Senior academics at the University of Ghent are so appalled at being forced to work with Israel-supporting racist Nathan Cofnas that they wrote a whole paper for the university’s management about his lack of qualifications and his “shoddy” and evidence-free work. And before anyone concludes that they are merely trying to distance themselves from his role in triggering the lethal media pile-on against the late Prof Jason Arday, no. They wrote the paper months before the pile-on and Arday’s subsequent death.
Fatal pile-on
Jason Arday died last week after a prolonged and vicious pile-on by right-wing media eager to ‘expose’ a Black academic’s supposed plagiarism as evidence of the imagined evils of equality legislation and practice. The pile-on was also joined by so-called ‘liberal’ media that seemed not to want to miss out on the punishment beating.
A few journalists have apologised for their part in the hounding. But most have doubled down, condemning those horrified by Arday’s lynching as making unfair attacks on journalists.
But none have so far properly examined Cofnas’s own academic standards – which his Ghent colleagues found so awful that they wrote a 19-page document highlighting it and condemning the university official who hired him. The document was approved for publication three months ago, in May 2026.
“Shoddy” shit-flooder
Titled “Positions of the Department of Philosophy & Moral Sciences on the Appointment of Dr. Nathan Cofnas as Scientific Staff Member“, the paper condemns both the hiring of Cofnas by fellow ‘racial scientist’ Bouke de Vries and his “negative impact of this appointment on department LW01, the students, and Ghent University as a whole”. And, despite being authored by senior academics and the language they habitually use, it doesn’t pull any punches – including criticism of his work as “flood[ing the research field] with shit”.
Not even an intelligence researcher
In his response to Skwawkbox’s request for comment, quoted in full later, Cofnas dismisses his colleagues for their supposed lack of expertise in “intelligence research”. But that’s not what he’s working on either, according to the academic paper:
This information about the project and the job posting is important because it is sometimes incorrectly claimed or assumed that Nathan Cofnas was hired to conduct research on (the heritability of)
intelligence. That is not the case. In the media, considerable attention is rightly paid to his views on intelligence and to the fact that he presents himself as a ‘race realist.’ However, Cofnas himself has
never conducted research on intelligence, nor is such research envisaged within the project for which he was hired. If he were to do so, a legal problem would arise: appointing a candidate to a position different from the one described in the job posting constitutes a violation of the principle of equality.
Unqualified applicant
The paper then goes on to examine Cofnas’s qualifications. It finds those deeply lacking – and entirely ill-fitted to the post into which he was parachuted:
2. The scientific qualifications of Nathan Cofnas in relation to the job opening
We find it very improbably [sic] that Nathan Cofnas was the best out of 14 candidates for this job opening. Bouke de Vries repeatedly stated in the press that Nathan Cofnas had published in highly ranked journals and had been affiliated with leading intitutions. However, Cofnas’s research has also been heavily criticized (2.1).
In addition, we observe only very limited expertise regarding the subjects that are central to the project: political philosophy, liberalism, and demography. The formulated requirement in the job posting of a “strong research interest in liberalism” is not borne out by Cofnas’s publication record or the rest of his CV (2.2).
So bad he should never have been published
The paper then looks at a paper by Cofnas that was published in an academic journal, Philosophical Psychology. The Ghent department paper looks at a letter written by academics following the publication and their conclusion that Cofnas’s work was “so bad that it never should have been published”:
In August 2020 the following text appeared in Philosophical Psychology: ‘More than provocative, less than scientific: A commentary on the editorial decision to publish Cofnas (2020).’ This on the occasion of an article from Cofnas published earlier in that journal in the same year. The authors (Larsen et al.) wrote:
“The purpose of our letter is not to invite Cofnas’s contribution into a broader dialogue, but to respectfully voice our concerns about the decision to publish the manuscript, which, in our opinion, fails to meet a range of academic quality standards usually expected of academic publications.”
“There are, however, several critical problems with Cofnas’s piece, which we believe should have either disqualified the manuscript upon submission or been addressed during the review process and resulted in substantial revisions. Here we outline what we see as the most pressing issues.”
The statement in this Letter to the Editor is strong: the article is so bad that it never should have been
published in its current form.
In fact, so appalling was Cofnas’s paper that the editors issued an apology and one admitted that publishing it meant that their whole editorial process had failed:
Though I did not play a role in the review or acceptance of Cofnas’s paper, I regret standing on the side of that editorial decision in the Editors’ Note. I do stand by the general commitment to free inquiry we expressed there; however, I now believe that our standard double-blind review process failed
“Abysmal”, “shoddy” and evidence-free
The paper then quotes a leading academic who wrote to Philosophical Psychology about Cofnas’s paper, who described it as “without a shred of evidence” and “abysmal”:
Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen, philosopher of science specialized in philosophy of psychology at the University of Toronto and first author of the ‘letter to the editor’ [told a journalist]:
I myself am a strong supporter of academic freedom, but not when someone presents speculative racial theories as science without providing even a shred of evidence. In our letter, we deliberately chose not to engage with those claims, because doing so would inadvertently lend them legitimacy. We limited ourselves to condemning the abysmal quality of the work.
The argumentation was riddled with false dichotomies, misinterpreted correlations, and straw-man reasoning — a technique to which philosophers are particularly allergic. Even worse was the scientific substantiation. We simply could not comprehend how Philosophical Psychology, an important journal in our field, had allowed such shoddy work to pass through.
…[Larsen adds] “It is not credible that Cofnas was the most suited candidate. In Canada or the United States, similar vacancies attract hundreds of candidates with almost identical qualifications. Cofnas wouldn’t stand a
chance.”Here [in Ghent] there were only 14 candidates, but it is not credible that there was none amongst them that, contrary to Cofnas, did meet the requirement “strong research interest in liberalism”.
‘Flood of shit’ from Cofnas
The Ghent academics say that even Cofnas’s presence detracts from their work, because they have to spend time countering the ‘flood of shit’ pouring out from him:
As Freddy Mortier stated in an opinion piece in De Morgen (albeit in a less elegant manner than expressed here): we have a choice between remaining silent or engaging in debate. Because of the proximity of researchers with controversial ideas, we are compelled to address them in academic publications and other texts. As a result, we have less time for our own research, which is of a very high quality. We are forced to engage with research of questionable quality that has not previously been part of our core expertise and has already been thoroughly refuted by others.
This is the academic version of “flood the zone with shit” (Steve Bannon’s famous statement about the Trump campaign in 2016): spread controversial, unsubstantiated claims that others must respond to. That way, they have less time for the important, high-quality research they actually want to do.
Racist views and links
The Ghent academics’ paper goes on to look at Cofnas’s public comments, statements and associations, which are deeply racist – including sharing material by a US publication notorious for its white supremacist views. First, it highlights his own advocacy of segregation – “barriers between races”:
In this blog post, Cofnas makes amongst others the following assertions
“In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%. Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”
“In the light of race differences, certain core liberal values will have to be reexamined. We will probably have to rethink ideals like multiculturalism and a borderless world. Legislators should take into consideration how their policies will influence the racial makeup of society, and what effects this is likely to have.”
“There must be some barriers set up between races in order for each one to express its own unique genius. And in the case of group conflict, racial tribalism can sometimes be the key to solving collective action problems. If whites are attacked qua whites, it makes sense for them to fight back as whites.”
And it notes Cofnas’s connections to white supremacist magazine ‘American Renaissance’ and self-confessed “scientific racist” Richard Lynn:
In the blog post, Cofnas also argues that: “American Renaissance […] is an important center for high quality discussions of race.” American Renaissance is the (online) magazine of the New Century Foundation think tank.
During the lecture organized by the KVHV on April 2, 2026, he also defended his reference to American Renaissance (AR). In doing so, Cofnas positions himself within a network of like-minded individuals. It is therefore useful to take a moment to consider what is published in AR.
On the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website, the entry on AR lists the following examples of ideas disseminated by AR:
“In fact, blacks and Hispanics are, compared to whites, far more likely to be poor, illiterate, on welfare, or in jail; they are far more likely to have illegi)mate children, be addicted to drugs, or have AIDS. By no definition of international competitiveness can the presence of these populations be anything but a disadvantage.” — “‘Who Speaks for Us?’ (A Word of Introduction to Our Readers),” American Renaissance, 1990
“There is a difference between blacks and whites — analogous to the difference in intelligence — in psychopathic personality considered as a personality trait. … For psychopathic personality, the mean and distribution are higher among blacks. The effect of this is that there are more black psychopaths and more psychopathic behavior among blacks.” — Richard Lynn, American Renaissance, 2002
“Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.” — Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, 2005
Studies show no meaningful ethnic difference in rates of psychopathy, by the way. The American Society of Human Genetics has denounced racist attempts to use genetics to promote ideas of racial supremacy:
The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) is alarmed to see a societal resurgence of groups rejecting the value of genetic diversity and using discredited or distorted genetic concepts to bolster bogus claims of white supremacy. ASHG denounces this misuse of genetics to feed racist ideologies.
The Ghent paper highlights this and points to other leading academics concluding the same:
Academic fascism from Cofnas?
The Ghent professors then summarise various critiques of how Cofnas’s shoddy methodology “goes off the rails”, including this, from Amsterdam professor Han van der Maas:
He doesn’t provide any evidence, but he assumes that his hypothesis will eventually be proven and immediately draws far-reaching conclusions from it.’ Van der Maas prefers not to use the term pseudoscience. ‘That would be the end of it, because there is a lot of bad science. I also believe that racist claims are certainly worth investigating. But extraordinary claims require exceptionally strong evidence, and I don’t see any of that here. That is very problematic, because these ideas have enormous implications outside of science. Biologically, race is a weak concept, but that doesn’t prevent people from strongly identifying with it.’”
They then look at his wider ideology, a fascism that – far from promoting academic freedom – wants to drive opposing or dissenting views out of education altogether and wage war on civil rights law. Doing it justice requires a rather lengthy quote:
From an opinion piece by Dirk Jacobs (professor of sociology at ULB) in De Morgen (March 14):
“His goal is not to engage in scholarship through the exchange and clash of ideas, but to roll out a farright
agenda. That is stated in black and white in his newsletters. To achieve this, institutions—particularly universities—must be taken over by ‘racial realists.’ I suggest that Rector Petra De Sutter read Cofnas’s piece ‘How to Take Back Academia’ (which the opinion writers have already correctly cited).In particular, the passages on how to replace policymakers on campuses, remove “woke” academics (from other pieces we learn that this mainly concerns sociology and psychology), and how the poli)cal support of the far right is required for this.” (our translation)
This political agenda is clearly evident not only in the text Jacobs cites, but also in another blog post (Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem, January 20, 2024). See the quotes below.
D. Cofnas is against academic freedom for those who hold different views
In Cofnas’s blog posts, we find numerous passages calling for the expulsion of dissenters from the university rather than engaging in rational dialogue with them.
In the section “What to do” from the blog post Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem, we read:
“In my article, “How to Take Back Academia,” I proposed a three-part plan:
(1) Promote knowledge of the cause of race differences
(2) Change the population of decision makers on campus
(3) Leverage political powerThe same plan can be generalized. Promoting knowledge of the genetic cause of race differences destroys the premise of wokism, but this is not enough to attain victory. Our institutions are brimming with delusional—and in many cases mentally ill—true believing Red Guard thugs who were appointed to maintain the ideological status quo. Many of these people will fight to the gates of hell to defend the woke system, and won’t accept evidence for hereditarianism no matter what. We need to find legal ways to remove these people from positions of authority: get rid of fake grievance-studies departments at universities; revoke the tenure of pseudoscholars who were hired in job searches that illegally discriminated against whites, Asians, and men; mass fire the woke commissars in the state department; and so on.
We have to leverage political power both to change the population of decisions makers and in order to deprive the woke of one of their most powerful weapons, which is civil rights law. “
Cofnas’s plan is not to engage in rational dialogue with those who hold different views, but rather to drive them out of universities. Among other things, by curtailing their civil rights.
We see this in a more recent blog post as well (Beating Woke with Facts and Logic, October 9, 2025) “Our institutions are teeming with woke fanatics who will never listen to reason and should be purged.
Civil rights law has been a powerful weapon in the hands of wokesters, and we need to snatch it away
from them.”The presence of someone with these views poses a direct threat to the academic freedom of everyone at Ghent University who disagrees with him. They are branded as people who are unreasonably stubborn.
Fellow ‘racial scientist’ Bouke de Vries, who appointed Cofnas to his position in Ghent without transparency, seems to share these views. Earlier this year, he was outed attending and speaking at eugenics conferences and other white supremacism-linked events, and making comments that indicate right-wing views including support for ethno-supremacism:
ignoring such differences can provide a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and hostility towards groups that perform above average academically and economically, such as Ashkenazi Jews… It also suggests that unequal outcomes may be less the result of discrimination and racism than many contemporary progressives claim.”
White racist war
This plan dovetails perfectly into Cofnas’s attack on – and the ultimate death of – Black professor Jason Arday. And Cofnas isn’t even shy about saying so, as Prof Steve Hall pointed out.
Hall posted a video of Cofnas speaking about his attack on Arday. Hall likens the views of Cofnas and those like him to a cleverer version of Nazism – and the attack on Arday as a step in their plan to take over:
Mark my words here. I’m not exaggerating. Nathan Cofnas is a Zionist, a hereditarian supremacist and part of the heavily-funded ‘Dark Enlightenment’ movement, initiated by Nick Land and fronted by Thiel, Yarvin and Tech Bros. They seek the end of democracy and a shift to technocratic population control.
Jason Arday was a carefully selected vulnerable target, the first of a campaign designed to discredit the university system and eventually all public institutions. This system, poorly managed by naive, comfortable liberals, is currently being targeted by private equity. It will take more than DEI vanity to defend it.
The left must toughen up its intellect and its politics. This is a serious, rich and powerful enemy operating at a global level, probably more powerful, and certainly cleverer and more insidious, than anything we saw in the 1930s.
In the interview clip, Cofnas says that his attack on Arday was an opportunity to create a story to retaliate for being sacked by Cambridge University and to start a “revolution” against Black people in academia. He concludes that:
After the revolution, I’ll be the head of the dept of eugenics and race science at Harvard.
Watch below:
Mark my words here. I’m not exaggerating. Nathan Cofnas is a Zionist, a hereditarian supremacist and part of the heavily-funded ‘Dark Enlightenment’ movement, initiated by Nick Land and fronted by Thiel, Yarvin and Tech Bros. They seek the end of democracy and a shift to… https://t.co/JHxpMueS4Q
— Steve Hall (@ProfHall1955) August 17, 2026
Cofnas: ‘right to reply’
Skwawkbox contacted Nathan Cofnas for comment on the Ghent department’s condemnation paper. He responded by attacking the academics’ qualifications. Prof Erik Weber, who heads the Ghent department, is a widely-published and highly respected academic and other faculty are similarly well-regarded.
Cofnas claimed that Cambridge University mounted an “anti-Cofnas investigation that ultimately exonerated me”. However, the university sacked him in 2024 for his views on race after students complained he was promoting eugenics.
Appeal to fellow-travellers from Cofnas
Cofnas also appealed to a letter of support he received from retired academic Richard Haier. Like Cofnas, Haier is an ardent Zionist – and an outright genocide-denier who put his name to a letter denouncing the idea of boycotting Israel and condemning as antisemitic the use of the word genocide to describe Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza:
As for the “genocide” charge, we believe it is completely unacceptable. The death of civilians is a tragedy in this war, as in all others. But the unwanted and tragic death of Palestinian civilians during Israel’s targeting of legitimate military objectives in Gaza is not comparable to Hamas’s October 7 murder spree. While it is not antisemitic to question Israel’s military and counter-terror strategies, the accusation that Israel is deliberately pursuing literal physical genocide in Gaza traffics in ugly canards and tropes about the sinister and malevolent Jew. To be clear: the only genuinely genocidal party here is Hamas, which in its founding charter fantasizes about the killing of every last Jew on earth.
Haier has his own links to so-called ‘racial science’. In 1994, he signed a notorious letter to the Wall Street Journal defending the racist book Bell Curve. The letter claimed that:
while the statistical bell curve for intelligence among Whites centered at an IQ of around 100, “for American Blacks” it was “roughly around 85,” and that there was no persuasive evidence that these curves were converging.
Haier also edited the journal Intelligence for more than eight years. The journal published dozens of articles by self-confessed racist Richard Lynn, whose comments include decrying the supposed “decay of European civilisation resulting from … the immigration of non-European peoples”.
Lynn was president of the ‘Pioneer Fund’, a foundation “created in 1937 by American Nazi sympathizers to support “race betterment” and “race realism.”” The Pioneer Fund is closely linked to the ‘American Renaissance’ white supremacist magazine that Cofnas likes to quote. When Intelligence was challenged to retract its Lynn articles because of their racism, Haier declined.
Cofnas’s response to the request for comment is reproduced below:
None of the people you quote have any expertise in intelligence research. They are a bunch of activists.
Richard Haier—the most prominent intelligence researcher in the world—wrote the letter below, which says that I am an “important voice in a controversial area”. (The letter is addressed to a lawyer named Aileen McColgan. She participated in Cambridge University’s anti-Cofnas investigation that ultimately exonerated me.)
Dear Ms. McColgan,
In response to a request from Dr. Cofnas, I write to comment on whether his paper (Research on Group Differences… 2020) is based on competent scholarship in the area of intelligence research. I am qualified to opine based on my current role as Editor-in-Chief of Intelligence, a scientific journal published by Elsevier. I have had this role since 2016 and each year I have read hundreds of submissions and expert peer reviews. I also have published original research on intelligence for over 40 years.
The answer is yes, Dr. Cofnas’s knowledge and scholarship in this paper are competent in two ways. First, I have read more than 20 of the cited references. They are all correctly cited in context and reflect mainstream findings and views among people who do intelligence research. Second, many citations argue against his position so there is a scholarly appreciation of different viewpoints.
I was familiar with his paper before he requested my comment. I cited it in two of my textbooks (both published by Cambridge University Press): The Neuroscience of Intelligence (2d ed, 2023), and The Science of Human Intelligence (2d ed, 2024).
I also read the critique of his paper by Larsen et al. [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09515089.2020.1805199] Although he did not ask me to comment on it, I would make this general point. There are many erroneous beliefs about intelligence research, especially with respect to average group differences and race. These beliefs are widespread among people outside of the intelligence research field. Many of these beliefs have been enumerated and empirically disputed in another book published by Cambridge University Press: In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about [Human] Intelligence (Russell Warne, 2020). There is far less “consensus” regarding most of these issues than some outside the field believe. Within the field, researchers familiar with the data appreciate the need for public discussion of what the data mean and what the data do not mean, especially about average group differences on psychometric measures.
As a consumer of the scientific data, [I find that] Dr. Cofnas’s paper addresses this need and is well within the bounds of constructive discussion, especially since the data raise a number of important philosophical issues that remain unsettled. I find this is also the case for his February SubStack blog comments. I have written previously about the need to find a balance between valid sensitivities and uncomfortable reactions to some intelligence research data and the need for protecting open inquiry and discussion (Haier, 2020; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2020.101482). I have also discussed these issues publicly on a number of popular podcasts so I appreciate how his paper has stimulated essential conversations.
Dr. Cofnas is an important voice in a controversial area. I hope my comments adequately convey my strong support for his work and engagement. If you think it helpful, I am prepared to go line by line through his paper and blog to verify he has correctly characterized the data he discusses.
Sincerely,
Richard Haier
Skwawkbox was unable to reach Elaine McColgan for confirmation that she did in fact receive such a letter. However, Cofnas’s appeal to Haier suggests a continuation of a pattern. One in which he is enabled by academics who – like Bouker de Vries and Richard Haier, appear to at least partly share his worldview on race, Israel, or both.
Featured image via the Canary
By Skwawkbox
