @WSJ I broke the Jason Arday story on Substack on July 21. Arday was hired to great fanfare in 2023 as the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge University. I showed that he engaged in extensive plagiarism and had fabricated much of his extraordinary life story. His work that wasn’t plagiarized was of such low quality that it couldn’t justify a position at any university, let alone a chair professorship at Cambridge. Within hours, my article had exploded on X and Substack. Three days later, it was picked up by the Telegraph, then the Times of London, Retraction Watch and all the rest. Finding every lie that Arday told since childhood became a national sport. U.K. newspapers published 249 articles about him in a 22-day period. After initially dismissing Arday’s critics as waging a “vile campaign,” on Aug. 5, Cambridge announced that it would investigate him. A few hours later, Arday resigned. On Aug. 14, he was found dead of an apparent suicide. Arday was an adult who was morally responsible for his actions. But he was mostly responding to incentives that were created by other people. His punishment went far beyond what was justified by wrongdoing he may have committed. For me, this story was never about Arday or even Cambridge. It was about the system of DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—which applies different standards to people based on identity characteristics like skin color. Arday was an extreme example of how DEI policies can create a mismatch between qualifications and position. I reject DEI in favor of treating people as individuals. The whole range of talent exists within every race and both sexes. But I don’t believe in equal outcomes as a moral ideal, or as something that is likely to occur in a free society. Who is responsible for the tragic outcome? Start with the university. The Cambridge administration has been aware of Arday’s plagiarism since at least 2023, when they were tipped off by another academic, Dave Harris. They also knew about his propensity for fabulation since at least last year, when he falsely reported being attacked by a racist with a knife in his Cambridge office. They had years to find a way to let Arday down gently, for example by moving him into a nonresearch position. Instead, they apparently planned to cover up the scandal for three decades until his retirement. They set him up for humiliation. When the story became public, the Cambridge administration didn’t learn any new information. Nevertheless, when Arday became an embarrassment, they signaled that they would no longer protect him. He was used as a pawn from beginning to end. What about the press? Two-thirds of the 249 articles about Arday were published after he resigned from his professorship, and the whole world already knew that he had lied and committed plagiarism. It is questionable whether most of this had legitimate news value. Then there’s me—a former Cambridge philosophy fellow and (until Thursday morning) postdoc at Ghent University in Belgium—who wrote a single article pointing out the truth. I have been flooded with death threats, smeared in countless newspaper articles, and accused of targeting Arday because I think that, as one commentator put it, “people like Cofnas simply don’t believe that Black people deserve to be professors at all.” Speaker after speaker at the vigil held for Arday in Trafalgar Square on Monday denounced me by name, including a prominent politician. Many have claimed that I fabricated the evidence against Arday, although this is easily refuted. On Aug. 18, the U.K.’s National Union of Journalists released a “Statement on the Death of Jason Arday.” After “condemn[ing] attacks against individual journalists,” the statement singles out one person for criticism: me. “That one of the highest profile critics of Arday was Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge academic and self-described ‘race realist’, is deeply concerning.” Although no one has found so much as a mistaken comma in the article I wrote about Arday, I’m apparently not entitled to protection against attack for telling the truth. On Thursday afternoon, I received a message from the rector of Ghent University, Petra De Sutter, notifying me that, in the wake of the backlash from the Arday affair, she was suspending me from my position as a postdoctoral researcher. Her letter made it clear that the school has laid the groundwork to fire me. I’m an easy scapegoat because I hold views about race that are controversial and easily misunderstood. I argue that differences between ancestral populations aren’t entirely due to environmental forces, and that some group disparities stem from natural differences for which no one is to blame. I made a widely quoted statement: “Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students.” That sentence has been cited repeatedly as evidence that I’m a racist. Few people are aware that my statement about Harvard admissions was summarizing a finding by Harvard itself. In the course of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit, Harvard disclosed an internal studyconducted in 2013, which found that, if admissions were based only on grades and test scores, the undergraduate population would be 0.7% African-American—a significant reduction from current levels. Racial representation at many American institutions is maintained by Harvard-style affirmative action. I didn’t quote Harvard’s statistic to celebrate it, or because I believe that black people don’t belong at universities. There are many brilliant black scholars. But it’s a difficult fact to face that in a truly colorblind system that didn’t take race into account, there would be a shocking lack of diversity in certain institutions. As I said in the controversial essay that mentions the Harvard statistic, “when it comes to policymaking in a multiracial society, we might need to make sure that everyone feels they have a voice in determining our collective fate.” To this end, I argued for taking measures to ensure meaningful representation of major demographic groups. But we shouldn’t do this under the banner of DEI, which automatically blames differences in outcome on white racism. Many people have asked me if I regret writing the Arday exposé. This is a tricky question to answer. 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. The lesson can’t be that it’s unacceptable to point out wrongdoing that implicates powerful public figures. That’s what I did when I exposed fraud and institutional corruption at Cambridge. Now, for self-interested reasons, there’s another case of corruption that I object to: the scapegoating of a whistleblower by powerful institutions that refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions. Mr. Cofnas is an academic specializing in the philosophy of biology.